When Low Birth Weight Babies Grow Up: Can Parents Buffer Their Health Shock?
- Presenter:
Chair: James Burgess; Discussant: TBA Tue June 6, 2006 15:30-17:00 Room 213
The causes and consequences of adverse birth outcomes, particularly low birth weight (LBW), have long been a major concern for social scientists. This interest has largely tended to focus on the increased risk of LBW infants suffering later developmental difficulties, which can ultimately impose substantial costs upon society. The major advances in medical technologies over recent decades is a further factor for consideration, since such advances have also led to significant improvements in the survival rates of LBW infants in both developed and developing countries.
Some of the prior studies have identified various causal relationships between birth outcomes and family background factors, such as parental education, family income and maternal behavior. However, while there has been some examination of the short-term consequences of LBW, there remains a distinct gap in the literature with regard to the examination of the long-term consequences of LBW and the interactive effects with parental education.
Viewing birth weight as an ‘input’ into the production function (or the initial endowment of human capital), the prior studies have generally established a correlation between LBW and low test scores, violent crimes committed at the age of eighteen, poor adult health and lower wages. There is also some evidence to show the existence of a strong relationship between family background and children’s educational attainment. However, there has been precious little work undertaken with regard to observation of the interactive effects of parental background and the negative health shock on the long-term outcomes of children.
The prior literature has generally failed to establish the association between adverse birth outcomes and long-term developmental outcomes for two main reasons. First of all, there are relatively few datasets containing the necessary information on adverse birth outcomes in conjunction with long-term developmental outcomes on the same study sample, and secondly, it is even more difficult to obtain such a linkage at national level. The studies have therefore tended to rely heavily upon small and selective samples; clearly therefore, it may not be possible to generalize the findings to other contexts.
In this study, we set out to combine several unique datasets in order to examine the long-term outcomes of LBW and the effects of the interaction between such outcomes and parental education. Our main dataset is annual birth certificate records, with the birth information of the study sample then being matched to the College Entrance Examination and High School Entrance Examinations files to determine long-term educational achievements. Our main goals in using these unique datasets are to identify the long term effects of LBW and to investigate the interactive effects of LBW and parental education. Although our results show that LBW has significant negative long-term effects on educational attainment, they also suggest such negative effects can nevertheless be mitigated by parental education.
