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Life Expectancy and Human Capital Investments: Evidence From Maternal Mortality Declines / Seema Jayachandran, Adriana Lleras-Muney.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Jayachandran, Seema.
- Series:
- Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w13947.
- NBER working paper series no. w13947
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);
- Other Title:
- Life Expectancy and Human Capital Investments
- Place of Publication:
- Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2008.
- Summary:
- Longer life expectancy should encourage human capital accumulation, since a longer time horizon increases the value of investments that pay out over time. Previous work has been unable to determine the empirical importance of this life-expectancy effect due to the difficulty of isolating it from other effects of health on education. We examine a sudden drop in maternal mortality risk in Sri Lanka between 1946 and 1953, which creates a sharp increase in life expectancy for school-age girls without contemporaneous effects on health, and which also allows for the use of boys as a control group. Using additional geographic variation, we find that the 70% reduction in maternal mortality risk over the sample period increased female life expectancy at age 15 by 4.1%, female literacy by 2.5%, and female years of education by 4.0%.
- Notes:
- Print version record
- April 2008.
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