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Title: Health Endowments and Parental Investments in Infancy and Early Childhood
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Datar, Ashlesha
Kilburn, M. Rebecca
Loughran, David S.
Health Endowments and Parental Investments in Infancy and Early Childhood
Working Paper WR-367, RAND Labor and Population Working Paper Series, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, March 2006.
Also: http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/2006/RAND_WR367.pdf
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79
Publisher: RAND
Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Birthweight; Breastfeeding; Family Characteristics; Head Start; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Pre-natal Care/Exposure; Preschool Children; Siblings

This paper tests whether parents reinforce or compensate for child endowments. We employ birth weight as a proxy for endowments and estimate how the difference in birth weight across siblings impacts specific parental investments, including breastfeeding initiation and duration, well-baby visits, immunizations, preschool attendance, and kindergarten entry age. We also examine whether parental investment in a child is impacted by her siblings' endowments. Our results indicate that heavier birth weight children receive higher levels of most parental investment than their lower birth weight siblings suggesting that parental investments in infancy and early childhood reinforce differences in endowments. In one exception, we find weak evidence that lower birth weight children enter kindergarten slightly later than their normal birth weight siblings, which could be interpreted as a compensating parental investment. Presence of a low birth weight sibling in the household increases the likelihood of investments such as well-baby visits and immunizations.

We use data from the NLSY-C, which contains detailed information about the children born to female respondents of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). We first restrict our sample to mothers with at least two children surveyed between 1986-2000 with birth weight information available for at least one child. Next, we only keep children for whom there is information on at least one of the parental investments examined in the paper. This reduces the sample to 10,000 children born to 3,660 mothers.

We exploit four key features of the NLSY-C for the purposes of this paper. First, the NLSY-C collects data on all children born to NLSY79 mothers, which allows us to examine intrafamily resource allocation decisions. Second, the NLSY-C collects data on birth weight for all surveyed children. The third key feature of the NLSY-C is that it collects information on a number of health and educational investments that parents make in their children starting in infancy and early childhood. Finally, the availability of information regarding maternal and family characteristics, and prenatal investments at the time of each sibling's birth is a unique feature of these data and allows us to control for such differences across siblings.

Our analyses consider the following investments:
(1) Initiation and duration (weeks) of breastfeeding
(2) Whether the child was taken for a well-baby visit in the first year after birth
(3) Whether the child received all doses of DPT and oral polio vaccines
(4) Whether the child attended preschool (including Head Start)
(5) Kindergarten entrance age (KEA) in months, and whether the child was held back
from entering kindergarten even after he or she was eligible

Bibliography Citation
Datar, Ashlesha, M. Rebecca Kilburn and David S. Loughran. "Health Endowments and Parental Investments in Infancy and Early Childhood." Working Paper WR-367, RAND Labor and Population Working Paper Series, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, March 2006.