期刊名称：Discussion Papers / Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration
印刷版ISSN：0804-6824
出版年度：2005
卷号：2005
出版社：Bergen
摘要：Lower birth weight babies have worse outcomes, both short-run in terms of oneyear
mortality rates and longer run in terms of educational attainment and earnings.
However, recent research has called into question whether birth weight itself is important
or whether it simply reflects other hard-to-measure characteristics. By applying within
twin techniques using a unique dataset from Norway, we examine both short-run and
long-run outcomes for the same cohorts. We find that birth weight does matter; very
small short-run fixed effect estimates can be misleading because longer-run effects on
outcomes such as height, IQ, earnings, and education are significant and similar in
magnitude to OLS estimates. Our estimates suggest that eliminating birth weight
differences between socio -economic groups would have sizeable effects on the later
outcomes of children from poorer families.
