TY  - JOUR
AU  - Jayachandran,Seema
AU  - Lleras-Muney,Adriana
TI  - Life Expectancy and Human Capital Investments: Evidence From Maternal Mortality Declines
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13947
PY  - 2008
Y2  - April 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13947
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13947.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Seema Jayachandran
Department of Economics
Northwestern University
2001 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208
Tel: (847) 491-4757
Fax: (847) 491-7001
E-Mail: seema@northwestern.edu

Adriana Lleras-Muney
Department of Economics
9373 Bunche Hall
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Tel: 310/825-3925
Fax: NA
E-Mail: alleras@ECON.UCLA.EDU
AB  - 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%.
ER  -