? The proposed project addresses the following questions: ? 1. Education, often seen as enhancing human capital, is also highly correlated with economic, social, and cultural capitals. Which aspects of human capital are most important for health outcomes? How large are these effects net of economic, social, and cultural capital? ? 2. Educated people often live in communities that have higher levels of education, more economic development, and better access to medical care, clean water, and sanitation. To what extent is the effect of individual level education a function of these community level characteristics? ? 3. Parental education may affect child health in a variety of ways. Some pathways, such as the use of medical services or the adoption of health enhancing behaviors, have direct effects on health outcomes. ? Other pathways, such as reduced fertility, changes in intra-household resource allocation, reduced gender inequality, and investments in the household infrastructure of water and sanitation systems, have a more indirect effect. What is the role of each of these direct and indirect effects on child health? ? 4. Social policies that support the disadvantaged can often moderate the health consequences of educational and economic inequalities. To what extent have state policies mitigated (or enhanced) the education-health relationship? ? We propose to examine these questions by augmenting an ongoing project in India. An NICHD funded study, about to begin, will collect a multipurpose household survey for 40,000 households throughout India. Of these, about 14,000 households were also surveyed in 1994. The overall project is designed to produce a widely used public data file of panel data on health and change in India. The proposed additional support will add several modules to explore which pathways and background characteristics explain education-health linkages. The new modules would focus on household level human, social, and cultural capital, and community-level medical care and schools. The addition of new ? modules to an ongoing project allows for a nuanced analytic strategy at relatively modest costs. ? ?
