Mother’s Education and Infant Health: Evidence from Closure of High Schools in China
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This paper examines the effect of maternal education on infant health by exploiting exogenous variation in women’s exposure to the wholesale closure of rural high schools immediately after the Cultural Revolution, from 1977 to 1984, in China. Using the 1992 Chinese Children Survey microdata combined with unique data on the exact year the school closures started by county, this study focuses on narrow comparisons in educational attainment and infant health among rural women born quarters apart yet having distinct exposures to the closures of high schools within county. Results first show a sharp and large drop in high school completion for women at age 17 years and 9 months by the first quarter in the first year of the school closures. Using the discontinuous change in high school completion induced by the closures, I find that women who completed high school are more likely to work off-farm, particularly in white-collar jobs, and are also more likely to have prenatal health checks and have them early during pregnancy. However, estimates on infant health show that one more year of maternal high school education has no causal effect on prematurity, low birthweight, neonatal mortality and infant mortality.
RPRT
Zhang, Shuang
2012
Cornell University
1530