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Title: Estimating the Effect of Smoking on Birth Weight in a Dynamic Model When Fertility Is a Choice
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Shnaps, Reuven
Estimating the Effect of Smoking on Birth Weight in a Dynamic Model When Fertility Is a Choice
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2001. DAI-A 62/05, p. 1899, Nov 2001.
Also: http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3015372
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning
Keyword(s): Age at First Birth; Birth Outcomes; Birthweight; Cigarette Use (see Smoking); Fertility; Health/Health Status/SF-12 Scale; Heterogeneity; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Pregnancy and Pregnancy Outcomes; Siblings; Smoking (see Cigarette Use)

The negative effect of smoking during pregnancy on birth weight outcomes has been a consistent finding in the economics literature on estimating birth weight production functions. An important result in the literature is that the negative effect of smoking on birth weight is generally robust to the introduction of unobserved heterogeneity in family-specific health endowments. All of the studies have assumed, however, that fertility itself is unrelated to either anticipated or realized birth weight outcomes that depend on such endowments. One purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of relaxing that assumption on the estimates of the smoking effect on birth weight. To that end, a dynamic model of fertility choice that explicitly incorporates the smoking decision, allowing for its addictive nature, and the birth weight technology, is constructed and empirically implemented using longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Surveys 1979 youth cohort. The estimates of the model imply that avoiding heavy smoking during pregnancy will increase the birth weight of the born child by almost 5oz., or approximately 140g. This estimate, however, is only slightly lower than the one obtained from a sibling Fixed-Effects estimation procedure which is based on the simulated data, and is equal to the sibling Fixed-Effects estimate obtained from the actual data. In addition to obtaining estimates of the birth weight production function that account for fertility choice, the estimates of the model are used to perform counterfactual policy experiments. In particular, the model predicts that preventing women from smoking during pregnancies will increase average birth weight outcomes by 0.7oz. In addition, this policy will reduce the incidence of low birth weight by about 10%. Furthermore, increasing the cigarette taxes will lead to a significant decline in the percentage of women who smoke, both while they are pregnant and while they are not pregnant. Consequently, in the event of a 50% increase in the price of cigarettes about 6% of the pregnant women will realize a significant increase of 4.7oz., on average, in their children's birth weight.
Bibliography Citation
Shnaps, Reuven. Estimating the Effect of Smoking on Birth Weight in a Dynamic Model When Fertility Is a Choice. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2001. DAI-A 62/05, p. 1899, Nov 2001..