"The Impacts of Increasing a Children's Stature at Age Two on Pre-Adolescent Child Outcomes in Cebu," (with Thomas Mroz, Haiyong Liu, Tetyana Shvydko, Slava Zayats, and Linda Adair), Carolina Population Center, UNC-CH 

Abstract:
This paper uses a sequential dynamic empirical model to study the longer term impacts of a young child’s height on subsequent illnesses, entry into school, and height and weight in Cebu, Philippines. Moving a child from the 10th percentile of the age two height distribution to the 90th percentile appears to have moderate impacts on the child’s later physiological and intellectual progress. Taller children at age two have a ten percentage point lower propensity to experience a serious illness between the ages of two and seven (37% versus 47%), and the failure to recognize the endogeneity of the height at age two underestimates this impact by about a factor of four. While taller children do appear to be more likely to receive subsequent immunizations, there appears to be little impact of these immunizations on reducing the incidence of preventable diseases. The failure to control for the endogeneity of the child’s height at age two also overstates by a factor of two its impact on height at age seven, and it also severely overestimates the impact of age two height on a child’s weight at age seven. Taller children at age two do appear to have higher intelligence test scores at age seven, and estimates of this impact do not appear to be influenced by whether or not one controls for the endogeneity of height at age two. Higher stature at age two has a moderate indirect impact on whether a child starts school on time, with much of this impact operating through the lower incidence of disease between the ages of two and seven. The estimated indirect impact would only be half as large if one did not control for the endogeneity of the child’s height at age two. Taken as a group, these results suggest that better nutrition and health behaviors before age two that result in taller children could have important impacts on a child’s subsequent early intellectual development by reducing the child’s susceptibility to diseases after age two and before entering school.