Journal
REVIEW OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS
Volume 95, Issue 3, Pages 711-724Publisher
MIT PRESS
DOI: 10.1162/REST_a_00314
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- NICHD NIH HHS [R03 HD058947] Funding Source: Medline
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Season of birth is associated with later outcomes; what drives this association remains unclear. We consider a new explanation: variation in maternal characteristics. We document large changes in maternal characteristics for births throughout the year; winter births are dispropor-tionally realized by teenagers and the unmarried. Family background controls explain nearly half of season-of-birth's relation to adult outcomes. Seasonality in maternal characteristics is driven by women trying to conceive; we find no seasonality among unwanted births. Prior seasonality-in-fertility research focuses on conditions at conception; here, expected conditions at birth drive variation in maternal characteristics, while conditions at conception are unimportant.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available