LATER RETURN TO EARLY CHILD HEALTH

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Early investments in children are made on the premise that the prenatal period through early childhood resent unique opportunities to produce healthy children and that child health is itself an investment in a child's entire future. This study will provide a fuller understanding of the roles the family plays in the determination of children's early health outcomes and how these early outcomes influence later outcomes such as cognitive development, education, adult health and adult socio-economic success. Two unique features of this study are that it focuses on the development of the child throughout the live cycle from birth outcomes to success in adult life and that it controls for earlier investments in human capital when examining later outcomes. The study uses two data sets, the National Survey of Longitudinal Youth (NLSY) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), to capture the full range of lifetime outcomes for extended families. The study also provides a new econometric approach to modeling these interrelated behaviors for multiple family members, which reveals the nature of the family links as well as the behavioral relationships of primary interest-the determinants of child quality. Specifically, the study will consider a wide range of child outcomes including: (1) infant health-birth weight and prematurity; (2) childhood outcomes-child mortality, weight for height, and cognitive measures; and (3) adult outcomes-education, health, occupational status, and earnings. These outcomes represent the development of the child's "quality" over the life cycle and are the result of parental decisions concerning resource allocation and investments in children, the stock of family resources, and genetic endowments.