Interrupted Maternal Education and Child Health: The Long Run Health Impact of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
1450.ris
—
Octet Stream,
1 kB (1653 bytes)
Will investments in women’s education improve child health? The answer to this
question relies on whether there is a strong causal relationship between mother’s education and child health. While the correlation between maternal education and child health is commonly found and almost unanimously acknowledged by researchers, it is the causality that is still under scholarly debate. This paper tests the causal relationship between mother’s education and child height (standardized by age and sex), using the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976, as a unique natural experiment. The empirical results in this paper confirm a significant casual effect of mother’s education on child height and imply a substantial loss in child health caused by the educational interruptions during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Using the instrumental variables generated from the Chinese Cultural Revoluti
on, the preferred 2SLS estimates in this paper indicate that the loss in mother’s education due to the Chinese Cultural Revolution led to over 0.3 standard deviations’ decrease in child height. Such a loss in child height is substantial, in a magnitude similar to the effect of being exposed in early childhood to the Chinese Great Famine in 1959-1961, the greatest famine in human history.
RPRT
Job Market Paper
Chen, Qihui
2010
University of Minnesota
1450