From the Cradle to the Labor Market? The Effect of Birth Weight on Adult Outcomes

By Sandra E. Black, P. Devereux, Kjell G. Salvanes. Social Science Research Network, 2006

1,346 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Lower birth weight babies have worse outcomes, both short-run in terms of one year mortality rates and longer run in terms of educational attainment and earnings. However, recent research has called into question whether birth weight itself is important or whether it simply reflects other hard-to-measure haracteristics. By applying within twin techniques using a unique dataset from Norway, we xamine both short-run and long-run outcomes for the same cohorts. We find that birth weight does matter; very small short-run fixed effect estimates can be misleading because longer-run effects on outcomes such as height, IQ, earnings, and education are significant and similar in magnitude to OLS estimates. Our estimates suggest that eliminating birth weight differences between socio-economic groups would have sizeable effects on the later outcomes of children from poorer families

Subfields: General Health Professions, Health, Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4b743f8b86dcf225278207ed0ef412598ca4d411

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In General Health Professions

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In Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health

Citations in the corpus

Under Pressure? The Effect of Peers on Outcomes of Young Adults (2010, positive): “The nonimportance of average age of peers implies that relative age effects cannot explain the finding of Black et al. (2011) that girls who start school younger are more likely to have teen births.”
Inequality at Birth: Some Causes and Consequences (2011, neutral): “For example, extrapolated to the United States, the estimates in Black, Devereux, and Salvanes (2007) suggest that if the mean birth weight of high school educated women was increased to the mean birth weight of college educated mothers, the earnings of affected male children would increase by 2…”
Where Have All the Young Girls Gone? Identification of Sex Selection in India (2010, background): “Improved maternal health and prenatal care are increasingly recognised as essential if neglected legs of development, producing long term gains to health, cognitive attainment and earnings (Almond 2006, Black et al. 2007, Almond and Mazumder 2009, Bhalotra and Rawlings 2010).”
Can targeted transfers improve birth outcomes?: Evidence from the introduction of the WIC program (2011, background): “Black et al. (2007), for example, find that a 10% increase in birth weight is associated with a 1% increase in adult earnings.”
Selection into Identification in Fixed Effects Models, with Application to Head Start (2019, neutral): “The main implication of SI is that under heterogeneous treatment effects, the FE estimate is no longer representative of the ATE for the sample.”
Early Childhood Intervention and Life-Cycle Skill Development: Evidence from Head Start (2009, methodology): “Still, to get a sense of the magnitude of any possible positive bias, I back out a correction using the long-run effect of birth weight on outcomes estimated by Black, Devereux, and Salvanes ( 2007 ) .”
Weather shocks and health at birth in Colombia (2014, background): “Poor health at birth adversely affects health in childhood and adulthood (Almond et al., 2005; Black et al., 2007, Alderman et al., 2006; Almond, 2006) and educational outcomes (Behrman and Rosenzweig 2004; Glewwe et al., 2001).”
Econometric methods for causal evaluation of education policies and practices: a non‐technical guide (2011, background): “Black, Devereux, and Salvanes ( 2007 ) apply a twin model to estimate the effect of birth weight on education in Norway.”