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Title: Birth Cohort and the Black-White Achievement Gap: The Roles of Access and Health Soon After Birth
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Chay, Kenneth Y.
Guryan, Jonathan
Mazumder, Bhashkar
Birth Cohort and the Black-White Achievement Gap: The Roles of Access and Health Soon After Birth
NBER Working Paper 15078, National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2009.
Also: http://www.nber.org/papers/w15078
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Health Care; Mortality; National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP); Pre/post Natal Health Care; Racial Differences; Sample Selection

One literature documents a significant, black-white gap in average test scores, while another finds a substantial narrowing of the gap during the 1980's, and stagnation in convergence after. We use two data sources -- the Long Term Trends NAEP and AFQT scores for the universe of applicants to the U.S. military between 1976 and 1991 -- to show: 1) the 1980's convergence is due to relative improvements across successive cohorts of blacks born between 1963 and the early 1970's and not a secular narrowing in the gap over time; and 2) the across-cohort gains were concentrated among blacks in the South. We then demonstrate that the timing and variation across states in the AFQT convergence closely tracks racial convergence in measures of health and hospital access in the years immediately following birth. We show that the AFQT convergence is highly correlated with post-neonatal mortality rates and not with neonatal mortality and low birth weight rates, and that this result cannot be explained by schooling desegregation and changes in family background. We conclude that investments in health through increased access at very early ages have large, long-term effects on achievement, and that the integration of hospitals during the 1960's affected the test performance of black teenagers in the 1980's. The AFQT percentile scores are normed relative to the nationally representative sample called the Profile of American Youth from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). The NLSY sample was used to norm the AFQT using the sample of 18-23 year olds tested in 1979. A well-documented misnorming of the AFQT for the period between 1976 and 1980 led the military to inadvertently admit many more low-scoring applicants than it intended during this period. All years of our data are normed relative to the same NLSY79 cohort, even those from the misnormed period. The AFQT was subsequently renormed based on the 1997 NLSY, but this occurred after all of the cohorts in our study took the test. Consistent with the re-norming of the AFQT, application rates for the less-educated fall sharply in 1982, though overall military application remains relatively stable.
Bibliography Citation
Chay, Kenneth Y., Jonathan Guryan and Bhashkar Mazumder. "Birth Cohort and the Black-White Achievement Gap: The Roles of Access and Health Soon After Birth." NBER Working Paper 15078, National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2009.