How does mother's schooling affect family health, nutrition, medical care usage, and household sanitation?

Abstract

A mother's education is widely posited to affect positively her own and her children's health and nutrition in developing economies. We estimate a LISREL system of production functions for maternal and child health and reduced-form relations for nutrition, medical care usage, and household water and sanitation, with latent variable representations of these dependent variables and of community and maternal endowments. If the maternal endowment is excluded, mother's schooling appears to have strong positive effects on health and nutrition. But this effect evaporates when the maternal endowment (i.e., abilities, habits, and health status related to childhood family background) is included, thus raising doubts about standard estimates of the impact of maternal schooling on health and nutrition.