Arbeitspapier
Birth weight and family status revisited: evidence from Austrian register data
In this paper, we study the socio-economic determinants of birth weight with a focus on the mothers family status. We use Austrian birth register data covering all births between 1984 and 2007 and find that a mothers marriage is associated with a higher birth weight of the newborn in a range between 4 and 6 dekagrams. This result remains stable if we control for time-invariant unobserved mother heterogeneity. A divorce around pregnancy results in birth weight 2 to 8 dekagrams lower as compared to that of newborn babies of single mothers. The family status effects in the 2000s are stronger as they were in the 1980s. A quantile regression suggests that family effects are more pronounced at the lower quantiles of the birth weight distribution and diminish at higher percentiles. Finally, in accordance with several instrumental variable (IV) studies, we find that the significantly positive impact of family status on childrens health outcomes disappears if we confine our sample to mothers, who are below the age of 22 years. We conclude that social and financial stress may have an important influence on the birth weight of newborns, especially at the lower tail of the birth weight distribution.
- Language
-
Englisch
- Bibliographic citation
-
Series: Working Paper ; No. 1117
- Classification
-
Wirtschaft
Health Behavior
Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure; Domestic Abuse
Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
Single Equation Models; Single Variables: Cross-Sectional Models; Spatial Models; Treatment Effect Models; Quantile Regressions
- Subject
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Low birth weight
family status
newborn health
fixed-effects estimations
Körpergewicht
Kinder
Sozialer Status
Mütter
Österreich
- Event
-
Geistige Schöpfung
- (who)
-
Frimmel, Wolfgang
Pruckner, Gerald J.
- Event
-
Veröffentlichung
- (who)
-
Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Department of Economics
- (where)
-
Linz
- (when)
-
2011
- Handle
- Last update
-
10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET
Data provider
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. If you have any questions about the object, please contact the data provider.
Object type
- Arbeitspapier
Associated
- Frimmel, Wolfgang
- Pruckner, Gerald J.
- Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Department of Economics
Time of origin
- 2011
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Low birth weight and health expenditures from birth to late adolescence
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Still unequal at birth: Birth weight, socioeconomic status and outcomes at Age 9
Birth weight and family status revisited: evidence from Austrian register data
Mother's education and birth weight
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Temporal trends in pregnancy weight gain and birth weight in Bavaria 2000–2007: slightly decreasing birth weight with increasing weight gain in pregnancy
Low birth weight and health expenditures from birth to late adolescence
Low birth weight and health expenditures from birth to late adolescence
Low birth weight in a heterogenic population
Significant Hypogammaglobulinemia in Very Low Birth Weight Infants
Predicting birth weight with conditionally linear transformation models
Beyond birth weight: The origins of human capital