ERIC Number: ED501968
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2008-Apr
Pages: N/A
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Life Expectancy and Human Capital Investments: Evidence from Maternal Mortality Declines. NBER Working Paper No. 13947
Jayachandran, Seema; Lleras-Muney, Adriana
National Bureau of Economic Research
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%.
Descriptors: Control Groups, Human Capital, Foreign Countries, Poverty, Risk, Economics, Mortality Rate, Pregnancy, Females, Males, Physical Health, Educational Environment, Gender Differences, Correlation, Developing Nations
National Bureau of Economic Research. 1050 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138-5398. Tel: 617-588-0343; Web site: http://www.nber.org/cgi-bin/get_bars.pl?bar=pub
Publication Type: Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA.
Identifiers - Location: Sri Lanka
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A