TY - JOUR AU - Chou,Shin-Yi AU - Liu,Jin-Tan AU - Grossman,Michael AU - Joyce,Theodore J. TI - Parental Education and Child Health: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Taiwan JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 13466 PY - 2007 Y2 - October 2007 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13466 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13466.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Shin-Yi Chou Department of Economics College of Business and Economics Lehigh University 621 Taylor Street Bethlehem, PA 18015-3117 Tel: 610/758-3444 Fax: NA E-Mail: syc2@lehigh.edu Jin-Tan Liu Department of Economics National Taiwan University 21 Hsu-Chow Road Taipei (100), TAIWAN Tel: 886-2-23519641/520 Fax: 886-2-2351-1826 E-Mail: liujt@ntu.edu.tw Michael Grossman Ph.D. Program in Economics City University of New York Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor New York, NY 10016-4309 Tel: 212/817-7959 Fax: 212/817-1597 E-Mail: mgrossman@gc.cuny.edu Theodore J. Joyce Baruch College & Graduate Center, CUNY 365 Fifth Ave, 5th Fl New York, NY 10016-4309 Tel: 212/817-7960 Fax: 212/817-1597 E-Mail: theodore.joyce@baruch.cuny.edu AB - This paper exploits a natural experiment to estimate the causal impact of parental education on child health in Taiwan. In 1968, the Taiwanese government extended compulsory education from six to nine years. From that year through 1973, the government opened 254 new junior high schools, an 80 percent increase, at a differential rate among regions. We form treatment and control groups of women or men who were age 12 or under on the one hand and between the ages of 13 and 20 or 25 on the other hand in 1968. Within each region, we exploit variations across cohorts in new junior high school openings to construct an instrument for schooling. We employ this instrument to estimate the causal effects of mother's or father's schooling on the incidence of low birthweight and mortality of infants born to women in the treatment and control groups or the wives of men in these groups in the period from 1978 through 1999. Parents' schooling, especially mother's schooling, does indeed cause favorable infant health outcomes. The increase in schooling associated with the reform saved almost 1 infant life in 1,000 live births, resulting in a decline in infant mortality of approximately 11 percent. ER -