Birth Weight in the Long Run

Prashant Bharadwaj, Petter Lundborg and Dan-Olof Rooth

No 21354, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study the effect of birth weight on long-run outcomes, including permanent income, income across various stages of the lifecycle, education, social benefits take-up, and adult mortality. For this purpose, we have linked a unique dataset on nearly all Swedish twins born between 1926- 1958, containing information on birth weight, to administrative records spanning nearly entire life time lab or market histories. We find that birth weight positively affects permanent income and income across large parts of the life cycle, although there is some evidence of a fade out after age 50. Our results indicate that lower birth weight children are more likely to avail of social insurance programs such as unemployment and sickness insurance and that birth weight matters for adult mortality. We supplement our main analysis with more recent data, which enables us to study how the impact of birth weight on income and education of young adults has changed across cohorts born almost 50 years apart.

JEL-codes: I1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
Note: CH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published as Prashant Bharadwaj & Petter Lundborg & Dan-Olof Rooth, 2018. "Birth Weight in the Long Run," Journal of Human Resources, vol 53(1), pages 189-231.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21354.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Birth Weight in the Long-Run (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:21354

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21354

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().