Birth weight and infant health for multiple births
Abstract
I provide plausibly causal estimates of the effect of birth weight using data from the universe of twins, triplets, and quadruplets born between 1995 and 2000 in the United States. Infants from higher-order multiple births have lower birth weights, but experience smaller reductions in infant health when they are low birth weight. OLS estimates using a rich set of controls show that this result holds when comparing singletons to multiples and when analyzing historical data from before the widespread use of in vitro fertilization. These results suggest that the paradox of low birth weight remains even after controlling for unobserved maternal heterogeneity.
Repository Citation
Saavedra, Martin. 2020. "Birth weight and infant health for multiple births." Journal of Health Economics 69: 102255.
Publisher
Elsevier
Publication Date
1-1-2020
Publication Title
Journal of Health Economics
Department
Economics
Document Type
Article
DOI
https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2019.102255
Keywords
Multiple births, Birthweight, Infant mortality, Twins, Triplets, Quadruplets
Language
English
Format
text
