Do lower birth weight babies have lower grades? Twin fixed effect and instrumental variable method evidence from Taiwan

By combining two unique Taiwanese datasets, this paper investigates how birth weight affects grades at age 15 years. To tackle the endogeneity problem caused by omitted variables, we first compare birth weight and grade variation within twins. We find that birth weight does increase grades but only...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social science & medicine (1982) 2009-05, Vol.68 (10), p.1780-1787
Main Authors: Lin, Ming-Jen, Liu, Jin-Tan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic achievement
Adolescent
Adolescents
Biological and medical sciences
Birth
Birth Weight
Body Weight
Diseases of mother, fetus and pregnancy
Education
Educational Status
Experiments
Female
Gynecology. Andrology. Obstetrics
Health care
Humans
Infant, Low Birth Weight
Infant, Newborn
Infants
Instrumental variables
Instrumental variables Lower birth weight Twin fixed effect Taiwan Education School grades Adolescents Twins
Intelligence
Least-Squares Analysis
Lower birth weight
Male
Marital Status
Maternal Age
Medical sciences
Miscellaneous
Models, Statistical
Pregnancy. Fetus. Placenta
Public health
Public health. Hygiene
Public health. Hygiene-occupational medicine
School grades
Socioeconomic Factors
Taiwan
Twin fixed effect
Twins
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Summary:By combining two unique Taiwanese datasets, this paper investigates how birth weight affects grades at age 15 years. To tackle the endogeneity problem caused by omitted variables, we first compare birth weight and grade variation within twins. We find that birth weight does increase grades but only when both twins weigh less than 3000 g at birth, which indicates that the effect is non-linear, and when the weight difference between the twins is larger than 200 g. Furthermore, twin fixed effect estimates are similar to the ordinary least squares (OLSs) ones. We then use the public health budget and the number of doctors in the county where the children were born as instrumental variables for the children's birth weight. We found that instrumental variable estimates are significant only for the less educated (
ISSN:0277-9536
1873-5347
DOI:10.1016/j.socscimed.2009.02.031