The long-term effect of the maternal and infant health act on the human capital of adolescents in China

ABSTRACT

We study the long-term effects of the Maternal and Infant Health Act (MIHA) on the human capital of adolescents in China. We exploit the variation in the availability of the intervention created by the cut-off date of the implementation of the MIHA and estimate a RD-DID model. We find no significant treatment effects on education or health outcomes for the full sample. In the subsample analysis, we find significant positive treatment effects on both education and health outcomes for adolescents with higher educated mothers, but no significant effects for those with lower educated mothers.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood intervention
• human capital
• education
• health
• RD-DID

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• H40
• I18
• I25
• J13
• O15

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant #72273163) and the Program for Innovation Research at Central University of Finance and Economics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) official website,

https://www.isss.pku.edu.cn/cfps/en/data/public/index.htm.

A description of the CFPS can be found at

http://www.isss.pku.edu.cn/cfps/en/index.htm.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13504851.2024.2351169

Notes

¹ The RD results using the sample of the 1995 birth cohort are provided in Table A2 in the online appendices. The RD results are consistent with our main results from RD-DID estimations.

² The latter results are available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [72273163]; Program for Innovation Research at Central University of Finance and Economics .