Volume 24, Number 4 (Fall) 1989
Behrman, Jere R. and Barbara L. Wolfe. 1989. "Does More Schooling Make Women Better Nourished and Healthier? Adult Sibling Random and Fixed Effects Estimates for Nicaragua." Journal of Human Resources 24(4):644-663.
There is debate on whether schooling causes increases in productivity or whether the estimated relationships reflect ability, knowledge, tastes, etc., that are associated with schooling. This paper examines the impact of women's schooling on women's health and nutrition with and without controls for unobserved childhood background factors related to ability and motivation. Random and fixed effects models are estimated using data on adult sisters. Both sets of estimates reinforce the relationships found in standard estimates - that women's schooling positively affects their health and nutrient intakes; the latter result is particularly robust.
Jere Behrman is the William R. Kenan, Jr. professor of economics and an associate of the Population Studies Center, Center for Analysis of Developing Economies and Center for Household and Family Economics, at the University of Pennsylvania. Barbara L. Wolfe is a professor of economics and preventive medicine, and a research associate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. This paper is one of a series resulting from a survey and research project to investigate the social, economic, and demographic roles of women in the developing country of Nicaragua. Initial funding was provided by Ford and Rockefeller Foundation, Agency for International Development, and National Science Foundation grants. NIHCD provided the financial support for this study. The project is being jointly conducted by the Universities of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales Nicaraguenese (CISNIC), and the Banco Central de Nicaragua. Humberto Belli, former Director of CISNIC, and Antonio Ybarra, former head of the Division of Social Studies and Intrastructure, Banco Central de Nicaragua were coprincipal investigators with Behrman and Wolfe for the early stages of the project. Belli supervised the collection of all survey data. The authors would like to thank, but not implicate, two anonymous referees, the funding agencies, their coprincipal investigators, and associates in the project, especially Luis Cunliffe. Behrman and Wolfe equally share responsibility for this paper.
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US ISSN 0022-166X