Children's health and achievement in school

The evidence is quite limited concerning the impact on education of child health within the range of health usually observed among school children. Previous studies based on socioeconomic survey data that purport to support the important role of child health on child schooling success fail to incorporate into their analysis the probable endogenous nature of child health. On a priori grounds it would seem that child health and child schooling are determined simultaneously by households given their observed and unobserved characteristics and those of the community. If so, failure to control for such household allocations in estimates of the impact of child health on child schooling is likely to lead to biased estimates of that effect. This paper explores the a priori nature of the possible biases and then presents some illustrative empirical analysis of these effects using some rich data for this purpose from the Ghanaian Living Standard Measurement Study. The paper concludes that for this sample there is no evidence of an impact of the observed range of child health on child cognitive achievement. -from Authors