Short, Medium, and Long Term Consequences of Poor Infant Health: An Analysis using Siblings and Twins

Oreopoulos, Philip; Stabile, Mark; Walld, Randy; Roos, Leslíe L.

doi:10.3386/w11998

Cited by 184 publications

(214 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…This result supports earlier findings on the effects of poor infant health on school achievements (for example Currie and Hyerson (1999), Black et al (2005) and Oreopoulos et al (2008)). …”

Section: Robustnesssupporting

confidence: 82%

The effect of early noncognitive skills on social outcomes in adolescence

Coneus

Laucht

2011

Education Economics

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Die Dis cus si on Pape rs die nen einer mög lichst schnel len Ver brei tung von neue ren For schungs arbei ten des ZEW. Die Bei trä ge lie gen in allei ni ger Ver ant wor tung der Auto ren und stel len nicht not wen di ger wei se die Mei nung des ZEW dar.Dis cus si on Papers are inten ded to make results of ZEW research prompt ly avai la ble to other eco no mists in order to encou ra ge dis cus si on and sug gesti ons for revi si ons. The aut hors are sole ly respon si ble for the con tents which do not neces sa ri ly repre sent the opi ni on of the ZEW.Download this ZEW Discussion Paper from our ftp server:ftp://ftp.zew.de/pub/zew-docs/dp/dp08115.pdf Non-technical summaryIn this study we investigate the impact of early noncognitive skills on several outcomes during adolescence which are important for both educational and labour market success. Although noncognitive skills remain malleable until adulthood, their fundamental elements are created during early childhood.Our empirical analysis is based on the Mannheim Study of Children at Risk, an epidemiological cohort study which observes children from birth until adulthood. We analyse how noncognitive skills, developed during the first two years of life, influence an adolescent's educational success, delinquent behaviour, health risk behaviour and autonomy. The four non-cognitive skills considered in this study are: attention span, approach, prevailing mood and distractability.According to the results, a child's attention span and his approach are crucial noncognitive skills with a long-term impact on observable outcomes during adolescence.Children with a clear interest in new things and children with a high attention span during early childhood do much better in terms of educational success, autonomy and health risk behaviour during adolescence.Contrary to this, we find that a prevailing bad temper and a high distractability during early childhood only negatively impact the performance and behaviour of those adolescents with extremely low non-cognitive skills.Moreover, gender differences can be observed between boys and girls with identical noncognitive skills. Boys are less successful in school than girls, their tobacco and alcohol consumption is significantly higher and they are less independent during adolescence.Our analysis shows that the most important risk group is made up of children with low noncognitive skills who were born with organic or psychosocial risks. The school achievements of children whose birth weight was low are significantly lower than those of other children with the same noncognitive skills during early childhood. Children who are raised by single parents or whose parents are less educated or delinquent consume much more alcohol during adolescence and are clearly more likely to become delinquent themselves.Thus, our economic analysis underlines the importance of early childhood with regard to a number of social outcomes during adolescence. It is the first of its kind to focus on noncognitive skills. Das Wichtigste in KürzeIn We investig...

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“…This result supports earlier findings on the effects of poor infant health on school achievements (for example Currie and Hyerson (1999), Black et al (2005) and Oreopoulos et al (2008)). …”

Section: Robustnesssupporting

confidence: 82%

The effect of early noncognitive skills on social outcomes in adolescence

Coneus

Laucht

2011

Education Economics

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“…Stable housing is an important factor contributing to the well-being of individuals and families, which facilitates access to health care services, employment, and education (Bratt 2002;Kushel et al 2006). The negative consequences of housing instability on child health could be long-lasting and contribute to health disparities as children in poorer health lag behind their peers in physical development, educational attainment, and labor market outcomes (Oreopoulos et al 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Food insecurity and housing instability in vulnerable families

King

2016

Rev Econ Household

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Reducing the prevalence of household food insecurity has been a long-standing objective of the federal government. Previous research has found many negative consequences of food insecurity for families and households but has not examined its relationship with housing instability. Using longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, difference-in-difference models show that food insecurity is associated with housing instability. The association remains statistically significant after accounting for potential selection and unobserved heterogeneity using propensity score matching and excluding households that experienced prior housing instability from the sample. Examining potential mediating factors, I find that material hardship explains about half of this association. These findings suggest that maintaining a strong social safety net would reduce the risk that families experience material hardship and housing instability, which may also reduce the risk of homelessness.

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“…In the BeckerTomes framework (1976), this result is consistent with a relatively low correlation between the 'price' of education and a child specific endowment of childhood health. 8The distinct PSID advantage is not in measuring childhood health impacts on education which is done well in many studies cited earlier, some of which have the added advantage of twins (Oreopoulos et al, 2006). Rather, it is that one can investigate the impact of childhood health on financial economic outcomes such as income and wealth well into mid-adulthood which these others studies cannot do well due to data limitations on adult economic resources.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Impact of Childhood Health on Adult Labor Market Outcomes

Smith¹

2005

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This paper examines impacts of childhood health on SES outcomes observed during adulthoodlevels and trajectories of education, family income, household wealth, individual earnings and labor supply. The analysis is conducted using data that collects these SES measures in a panel who were originally children and who are now well into their adult years. Since all siblings are in the panel, one can control for unmeasured family and neighborhood background effects. With the exception of education, poor childhood health has a quantitatively large effect on all these outcomes. Moreover, these estimated effects are larger when unobserved family effects are controlled. (JEL codes; I 10 , J 00 )There is renewed scholarly and policy interest in why adults of lower socio-economic status (SES) have worse health outcomes. No matter which measures of SES are used (income, wealth, or education), the evidence that this association is large is abundant (Marmot, 1999;Smith, 1999). A key issue concerns the extent to which childhood health status affects levels and trajectories of the most central measures of SES including education, income, and wealth during one's adult years. But estimating this relationship is difficult, as it requires data that follow individuals from their childhood years into a significant part of their adulthood, all the while simultaneously measuring health and these key SES concepts. Since unmeasured attributes of the family, neighborhood and environment in which people are raised may be determinants of their adult outcomes and trajectories, data must permit some control for them, especially that undoubtedly large sub-component that is unmeasured in most surveys. This paper uses unique data derived from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID) that has followed groups of siblings and their parents for as long as 30 years. Throughout that period, information on education, income, wealth, and health were collected prospectively on all parties. Following siblings from the same family offers an excellent opportunity to control for unmeasured family and other background effects common to children raised in the same family especially in light of the detailed and long histories of economic status available for these children when they are adults in the PSID. Using this data, I present estimates that indicate that health conditions during childhood have quantitatively large impacts on virtually all key adult indicators of socioeconomic status used by economists. This paper is divided into three sections. The first briefly summarizes some recent contributions by economists on the question of the origins and impact of childhood health on adult outcomes. Section 2 highlights the salient strengths and weaknesses of the data that will be used in the analysis. The final section contains empirical models that investigate the * Smith is a Senior Economist at RAND and holds the RAND chair in Labor Market and Demographic Studies. The programming assistance of David Rumpel is gratefully appreciated. This paper benef...

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Short, Medium, and Long Term Consequences of Poor Infant Health: An Analysis using Siblings and Twins

Cited by 184 publications

References 19 publications

The effect of early noncognitive skills on social outcomes in adolescence

The effect of early noncognitive skills on social outcomes in adolescence

Food insecurity and housing instability in vulnerable families

The Impact of Childhood Health on Adult Labor Market Outcomes

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