Behrman, Jere R.

Email Address
ORCID
Disciplines
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Position
Introduction
Research Interests

Filters

2021 - 20222
2
2
Reset filters

Settings

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Publication
    Maternal Undernutrition in Adolescence and Child Human Capital Formation over the Life-Course: Evidence from an International Cohort Study
    (2021-02-03) Georgiadis, Andreas; Benny, Liza; Behrman, Jere R.; Dornan, Paul
    Adolescence has been highlighted as a period when environments are critical for the human capital development of women, and thus of their children, but evidence on this from low- and middle-income countries is scarce. We estimate the effect of mother adolescent undernutrition on offspring growth and development from infancy through adolescence using data from Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam and Instrumental Variables (IV) estimation that employs rainfall shocks during mother’s adolescence as instruments for mother’s nutritional status. We find a positive and significant effect of mother adolescent nutritional status on child height-for-age in infancy that persists through to adolescence and evidence that this may manifest mainly through a biological channel. Our results also support a significant impact of rainfall shocks during mother’s early adolescence on mother’s adult height and child growth from infancy to adolescence. We find no significant effect of mother’s adolescent nutritional status and rainfall shocks during mother’s adolescence on child achievement tests scores, however.
  • Publication
    Same Environment, Stratified Impacts? Air Pollution, Extreme Temperatures, and Birth Weight in South China
    (2022-02-11) Liu, Xiaoying; Behrman, Jere R.; Wang, Fan; Zhao, Qingguo
    This paper investigates whether associations between birth weight and prenatal ambient environmental conditions—pollution and extreme temperatures—differ by 1) maternal education; 2) children’s innate health; and 3) interactions between these two. We link birth records from Guangzhou, China, during a period of high pollution, to ambient air pollution (PM10 and a composite measure) and extreme temperature data. We first use mean regressions to test whether, overall, maternal education is an “effect modifier” in the relationships between ambient air pollution, extreme temperature, and birth weight. We then use conditional quantile regressions to test for effect heterogeneity according to the unobserved innate vulnerability of babies after conditioning on other confounders. Results show that 1) the negative association between ambient exposures and birth weight is twice as large at lower conditional quantiles of birth weights as at the median; 2) the protection associated with college-educated mothers with respect to pollution and extreme heat is heterogeneous and potentially substantial: between 0.02 and 0.34 standard deviations of birth weights, depending on the conditional quantiles; 3) this protection is amplified under more extreme ambient conditions and for infants with greater unobserved innate vulnerabilities.