Infant Health and Academic Achievement in Childhood

P. Chatterji, Daisoon Kim and Kajal Lahiri

Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers from HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York

Abstract: Research has shown that birth weight has a lasting impact on adult outcomes such as education and earnings. This paper examines the role of nutritional intake in utero on academic achievement in childhood, which may provide a link between birth weight and adult outcomes, and further investigates its implication on the black-white test score gap. Using the same PSID-CDS data source as was used in Johnson and Schoeni (2011), we build on theliterature by employing the fetal growth rate as a proxy for fetal nutrition and proposing a nested error component two-stage least squares (NEC2SLS) estimator that uses internal instruments in a way analogous to Hausman and Taylor (1981) estimator. In particular, this alternative estimator allows us to exploit information on the single observation within family, which comprises a third of our sample, as well as obtain coe¢ cient estimates for thetime-invariant variables such as race and maternal education. These would not be feasible with the usual …fixed effects estimation. We estimate positive and signi…cant effects of fetal growth rate on math and reading scores of children, those effects being concentrated over the low birth weight range. However, they appear to contribute little to the black-white gap in test scores.

Keywords: birth weight; academic achievement; black-white test score gap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-05
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