Maternal Health Behaviours and their Children's Education, Health, and Economic Outcomes

Our aim is to use quantitative causal methods to explore the importance of three maternal health
behaviours, in utero and peri-natal, on educational (especially GCSE) outcomes for the children.
We specifically focus on causal effects - because of the possibility of unobservable confounding.
This Is important because the policy relevance of the work will depend on having estimates that
have been purged of the effects of confounding unobservable factors. The portfolio aims to feature
high quality causal estimates of the effect of three important health behaviours behaviours on
educational outcomes of policy relevance. The work will develop skills in evaluation methods to
launch a career in health economics and support a post-doc research agenda.
The student will explore: the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) where data has been collected from
conception; and the two Longitudinal Studies of Young People in England, LSYPE1 and 2 (that follow
children beyond 13+). The supervisors have long experience of these data - to allow rapid progress.
We aim to have several academic impacts: we hope to kickstart research on the wider effects of
Ramadan by developed world health economists. And we aim to promote development economists
to explore compliance with Ramadan. We hope that by our use of set identification will prompt its
use by other researchers where the "Instrumental Variables" method (IV) would be underpowered
(something seldom acknowledged). And we hope that by applying "Machine Learning" (ML)
methods on rich datasets we will demonstrate its usefulness to other researchers of breastfeeding. We will be quantifying under-researched causal effects on outcomes associated with two welltrodden
health behaviours, and we will add a new one (Ramadan). The methods are well-suited to
the problems at hand and the data is of high quality. So the studentship promises new evidence
well-matched to important policy issues. We will explore a much wider range of outcomes for the
children than has usually featured in the literature - effects on SEN(D) status, non-cognitive traits
(conscientiousness, locus of control etc as well as patience and risk attitudes); KS2, KS3, GCSE, and
A-level effects; and university outcomes, earnings and employment at 25, well-being and mental
health at age 25, volunteering and charitable giving, birthweight, prematurity, breastfeeding
establishment and cessation, child development tests, child health problems; behavioural
problems, .......and more.