Marcos Vera Hernandez - UCL
Breastfeeding and Children’s Development (joint with Emla Fitzsimons)
Date: 09/26/2012 (Wed)
Time: 3:30pm- 5:00pm
Location: Seminar will be held on-site: Social Sciences 111
Organizer: Manoj Mohanan
Meeting Schedule: Login or email the organizer to schedule a meeting.
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
10:00am - OPEN
10:30am - Joanna Maselko (DGHI)
11:00am - OPEN
11:30am - OPEN
12:00pm - Peter Arcidiacono
12:30pm - OPEN
1:00pm - Lunch - 1-2PM .. Mohanan
2:00pm - Hugh Macartney (@239)
2:30pm - Duncan Thomas (@314)
3:00pm - Erica Field
3:30pm - Seminar Presentation (3:30pm to 5:00pm)
Additional Comments: Abstract: There is a large gradient in breastfeeding rates across education groups, with rates in the developed world considerably higher amongst the relatively more educated. This may a contributory factor in the intergenerational transmission of human capital. In this paper, we estimate the causal effects of breastfeeding on children's development. We provide strong evidence to show that babies born just before or during the weekend are significantly less likely to be breastfed, most likely because hospitals dedicate fewer resources to non-essential services – such as breastfeeding support - at times when they are more costly, namely at weekends. We use variation in the timing/day of birth to estimate the effect of breastfeeding on children's subsequent cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes. With the exception of planned Caesarean sections, which we exclude from the analysis, we argue that timing of birth is random. We find that breastfeeding has large and significant effects at age 3 and 5 on the developmental outcomes of the children of relatively less educated mothers. These large effects are of similar size to the results of the only randomized trial ever done on breastfeeding, for which we can argue that the compliers possibly have common features with ours. A Monte Carlo analysis shows that our Instrumental Variable estimates are conservative and our confidence intervals have the right coverage.