IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ifs/ifsewp/21-38.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Breastfeeding and child development

Author

Listed:
  • Emla Fitzsimons

    (Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London)

  • Marcos Vera-Hernandez

    (Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London)

Abstract

We show that children who are born at or just before the weekend are less likely to be breastfed, owing to poorer breastfeeding support services in hospitals at weekends. We use this variation to estimate the effect of breastfeeding on children’s development in the first five years of life, for a sample of births of low educated mothers. We find large effects of breastfeeding on children’s cognitive development but no effects on health or non-cognitive development during the period of childhood we consider. Regarding mechanisms, we study how breastfeeding affects parental investments and the quality of the mother-child relationship.

Suggested Citation

  • Emla Fitzsimons & Marcos Vera-Hernandez, 2021. "Breastfeeding and child development," IFS Working Papers W21/38, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    • Handle: RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:21/38
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ifs.org.uk/uploads/WP202138-Breastfeeding-and-child-development.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Khudri, Md Mohsan & Hussey, Andrew, 2024. "Breastfeeding and Child Development Outcomes across Early Childhood and Adolescence: Doubly Robust Estimation with Machine Learning," IZA Discussion Papers 17080, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Albanesi, Stefania & Olivetti, Claudia & Petrongolo, Barbara, 2022. "Families, labor markets and policy," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 118038, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    3. Rossi, Elodie & Levasseur, Pierre & Clément, Matthieu, 2024. "“Mother's milk”: Is there a social reversal in breastfeeding practices along with economic development?," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 345(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Behavior
    • I14 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Inequality
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:21/38. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Emma Hyman (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ifsssuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.