How does mother's schooling affect family health, nutrition, medical care usage, and household sanitation?

doi:10.1016/0304-4076(87)90049-2

Journal of Econometrics

Volume 36, Issues 1–2, September–October 1987, Pages 185-204

https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-4076(87)90049-2 Get rights and content

Abstract

A mother's education is widely posited to affect positively her own and her children's health and nutrition in developing economies. We estimate a LISREL system of production functions for maternal and child health and reduced-form relations for nutrition, medical care usage, and household water and sanitation, with latent variable representations of these dependent variables and of community and maternal endowments. If the maternal endowment is excluded, mother's schooling appears to have strong positive effects on health and nutrition. But this effect evaporates when the maternal endowment (i.e., abilities, habits, and health status related to childhood family background) is included, thus raising doubts about standard estimates of the impact of maternal schooling on health and nutrition.

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^☆: 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 the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Agency for International Development, and the National Science Foundation. The National Institutes of Health provided the financial support for this study. The project has been conducted jointly 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 Infrastructure, 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, the funding agencies, Anil Deolalikar, Pravin K. Trivedi, Irv Piliavin, an anonymous referee, the authors' coprincipal investigators, and associates in the project, especially Luise Cunliffe. Behrman and Wolfe equally share responsibility for this paper.

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How does mother's schooling affect family health, nutrition, medical care usage, and household sanitation?☆

Abstract

A treatise on the family

Schooling and other human capital investments: Can the effects be identified?

Economics of Education Review

Determinants of nutrient consumption and health status of individual family members in rural India: A latent variable analysis

Socioeconomic success: A study of the effects of genetic endowments, family environment and schooling

Labor force participation and earnings determinants for women in the special conditions of developing countries

Journal of Development Economics

More evidence on nutrition demand: Income seems overrated and women's schooling underemphasized

Journal of Development Economics

The socioeconomic impact of schooling in a developing country

Review of Economics and Statistics

Does more schooling make women better nourished, but less healthy? Adult Sibling estimates for Nicaragua

Human capital and earnings distributions in a developing country: The case of prerevolutionary Nicaragua

Economic Development and Cultural Change

Population, labor force and long swings in economic growth: The American experience

Relative economic status and the American fertility swing

Cleaning house: New perspectives on households and economic development

Journal of Development Economics

Education and well-being: The role of non-market effects

Journal of Human Resources

Malnutrition: Child morbidity and the family decision process

Journal of Development Economics

The mobilization of women's labor for cash crop production: A game theoretic approach

American Journal of Agricultural Economics

LISREL: Analysis of linear structural relations by the method of maximum likelihood