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

描述(由申请人提供)：研究一直发现，孩子出生的月份与后来的结果有关，涉及健康、教育程度、收入和死亡率。目前还不清楚是什么推动了这种联系。对这一现象的先前解释考虑了可能以特定方式影响冬季出生的儿童的社会和自然因素(如义务教育法律或气候变化)。这些解释往往是含蓄的，在许多情况下是明确的，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，各种因素会干预，造成不同的结局。我们的项目将考虑另一种以前被忽视的解释：那些在一年中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怀上的。为了考虑这一替代解释，这个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生育妇女特征的变化。其次，这个项目将使用人口普查数据来调查，在归因于出生季节的结果(包括与健康、教育和收入相关的结果)中，有多少可以通过简单地控制个人的母亲背景来解释。第三，该项目将使用生命统计数据和国家气候数据中心的数据来探索天气条件，作为不同女性群体全年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，包括关于学校教育回报的工作，关于妇女生育决定的工作，以及关于出生季节和以后结果之间的关系的工作。这项研究可能会提供一个重要但尚未探索的部分解释，解释为什么结果与出生月份有关。这项工作还将对大量关于就学回报的经济学研究产生重要影响，这些研究依赖于强有力的假设，解释为什么出生季节的结果不同；我们的初步研究表明，这些文献做出的假设几乎肯定是不正确的。 与公共卫生相关：该项目与公共卫生相关，因为它探索了一种引人注目的、以前未被注意到的这一年中妇女生育的模式。据我们所知，我们的研究将是美国第一项大规模的全国性研究，旨在探索特定女性群体是否比其他女性更有可能在一年中的特定时间怀孕或生育。虽然妇女生育率本身是一个重要的健康主题，但该项目还将推动关于出生季节与儿童健康结果之间关系的科学研究。我们的工作提出了一个创新的、以前被忽视的解释，解释了为什么在一年中的特定时间出生的孩子比其他孩子的结果更差(包括与健康、教育和收入有关的结果)。因此，我们的工作将为公共卫生的一个重要方面--妇女生育结果--提供新的信息，并为与儿童健康和福祉有关的鲜为人知的现象提供新的解释。

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.