Volume 36, Number 1 (Winter) 2001
Alderman, Harold, Jere R. Behrman, Victor Lavy, and Rekha Menon. 2001. "Child Health and School Enrollment: A Longitudinal Analysis." Journal of Human Resources 36(1): 185-205.
Better child health is widely thought to improve school performance, and therefore post-school productivity. But most of the literature ignores that child health as well as child schooling reflects behavioral choices. Therefore the estimated impact of child health on child schooling in these studies may be biased, perhaps substantially. This study employs longitudinal data to investigate the impact of child health (as indicated by nutritional status) on school enrollments in rural Pakistan using an explicit dynamic model for the preferred estimates. These estimates use price shocks when children were of preschool age to control for behavior determining the child health stock measure. They indicate that child health (nutrition) is three times as important for enrollment than suggested by "naive estimates" that assume that child health is predetermined rather than determined by household choices in the presence of unobserved factors such as preferences and health endowments. These results, therefore, reinforce strongly the importance of using estimation methods that are consistent with the economic theory of households to explore the impact of some choice variables on others using socioeconomic behavioral data.
Harold Alderman and Rekha Menon are researchers with the World Bank; Jere R. Behrman is a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania; Victor Lavy is a professor of economics at the Hebrew University. The authors thank Paul Glewwe for helpful comments on an earlier draft. The findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent.
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X