Events

(joint work with Marco Cozzani, Niko Eskelinen and Matti Lindberg)

Abstract: Numerous studies have shown that perinatal health conditions have long-term effects on educational attainment, labour market success, and health in adulthood. Many of these studies have used birth weight as a compound measure of prenatal health, whereas others have estimated causal effects of prenatal health using natural experiments of natural and man-made disasters. A limitation of this literature is that it provides little evidence of the relevance of prenatal health at the population level, either because it focuses on single markers of prenatal health (birth weight) or because it estimates the effects of rare events (disasters). In this study, we address these issues by estimating the effects of a range of common perinatal health conditions—maternal smoking in pregnancy, gestational hypertension and pre-eclampsia, and anemia, as well as low birth weight and its two components, gestational age and intrauterine growth restriction—and estimate population attributable fractions as summary measures of the importance of these conditions on (foregone) educational attainment at the population level. We use Finnish population register data and estimate sibling fixed-effects models to control for unmeasured variables shared by siblings. We find that intrauterine growth restriction—and by implication, low birth weight—is the only perinatal condition that affects educational attainment, and it only affects the probability of attaining a tertiary degree. Being born small-for-gestational-age or with low birth weight lowers the probability of attaining a tertiary degree by 7 and 8 percentage points (approximately 20% compared to the baseline), respectively. Yet, the low prevalence of these conditions means that they have miniscule population-level relevance: eliminating them would increase the population share of tertiary degree holders only by 0.5 percentage points. We conclude that although perinatal health problems can have important socioeconomic consequences at the individual level, its population-level relevance is limited. We discuss the transferability of these conclusions beyond the Finnish context.

The Sociology Seminar Series for Hilary Term is convened by Ginevra Floridi, Ramina Sotoudeh and Benjamin Elbers.  For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.