On the Value of Birth Weight*
| Published date | 01 October 2021 |
| Author | Damian Clarke,Sonia Oreffice,Climent Quintana‐Domeque |
| Date | 01 October 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/obes.12429 |
On the Value of Birth Weight*
DAMIAN CLARKE,†,‡SONIA OREFFICE‡,§,¶and
CLIMENT QUINTANA-DOMEQUE‡,§,¶,††
†Department of Economics, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile (e-mail:
dclarke@fen.uchile.cl)
‡IZA, Bonn, Germany
§University of Exeter, Exeter, UK (e-mail: s.oreffice@exeter.ac.uk;
c.quintana-domeque@exeter.ac.uk)
¶HCEO, Chicago, IL, USA
††GLO, Essen, Germany
Abstract
A large body of evidence documents the educational and labour market returns to
birth weight, which are reflected in investments in large social safety net programmes
targeting birth weight and early life health. However, there is no direct evidence on
the private valuation of birth weight. In this paper, we estimate the willingness to
pay for birth weight in the United States, using a series of discrete choice
experiments. Within the normal birth weight range (2,500–4,000 g), we find that
individuals are, on average, willing to pay $1.47 (95% CI: [$1.24, $1.70]) for each
additional gram of birth weight when the value of birth weight is estimated linearly,
or $2.40 (95% CI: [$2.03, $2.77]) when the value of birth weight is estimated non-
parametrically.
I. Introduction
The weight of a newborn is a well-known measure of the initial endowment or stock
of human capital early in life (Almond and Currie, 2011; Almond, Currie and Duque,
2018). The importance of the fetal period as a predictor of health throughout the life
course has been recognized in a series of influential papers by Barker and coauthors on
the fetal origins of disease (Barker et al., 1989; Barker, 1990, 1995), with considerable
and ever-growing evidence that insults to fetal health have enduring and significant
JEL Classification numbers:C9, I1, J1.
*This experiment documented in this paper has passed ethical approval at the Oxford Centre of Experimental
Social Sciences (CESS), and been registered as project ETH-160128161. We thank the editor James Fenske, two
anonymous referees at the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics,
´
Aureo de Paula, two anonymous referees
at Review of Economic Studies, and participants in seminars at the University of Exeter and the University of
Surrey, and at the Royal Economic Society (RES) Annual Conference 2019 (University of Warwick) and
European Society for Population Economics (ESPE) Annual Conference 2019 (University of Bath) for helpful
comments and suggestions. Replication materials are available at the Harvard Dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/
DVN/IWINJN. Any errors contained in the paper are our own.
1130
©2021 The Authors. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics published by Oxford University and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License,which permits use, distribution and reproduction in
any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
OXFORD BULLETIN OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS, 83, 5 (2021) 0305-9049
doi: 10.1111/obes.12429
costs throughout life (Case, Fertig and Paxson, 2005; Almond, 2006; Currie and
Moretti, 2007; Black, Devereux and Salvanes, 2007; Almond, Edlund and Palme,
2009). These findings justify sizeable welfare programmes targeted at babies with poor
endowments early in life, such as those focusing on low birth weight infants (Almond,
Chay and Lee, 2005; Bharadwaj, Løken and Neilson, 2013) and pre-natal nutrition
programmes, such as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women Infants
and Children (WIC).
Despite a large body of evidence on the importance of birth weight and
considerable public investment, little is known regarding the private valuation of this
birth outcome, or other newborn measures. Knowing the value which people place on
birth weight and other birth characteristics is of public concern and a fundamental
policy issue, in particular as a key ingredient to policies focused on parental behaviour
prior to and during gestation. To the degree that a wide range of (costly) parental
behaviours can positively impact birth weight (Rosenzweig and Schultz, 1983; Sexton
and Hebel, 1984; Chevalier and O’Sullivan, 2007), the perceived importance of birth
weight to parents may have significant effects on these behaviours.
In this paper, we estimate the importance of birth weight to individuals, as
measured by their willingness to pay (WTP) for birth weight. In order to do so, we
conducted a series of discrete choice experiments on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
(MTurk), an online labour market platform. This is increasingly used in social science
research (Kuziemko et al., 2015; Jordan et al., 2016) and, in particular, a recent study
has relied on this platform to estimate the value of life before and after birth (Jamison,
2016). We conducted these experiments with approximately 2,000 respondents, half of
them interviewed in 2016, and half of them in 2018. Respondents were asked to
consider seven pairs of birth scenarios sequentially, amounting to around 28,000
different birth scenarios with a number of different characteristics. These characteristics
were each orthogonally varied both within and between experimental subjects.
Specifically, we performed conjoint analysis (CA), a method first described by
Lancaster (1966).
These experiments allow respondents to reveal their preferences (or lack thereof)
over a range of birth characteristics. In particular, we randomise a baby’s birth weight,
monetary costs of birth, gender and birth timing. Birth weight was randomised within
the normal range of 2,500–4,000 g. We restrict our analysis to the ‘normal’range for
two reasons. First, not only do continuous measures of birth weight have greater
explanatory power for a larger range of variables than a low birth weight (LBW, or
weights less than 2,500 g) indicator (Black et al., 2007), but recent evidence also
suggests that marginal increases in birth weight within the normal weight range are
particularly important for well-being. Royer (2009) suggests that given this fact, babies
born in the normal range of weights should receive more research attention.
1
Indeed,
Maruyama and Heinesen (2020) show that health effects of LBW exist also in the
1
In full, Royer (2009) reports (p. 52): ‘Ifind that the effects of birth weight on long-run outcomes are
nonlinear and for educational attainment, in particular, are largest above 2,500 g, the cutoff for defining low
birth weight. These findings suggest that babies with birth weights outside the lower tail of the distribution (i.e.
outside the range of low birth weight) should receive more attention’.
©2021 The Authors. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics published by Oxford University and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
On the value of birth weight1131
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