The Role of Perinatal Health in Educational Attainment: Individual and Population Level Relevance

Juho Härkönen, European University Institute
Marco Cozzani, University of Florence
Niko Eskelinen , University of Turku | Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare
Matti Lindberg, University of Turku

A wide range of literature has highlighted how the nine months a child spends in the womb are a crucial developmental window, which can have a profound influence on future health and socio-economic attainment. Research has shown, for example, that poor perinatal health is linked with lower cognitive scores and IQ, worst mental health, reduced educational attainment, increased welfare dependency, and lower wages. Although this research has contributed to understanding the long-term consequences of perinatal health across human populations, we argue it suffers of two major limitations. First, it typically adopts a global measure of perinatal health, namely birth weight or low birth weight (LBW, < 2,500 g.), which may not fully capture common insults to perinatal health and development. Second, many studies on the causal effect of perinatal health on children’s later life outcomes have relied on once-in-a-century random shocks such as nuclear fallouts and catastrophic earthquakes, making the generalisations of the results potentially limited. We investigate the effect of perinatal health on educational attainment using sibling fixed effects models drawing on high-quality population-level Finnish register data. We find that only being small-for-gestational-age (SGA) has an impact on educational attainment. We also find that the population attributable fraction of reduced attainment due to SGA is particularly small, consisting of only half a percentage point. We discuss this result in light of considering perinatal health as either having a population relevance of a clinical relevance. Further research should investigate the population relevance of perinatal health in less generous contexts.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 52. Education and Health