Parental Education and Child Health: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Taiwan

Abstract

In 1968, the Taiwanese government extended compulsory education from six to nine years and opened over 150 new junior high schools at a differential rate among regions. Within each region, we exploit variations across cohorts in new junior high school openings to construct an instrument for schooling and employ it to estimate the causal effects of mother’s or father’s schooling on infant birth outcomes in the years 1978–1999. Parents’ schooling does indeed cause favorable infant health outcomes. The increase in schooling associated with the reform saved almost 1 infant life in 1,000 live births. “The one social factor that researchers agree is consistently linked to longer lives in every country where it has been studied is education. It is more important than race; it obliterates any effects of income.” Gina Kolata, “A Surprising Secret to Long Life: Stay in School,”New York Times, January 3, 2007, p. 1.

Education and health: evidence on adults with diabetes

“…Exogenous policies which affect educational attainment at the lower end of the frequency distribution of years of schooling completed can sometimes serve as useful instruments (see e.g., (Chou et al 2010; Lleras-Muney 2005). The assumption underlying this IV strategy is that it is gains in educational attainment at the lower end that affect health and related outcomes.…”

“…Several approaches have been used. Researchers have taken natural experiments as instrumental variables (IVs), e.g., changes in compulsory schooling laws (Albouy and Lequien 2009; Chou et al 2010; Lleras-Muney 2005; Oreopoulos 2006), exemptions from military service (de Walque 2007a), changes in requirements for high school completion (Kenkel et al 2006), and primary school construction programs (Breierova and Duflo 2004). Other IVs have been college openings for women in the 17 th year (Currie and Moretti 2003), tuition free primary education (Osili and Long 2008), and age at school entry policy (McCrary and Royer 2006).…”

Women Empowerment and Economic Development

“…While there is no doubt that education has a positive effect on child mortality, it is not clear that girls' education is much more critical than boys' education. Chou et al (2010) use the same empirical strategy to study the impact of father and mother education on child health in Taiwan (which introduced compulsory junior secondary schooling in 1968 and introduced it progressively in different regions). They find strong and positive effects of both father and mother education on child survival, and one effect is not significantly greater than the next.…”

Education Policy and Under-Five Survival in Uganda: Evidence from the Demographic and Health Surveys

“…This literature mostly applies instrumental variables (IV) methods to consistently estimate the influence of schooling achievements on child health outcomes. For example, Chou, Liu, Grossman and Joyce [15] used a two-stage least square (2SLS) approach to assess the causal influence of parental schooling on early health (measured by birth weight) and under-five mortality. Exploiting the 1968 schooling initiative in Taiwan as the omitted instrument in a 2SLS model, they established that increased schooling saved nearly one child in every 1000 live births which translated to an approximate 11 percent decline in infant mortality.…”

“…There is sufficient evidence to suggest the existence of a causal relationship between parental schooling and child well-being in developed countries [15][16][17][18]. For developing countries, the evidence is surprisingly thin.…”