Child health and school enrollment - A longitudinal analysis

Better child health is widely thought to improve school performance, and th erefore post-school productivity. But most of the literature ignores that c hild health as well as child schooling reflects behavioral choices. There f ore the estimated impact of child health on child schooling in these studie s may be biased, perhaps substantially. This study employs longitudinal dat a to investigate the impact of child health (as indicated by nutritional st atus) on school enrollments in rural Pakistan using an explicit dynamic mod el for the preferred estimates, These estimates use price shocks when child ren were of preschool age to control for behavior determining the child hea lth stock measure. They indicate that child health (nutrition) is three tim es as important for enrollment than suggested by "naive estimates" that ass ume that child health is predetermined rather than determined by household choices in the presence of unobserved factors such as preferences and healt h endowments. These results, therefore, reinforce strongly the importance o f using estimation methods that are consistent with the economic theory of households to explore the impact of some choice variables on others using s ocioeconomic behavioral data.