Early Life Health Interventions and Academic Achievement

This paper studies the effect of improved early life health care on mortality and long-run academic achievement in school. We use the idea that medical treatments often follow rules of thumb for assigning care to patients, such as the classification of Very Low Birth Weight (VLBW), which assigns inf...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American economic review 2013-08, Vol.103 (5), p.1862-1891
Main Authors: Bharadwaj, Prashant, Løken, Katrine Vellesen, Neilson, Christopher
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic achievement
Babies
Birth weight
Child care
Childhood
Children
Children & youth
Chile
Confounding (Statistics)
Correlation analysis
Education
Gestational age
Health care
Health care policy
Health technology assessment
Infants
Latin America
Medical care
Medical treatment
Mortality
Norway
Patients
Personal health
Psychoeducational intervention
Schooling
Social research
Studies
Surfactants
Western Europe
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Summary:This paper studies the effect of improved early life health care on mortality and long-run academic achievement in school. We use the idea that medical treatments often follow rules of thumb for assigning care to patients, such as the classification of Very Low Birth Weight (VLBW), which assigns infants special care at a specific birth weight cutoff. Using detailed administrative data on schooling and birth records from Chile and Norway, we establish that children who receive extra medical care at birth have lower mortality rates and higher test scores and grades in school. These gains are in the order of 0.15-0.22 standard deviations.
ISSN:0002-8282
1944-7981
DOI:10.1257/aer.103.5.1862