Vortrag
Birth Outcomes and Economic Crises: Evidence from Argentina

Carlos Bozzoli


25th Annual Congress of the European Economic Association : EEA 2010
Glasgow, Großbritannien, 23.08.2010 - 26.08.2010



Abstract:
We make use of a national registry of 1.9 million births occurring between 2001 and 2003 in Argentina to study the effect of the Argentinean crisis on the weight of the newborns. We find that the crisis explains a loss of about 30 grams in average birth weight, which is about 15% of the gap in birth weight between babies born in US and those born in Pakistan, a country with an important incidence of low-birth weight babies. Moreover, the crisis had a differential effect depending on mother's socioeconomic status: the impact of the recession was even more pronounced in mothers of low educational level.

Abstract

We make use of a national registry of 1.9 million births occurring between 2001 and 2003 in Argentina to study the effect of the Argentinean crisis on the weight of the newborns. We find that the crisis explains a loss of about 30 grams in average birth weight, which is about 15% of the gap in birth weight between babies born in US and those born in Pakistan, a country with an important incidence of low-birth weight babies. Moreover, the crisis had a differential effect depending on mother's socioeconomic status: the impact of the recession was even more pronounced in mothers of low educational level.



JEL-Classification: I1;J1
Keywords: Argentina, birth weight, economic crisis
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