@techreport{NBERw13947,
 title = "Life Expectancy and Human Capital Investments: Evidence From Maternal Mortality Declines",
 author = "Seema Jayachandran and Adriana Lleras-Muney",
 institution = "National Bureau of Economic Research",
 type = "Working Paper",
 series = "Working Paper Series",
 number = "13947",
 year = "2008",
 month = "April",
 URL = "http://www.nber.org/papers/w13947",
 abstract = {Longer life expectancy should encourage human capital accumulation, since a longer time horizon increases the value of investments that pay out over time. Previous work has been unable to determine the empirical importance of this life-expectancy effect due to the difficulty of isolating it from other effects of health on education. We examine a sudden drop in maternal mortality risk in Sri Lanka between 1946 and 1953, which creates a sharp increase in life expectancy for school-age girls without contemporaneous effects on health, and which also allows for the use of boys as a control group. Using additional geographic variation, we find that the 70% reduction in maternal mortality risk over the sample period increased female life expectancy at age 15 by 4.1%, female literacy by 2.5%, and female years of education by 4.0%.},
}