Accounting for the Change in the Gradient: Health Inequality among Infants

Wanchuan Lin, University of California, Los Angeles

More-educated women have healthier infants. This study investigates changes in the relationship between maternal education and infant health using Vital Statistics data from 1983 to 2000. I find that the disparity in both APGAR scores and infant deaths has been narrowing over the past two decades. A simple decomposition reveals that increasing access to medical care is the dominant factor explaining the closing gap. The gap was also narrowed by the increasing share of births to less-educated women that were accounted for by Hispanics rather than African-Americans. However, several behavioral factors had an important impact on the education-related gap in infant health. The gap decreased because less-educated women smoked less, but this improvement was partially offset by an increase in the number of less-educated women gaining more than 60 pounds during their pregnancies. The gap also decreased because increasing numbers of college-educated women had multiple births.