The Contemporaneous Distributional Effects of Investments on Early Childhood Nutrition: A Panel Quantile Approach

Abstract

This article examines the distributional effects of early nutritional investments on contemporaneous child health endowment measurements. Depending on whether investments made in child nutrition at different times complement or substitute, the return from early childhood nutritional investments can differ across the health endowment distribution. To establish a causal inference, I merge village-level rainfall data with a child-level longitudinal survey — the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey — and apply a Correlated Random Effect quantile regression for panel data model. The findings suggest that the return derived from a standard deviation increase in a village-level precipitation z-score is stronger at the lower end of the weight-for height and weight-for age z-score distributions. Given that inequalities present at an early age widen over time, the equalizing benefits of a standard deviation increase in a village-level precipitation z-score imply that scaling up investments on early childhood nutrition will not only increase long term efficiency but will also reduce inequality.