Essays on health and human capital

In this thesis, I study how macroeconomic conditions and personal behaviors influence people’s health and human capital development. This thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter and third chapter talk about how economic growths affect an individual’s behavior and development. The second chapter estimates the relation between fertility decisions and human capital. Despite that all three studies are based on data from China, the findings are expected to contribute to answering the general questions.In Chapter 1, I use Chinese panel data to estimate the exogenous effect of economic growth on individuals’ smoking behavior. By instrumenting the endogenous provincial GDP growth rate with a dummy variable indicating whether the province has a new leader, my results show that a higher economic growth rate reduces overall cigarette consumption, but does not reduce the overall smoking prevalence. In addition, a higher economic growth rate reduces cigarette consumption of men but not women. Higher growth reduces cigarette consumption of middle-aged and older men, but not younger men. Of these three groups, only middle-aged men reduce their smoking prevalence in response to higher economic growth. In Chapter 2, I analyze the impact of the number and gender composition of siblings on childhood academic performance in China. I instrument these key covariates using the first child’s gender and its interaction with different policies allowing parents to have certain numbers of children. Students with more younger siblings have higher academic performance regardless of the siblings’ gender composition when the family size is small. The positive impact decreases with the birth order of the student. More data is needed to identify the impact when the family size is large. Further investigation sheds light on the mechanism: more younger siblings increase older children’s study time and reduce their internet/video game time, and raise their families’ academic expectations for older children. In Chapter 3, I explore how economic growth during pregnancy and the first ten years of life affect Chinese children’s cognitive ability measured in junior high school. Using the luminosity intensity of nighttime lights as a proxy for local output, I find that only economic growth in the first year of a child’s life significantly improves cognitive ability, with the effect entirely due to girls. Children from highly educated families benefit more from growth than those from less-educated families.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference