TY - JOUR AU - Chay,Kenneth Y. AU - Guryan,Jonathan AU - Mazumder,Bhashkar TI - Birth Cohort and the Black-White Achievement Gap: The Roles of Access and Health Soon After Birth JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 15078 PY - 2009 Y2 - June 2009 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15078 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15078.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Kenneth Chay Department of Economics Brown University Box B Providence, RI 02912 Tel: 401-863-6296 E-Mail: Kenneth_Chay@brown.edu Jonathan Guryan Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research 2040 Sheridan Road Evanston, IL 60208 Tel: 847/467-7144 E-Mail: j-guryan@northwestern.edu Bhashkar Mazumder Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago 230 S. LaSalle Street Chicago, IL 60604 Tel: 312-322-8166 E-Mail: bmazumder@frbchi.org AB - One literature documents a significant, black-white gap in average test scores, while another finds a substantial narrowing of the gap during the 1980's, and stagnation in convergence after. We use two data sources -- the Long Term Trends NAEP and AFQT scores for the universe of applicants to the U.S. military between 1976 and 1991 -- to show: 1) the 1980's convergence is due to relative improvements across successive cohorts of blacks born between 1963 and the early 1970's and not a secular narrowing in the gap over time; and 2) the across-cohort gains were concentrated among blacks in the South. We then demonstrate that the timing and variation across states in the AFQT convergence closely tracks racial convergence in measures of health and hospital access in the years immediately following birth. We show that the AFQT convergence is highly correlated with post-neonatal mortality rates and not with neonatal mortality and low birth weight rates, and that this result cannot be explained by schooling desegregation and changes in family background. We conclude that investments in health through increased access at very early ages have large, long-term effects on achievement, and that the integration of hospitals during the 1960's affected the test performance of black teenagers in the 1980's. ER -