Life-long effects of prenatal malnutrition evidence from gestation during Ramadan

Abstract

Empirical evidence shows that prenatal malnutrition not only has impacts on kids’ childhood and adolescent outcomes, but it also has long-term effects on those children’s adult health and academic and labor market performance. This has strong implications on countries’ human capital development. Most evidence has been focused on health rather than educational and labor market outcomes, and has relied mostly on natural experiments, such as famines, wars and pandemics, which tend to be correlated with other shocks. In this paper, we take advantage of Nigerian exposure to Ramadan’s fasting in order to measure the effects of prenatal malnutrition on health, education and labor market outcomes over individuals’ life cycle. Given that Ramadan’s dates are determined by the lunar calendar and vary each year, the exposure to fasting during pregnancy is exogenously determined by Ramadan’s and pregnancy dates. The dataset allows to track male individuals over different life stages to evaluate the effects of prenatal malnutrition in the short and long-run. This work understands that the shocks and later interventions may interact in complex ways. As a result, the purpose of this paper is account for links between health, educational and labor market outcomes. The early impacts on health (birth weight and height scores), are negative and statistically significant, as well as the effects on school repetition and wages. However, exposure during different gestation periods take relevance for school repetition and wages, suggesting more complex interactions between shocks and later interventions.