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Childhood Health and Human Capital: New Evidence from Genetic Brothers in Arms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2015

John Parman
John Parman*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Economics, The Department of Economics, The College of William & Mary, P.O. Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795. E-mail: jmparman@wm.edu.
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Abstract

Negative shocks to childhood health can have a lasting impact on the economic success of an individual by altering families' schooling investment decisions. This article introduces a new dataset of brothers serving in World War II and uses it to demonstrate that improvements in childhood health led to substantial increases in educational attainment in the first one-half of the twentieth century. By exploiting variation in health within families, the data show that this relationship between childhood health and educational attainment holds even after controlling for both observed and unobserved household and environmental characteristics.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 75 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 30 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2015 

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Footnotes

I have greatly benefited from discussions with Trevon Logan, Joseph Ferrie, Doug Miller, Hoyt Bleakley, Marianne Wannamaker, and participants at the Economic History Association annual meeting, the UC-Davis economic history seminar and the Center for Population Economics workshop at the University of Chicago. I thank Kirstin Miller for her excellent research assistance.

References

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