The proposed research will examine how health and nutrition (as well other social and demographic factors) affect educational attainment, work patterns and wages of young adults in Cebu, Philippines. We will use existing data from our ongoing Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey, augmented by new data from two additional survey rounds. We will develop and estimate comprehensive longitudinal models of adult wages and prior school achievement that account for the cumulative and age-specific effects of individual, household and community factors. Central among the determinants is a vector of factors representing multiple aspects of child health at different ages, including birth characteristics, diet and nutritional status, infectious disease morbidity, preventive health care, early child growth, cognitive ability, and psychological well being. These will be considered in the context of household socioeconomic factors (e.g., parental education, household composition, income and assets) and community characteristics. Specifically, we will (1) estimate the effects of early childhood and concurrent health and nutrition on multiple aspects of schooling, including age at entry into primary school, grade repetition, grade completion through secondary school, and achievement measured with standard tests; (2) estimate the effects of health history from birth to adulthood on work and earnings; and (3) explore the possibility there are distinct pathways through which nutrition and health affect economic outcomes. The """"""""brains"""""""" pathway traces the effects of early childhood health and nutrition on cognitive and behavioral development, through school achievement and educational attainment to wages. We hypothesize that this pathway will be important in a rapidly developing economy, where there is a growing emphasis on jobs requiring intellectual skills. The """"""""brawn"""""""" pathway follows the effects of childhood health and nutrition on physical development, which is likely to affect work capacity (and thus wages) in physically demanding jobs. We will also explore the extent to which there are direct effects of health on economic outcomes. Our longitudinal modeling strategy accounts for biases related to different aspects of sample selectivity, the endogeneity of child health and other inputs such as schooling when estimating wages, omitted variables and measurement error.
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