Birth spacing and child health trajectories
Files
Published version
Date
2020-06
Authors
Miller, Ray
Karra, Mahesh
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
Ray Miller, Mahesh Karra. 2020. "Birth Spacing and Child Health Trajectories." Population and Development Review, Volume 46, Issue 2, pp. 347 - 371. https://doi.org/10.1111/padr.12335
Abstract
Using longitudinal data on a cohort of over 4,000 children from four low‐ and middle‐income countries, we document the association between birth spacing and child growth trajectories. We find declines in child height at age 1 among children who are born within three years of an older sibling. However, we also observe catch‐up growth for closely spaced children as they age. We find no evidence that catch‐up growth is driven by remedial health investments after birth, suggesting substitutability in underlying biological processes. We also find that very widely spaced children (preceding birth interval of more than seven years) are similar in height at age 1 as children who are spaced three to seven years apart, but outgrow their more closely spaced counterparts as they age. However, further sibling comparisons suggest that the growth premium that is observed for very widely spaced children may be driven by unobserved confounding factors.
Description
License
© 2020 The Authors. Population and Development Review published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.