Children in developing countries face a myriad of hardships including poverty, household economic shocks, and high disease burden. These adverse conditions curtail children’s human capital attainment. In this dissertation, I examine the roles of household economic shocks and poor health on drop out from school, grade repetition, and math test scores among children in four developing countries. I use panel data on nearly 4,000 children from ages 7 to 15 over 12 years in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam, and fit linear and logistic regression models with random and fixed effects to examine the predictors of educational outcomes. I find that household economic shocks do not have significant long term effects on grade repetition and math test scores in adolescence. However, household economic shocks caused by illness and death events in the household increase dropout rates. I find that lower parental socioeconomic status measured by poverty and maternal education has a strong negative influence on children’s education. Poor health is associated with reduced drop out from school, while it also predicts lower math test scores, indicating that sick children fail to keep up academically with their healthier peers while in school. The effects of poor health are driven mostly by poor health at younger ages in early childhood rather that those occurring in early adolescence. Importantly, I do not find a significant pattern of context-dependent variation in the impacts of poverty, household economic shocks, or poor health. The findings highlight specific pathways linking early hardship experiences and children’s later educational attainment and contribute to the literature on the inter-generational transmission of inequalities in developing countries.
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Citation
Reda, Ayalu Aklilu,
"Wealth, Health, and Child Education in Developing Countries"
(2017).
Sociology Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0251GN3
