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Mother's Education and Child Health: Is There a Nurturing Effect?

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Author Info
Yuyu Chen
Hongbin Li

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Abstract

In this paper, we examine the effect of maternal education on the health of young children by using a large sample of adopted children from China. As adopted children are genetically unrelated to the nurturing parents, the educational effect on them is most likely to be the nurturing effect. We find that the mother's education is an important determinant of the health of adopted children even after we control for income, the number of siblings, health environments, and other socioeconomic variables. Moreover, the effect of the mother's education on the adoptee sample is similar to that on the own birth sample, which suggests that the main effect of the mother's education on child health is in post-natal nurturing. Our work provides new evidence to the general literature that examines the determinants of health and that examines the intergenerational immobility of socioeconomic status.

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Paper provided by Chinese University of Hong Kong, Department of Economics in its series Discussion Papers with number 00021.

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Date of creation: Feb 2006
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Handle: RePEc:chk:cuhkdc:00021

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Production
I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
O15 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration

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