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Two key questions are addressed regarding the intersection of socioeconomic status, biology, and low birth weight over the life course. First, do the income and other socioeconomic conditions of a mother during her pregnancy affect her chances of having a low-birth-weight infant net of her own birth weight, that of the father, and other family-related, unobserved factors? Second, does an individual’s birth weight status affect his or her adult life chances net of socioeconomic status? These ques-tions have implications for the way we conceive of the relationship between socio-economic status and health over the life course, specifically in sorting out causal directionality. We use intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dy-namics, for the years 1968 through 1992. Results of sibling comparisons (family-fixed-effects models) demonstrate that maternal income does not appear to have a significant impact on birth weight. However, low birth weight results in lower edu-cational attainment net of other factors. These findings suggest that, when consid-ered across generations, causality may not be as straightforward as implied by cross-sectional or unigenerational longitudinal studies.
Conley et al. (Thu,) studied this question.