Agarwal, N, Aiyar, A, Bhattacharjee, A orcid.org/0000-0002-0157-1476 et al. (5 more authors) (2017) Month of birth and child height in 40 countries. Economics Letters, 157. pp. 10-13. ISSN 0165-1765
Abstract
Lokshin and Radyakin (2012) present evidence that month of birth affects child physical growth in India. We replicate these correlations using the same data and demonstrate that they are the result of a spurious relationship between month of birth, age-at-measurement and child growth patterns in developing countries. We repeat the analysis on 39 additional countries and show that there is no evidence of seasonal birth effects in child height-for-age z-score in any country. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the Demographic and Health Survey data used to estimate the correlation is not suitable for the task due to a previously unrecognized source of measurement error in child month of birth. We document results from several papers that should be re-interpreted in light of this issue.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | (c) 2017, Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. This is an author produced version of a paper published in Economics Letters. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | Child health; Month of birth; Anthropometrics; Demographic & health survey. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Business (Leeds) > Economics Division (LUBS) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 21 Nov 2017 11:17 |
Last Modified: | 01 Jul 2019 11:45 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.econlet.2017.05.006 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:124244 |