Child survival, height for age and household characteristics in Brazil

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Abstract

The impact of household characteristics on child survival and height, conditional on age, is examined using household survey data from Brazil. Parental education is found to have a very strong positive effect on both outcomes and this is robust to the inclusion of household income and also parental heights, which partly proxy for unobserved family background characteristics. We find that income effects are significant and positive for child survival but insignificant for child height although the latter depends on identification assumptions. Parental height has a large positive impact on child height and on survival rates even after controlling for all other observable characteristics.

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We gratefully acknowledge the research support of EMBRAPA, and the assistance of IBGE who provided the data. Strauss received partial support form National Institutes of Health grant number HD21009-01. Strauss and Thomas were at the Warwick University Summer Workshop, July, 1988, when some of the paper was revised, Henriques was at Fordham University. Mauricio Vasconcellos was an invaluable guide through the data. We are grateful to him, Harold Alderman, Jere Behrman, Tanya Lustosa, John Mullahy, Mark Rosenzweig, Mark Stewart, T. Paul Schultz, James Trussell and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. Gyu Taeg Oh, Woo Heon Rhee and Dan Singer provided able research assistance. The authors share equal responsibility for the paper.