Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring) 1991
Thomas, Duncan, John Strauss, and Maria-Helena Henriques. 1991. "How Does Mother's Education Affect Child Height?" Journal of Human Resources 26(2):183-211.
Many studies have demonstrated that parental education has a significant positive impact on child health. This paper attempts to identify the mechanisms through which maternal education affects one indicator of child health - height conditional on age and sex. Using data from the a986 Brazilian Demographic and Health Survey, it is shown that almost all the impact of maternal education can be explained by indicators of access to information - reading papers, watching television, and listening to the radio. In urban areas, whether the mother is semi-literate accounts for some of the education effect. There are also significant interactions between maternal education and the availability of community services indicating that education and health services are substitutes.
Duncan Thomas is an assistant professor in the Economics department at Yale University; John Strauss is a Senior Economist in the Economics and Statistics Department at Rand Corporation; Maria-Helena Henriques is an associate at the Institute of Child Development at Istanbul University. Part of Strauss' time was funded by National Institutes of Health grant number R01-H021098-03. The first draft of this paper was written while Strauss and Thomas were at the Warwick University Summer Research Workshop, 1988; at that time Henriques was in the Sociology Department, Fordham University. The Brazilian Demographic and health Survey is available from the Institute for resource development, 8850 Stanford Boulevard, Columbia, MD 21045; we are grateful for the comments and assistance of Trevor Croft and Naomi Rutenberg. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning October 1991 through October 1994 from Duncan Thomas at Economic Growth Center, Box 1987, Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Harold Alderman, Jere Behrman, T. Paul Schultz, three anonymous referees made many valuable comments. Bruce Tustin was an excellent research assistant.
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X