Re­search Fo­cus

Research Focus

The Cen­ter is ded­i­cat­ed to high-qual­i­ty re­search that will ul­ti­mate­ly im­prove the lives of chil­dren and young adults. In par­tic­u­lar, an im­por­tant fo­cus of the Cen­ter is to im­prove our knowl­edge of the caus­es and con­se­quences of breast­feed­ing.

Ear­ly child­hood con­di­tions have long-last­ing con­se­quences for lat­er life eco­nom­ic and so­cial well-be­ing. Breast­feed­ing might be one key in­gre­di­ent in the in­ter­gen­er­a­tional trans­mis­sion of hu­man cap­i­tal and there­by eco­nom­ic in­equal­i­ty, as we see a strong so­cioe­co­nom­ic gra­di­ent in breast­feed­ing rates across de­vel­oped coun­tries with more eco­nom­i­cal­ly ad­van­taged moth­ers be­ing more like­ly to breast­feed. A ma­jor pub­lic health fo­cus – rest­ing on cor­re­la­tion­al ev­i­dence – con­cerns how to im­prove breast­feed­ing rates glob­al­ly. Yet, causal ev­i­dence of the ef­fects of breast­feed­ing is still in its in­fan­cy: What are the con­se­quences of breast­feed­ing on chil­dren’s health, cog­ni­tive, emo­tion­al, and so­cial de­vel­op­ment? How does breast­feed­ing pro­mo­tion af­fect the child’s fam­i­ly en­vi­ron­ment? Why do not all moth­ers breast­feed? What could be done to im­prove breast­feed­ing rates?

Oth­er im­por­tant ques­tions that we fo­cus on in the Cen­ter con­cern how the child­hood fam­i­ly and the school en­vi­ron­ment af­fect hu­man cap­i­tal de­vel­op­ment, such as ed­u­ca­tion­al at­tain­ment, choice of field of study and oc­cu­pa­tion, eco­nom­ic pref­er­ences, and earn­ings.

Our Research

What is the Causal Effect of Breastfeeding on Child Development?

Many ob­ser­va­tion­al stud­ies re­port ben­e­fi­cial as­so­ci­a­tions be­tween breast­feed­ing and a wide range of child out­comes. This is a po­ten­tial rea­son for cost­ly in­ter­ven­tions to pro­mote breast­feed­ing. How­ev­er, econ­o­mists gen­er­al­ly ar­gue that causal ev­i­dence is re­quired to jus­ti­fy these ini­tia­tives over oth­er cost­ly mea­sures to im­prove child de­vel­op­ment. We re­view dif­fer­ent em­pir­i­cal ap­proach­es used in the lit­er­a­ture to study the ef­fects of breast­feed­ing on child de­vel­op­ment from the point of view of an econ­o­mist. We iden­ti­fy two stud­ies that con­vinc­ing­ly and cred­i­bly pro­vide causal es­ti­mates. Both stud­ies find no ev­i­dence over­all of im­prove­ments in child health or so­cioe­mo­tion­al de­vel­op­ment. One study finds ben­e­fi­cial ef­fects of breast­feed­ing for at least three months on cog­ni­tive de­vel­op­ment, while the oth­er finds no im­prove­ment on this di­men­sion when breast­feed­ing in­ten­si­ty in­creas­es. These find­ings might be con­text-spe­cif­ic but pro­vide a rea­son­able up­per bound of any po­ten­tial ben­e­fi­cial ef­fect of breast­feed­ing on child de­vel­op­ment in set­tings where mod­ern in­fant for­mu­la is the al­ter­na­tive. We con­clude that the causal ev­i­dence is ex­treme­ly scarce and that we do not know much about the causal ef­fects of breast­feed­ing; fu­ture re­search should clear­ly ad­dress this is­sue.

Source: This is an ex­cerpt of “Causal Ef­fects of Breast­feed­ing on Child De­vel­op­ment: An Econ­o­mist’s View by Anne Ardi­la Brenøe and Clau­dio Schilter“(draft com­ing soon).

The BEBE Cohort Study (Funding Obtained from SNF)

In the BEBE co­hort study, the Cen­ter part­ners with the Shang­hai First Ma­ter­ni­ty and In­fant Hos­pi­tal. We will re­cruit ap­prox­i­mate­ly 3,000 cou­ples who have just had their first child and fol­low them with reg­u­lar sur­veys un­til, at the very least, the new­born’s first birth­day. In this set­up, we aim to an­a­lyze the de­ter­mi­nants of in­fant feed­ing choic­es and its con­se­quences for child and ma­ter­nal well-be­ing.

The LRF CEB Is Generating Knowledge via Three Research Tracks.