Season of Birth and Later Outcomes: Old Questions, New Answers

出生季节和后来的结果：老问题，新答案

• 批准号: 7661275
• 负责人: Kasey Buckles
• 金额: $ 7.5万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-06-01 至 2011-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7661275
• 关键词: Affect; Age; Birth; Censuses; Characteristics; Child; Child health care; Climate; Conceptions; Data; Differential Fertility; Discipline; Economics; Educational Status; Employee Strikes; Fertility; Health; Health Policy; Individual; Knowledge; Laws; Literature; Methodology; Outcome; Pattern; Public Health; Research; Schools; Scientific Advances and Accomplishments; Testing; Time; Vital Statistics; Wages; Weather; Woman; Women' s Group; Work; innovation; mortality; optimism; public health relevance; season of birth; social; socioeconomics

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Research has consistently found that the month of a child's birth is associated with later outcomes involving health, educational attainment, earnings and mortality. What drives this association remains unclear. Prior explanations for this phenomenon consider social and natural factors (such as compulsory schooling laws or changes in climate) that might affect children born in the winter in particular ways. These explanations often implicitly, and in many cases explicitly, assume that children born at different times of the year are initially similar, but that factors intervene after conception or birth to create differences in outcomes. Our project will consider an alternative and previously-overlooked explanation: those children born throughout the year are not initially similar but are conceived by women with different socioeconomic characteristics. To consider this alternative explanation, this project will have three specific aims. First, this project will use Vital Statistics and census data to document changes in the characteristics of the average woman giving birth throughout the year. Second, this project will use census data to investigate how much of the difference in outcomes (including outcomes related to health, schooling, and earnings) ascribed to season of birth can be explained by simply controlling for the maternal backgrounds of individuals. Third, this project will use Vital Statistics and National Climatic Data Center data to explore weather conditions as a partial explanation for differential fertility outcomes between different groups of women throughout the year. This work will advance research in multiple disciplines, including work on the returns to schooling, work on women's fertility decisions, and work on the relationship between season of birth and later outcomes. This study may provide an important-but-unexplored partial explanation for why outcomes are related to month of birth. This work will also have important implications for a large body of economic research on returns-to- schooling which relies on strong assumptions for why outcomes differ by season of birth; our preliminary studies show that the assumptions made by this body of literature are almost certainly untrue. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This project is relevant to public health as it explores a striking and previously unnoted pattern in births to women during the year. Our study will be, to our knowledge, the first large-scale nationwide U.S. study to explore whether particular groups of women are relatively more likely than other women to conceive or give birth at certain times of year. While women's fertility is itself an important health topic, this project will also advance scientific research on the relationship between season of birth and child health outcomes. Our work proposes an innovative and previously overlooked explanation for why children born in certain times of the year have worse outcomes (including outcomes related to health, schooling, and earnings) than other children. Our work will thus contribute new information to an important aspect of public health-women's fertility outcomes-and provide new explanations for poorly understood phenomena related to child health and wellbeing.

描述（由申请人提供）：研究一致发现，孩子的出生月份与以后的健康、教育程度、收入和死亡率有关。导致这种联系的原因尚不清楚。先前对这一现象的解释认为，社会和自然因素（如义务教育法或气候变化）可能会以特定的方式影响冬季出生的孩子。这些解释通常隐含地（在许多情况下是明确地）假设，在一年中的不同时间出生的孩子最初是相似的，但在受孕或出生后，一些因素会干预，造成结果的差异。我们的项目将考虑另一种以前被忽视的解释：全年出生的孩子最初并不相似，而是由具有不同社会经济特征的妇女孕育的。考虑到这种替代解释，该项目将有三个具体目标。首先，该项目将使用生命统计和人口普查数据来记录全年平均分娩妇女特征的变化。其次，该项目将使用人口普查数据来调查出生季节导致的结果差异（包括与健康、学校教育和收入相关的结果）在多大程度上可以通过简单地控制个人的母亲背景来解释。第三，本项目将使用人口动态统计和国家气候数据中心的数据来探索天气条件作为全年不同妇女群体生育结果差异的部分解释。这项工作将推动多个学科的研究，包括关于重返学校的研究、关于妇女生育决定的研究以及关于出生季节与后来结果之间关系的研究。这项研究可能提供了一个重要但未被探索的部分解释，为什么结果与出生月份有关。这项工作也将对大量关于重返学校的经济研究产生重要影响，这些研究依赖于对为什么结果会因出生季节而不同的强有力假设；我们的初步研究表明，这些文献的假设几乎肯定是不正确的。