(provide by the applicant):
The specific aims of this project are to estimate the causal impacts of mother's education and father's education on child health and child educational outcomes in Taiwan. Interest in this topic can be traced to the recent focus on the role of human capital in general and its two most important components - health and schooling - in particular in the determination of economic growth and to the evidence in many studies that parents' education has a positive and significant effect on a variety of measures of child well-being. There is much less consensus as to whether this correlation reflects causality from more schooling to increases in well-being. A number of investigators have argued that omitted """"""""third variables"""""""" such as a future orientation or heritable ability may cause both schooling and well-being to rise. The study will exploit a natural experiment to estimate the causal impact of the mothers 'and fathers' education in Taiwan. In 1968, the Taiwan government extended compulsory education from six to nine years. To accommodate the expected increase in enrollment in junior high schools, the government opened 140 new junior high schools, a seventy-percent increase, in 1968. The study will use variations across cohorts born between 1948 and 1968 in exposure to compulsory education reform and across regions in new junior high school openings per child ages 12-14(program intensity). It will estimate the impact of the mothers and fathers schooling on a variety of measures of child well-being by using cohort and program intensity in region of birth interactions as instruments for schooling in two-stage least squares and two-step estimation procedures. Health outcomes for infants include birthweight; the probabilities of low- and very low-weight births; the probabilities of neonatal and post-neonatal death with and without adjustment for birthweight; the trimester in which prenatal care began; maternal cigarette smoking; contraceptive practices; and breastfeeding. Health outcomes for children through age 19 include the probability of child death; physical examination outcomes; receipt of vaccinations; cigarette smoking; alcohol use; physical exercise; and knowledge of appropriate diet. Educational outcomes include scores on senior high school and university entrance examinations; the probability of completing senior high school; the probability of entering university; and rank of university attended. Fertility outcomes, relevant because there may be tradeoffs between the number of children in the family and the well-being of each child, include mother's age at first birth and desired family size. The data collections are all birth and infant and child death certificates for 1978-2000; files with test scores; and three micro level surveys.
| Chou, Shin-Yi; Liu, Jin-Tan; Grossman, Michael et al. (2010) Parental Education and Child Health: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Taiwan. Am Econ J Appl Econ 2:63-91 |
