Document Type
Working Paper
Date of this Version
2-3-2021
Abstract
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.
Keywords
adolescent undernutrition, maternal and child growth, child cognitive
Recommended Citation
Georgiadis, Andreas, Liza Benny, Paul Dornan, and Jere Behrman. 2021. "Maternal Undernutrition in Adolescence and Child Human Capital Formation over the Life-Course: Evidence from an International Cohort Study." University of Pennsylvania Population Center Working Paper (PSC/PARC), 2021-62. https://repository.upenn.edu/psc_publications/62.
Included in
Demography, Population, and Ecology Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons
Date Posted: 03 February 2021