Educational achievement to age 11 years in children born at late preterm and early term gestations.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the effects of being born late preterm (LPT, 34-36 weeks' gestation) or early term (37-38 weeks) on children's educational achievement between ages 5 and 11 years. DESIGN: A series of observational studies of longitudinal linked health and education data. SETTING: The Born-in-Bradford (BiB) birth cohort study, which recruited mothers during pregnancy between 2007 and 2011. PARTICIPANTS: The participants are children born between 2007 and 2011. Children with missing data, looked-after-children, multiple births and births post-term were excluded. The sample size varies by age according to amount of missing data, from 7860 children at age 5 years to 2386 at age 11 years (8031 at age 6 years and 5560 at age 7 years). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Binary variables of whether a child reached the 'expected' level of overall educational achievement across subjects at the ages of 5, 6, 7 and 11 years. The achievement levels are measured using standardised teacher assessments and national tests. RESULTS: Compared with full-term births (39-41 weeks), there were significantly increased adjusted odds of children born LPT, but not early term, of failing to achieve expected levels of overall educational achievement at ages 5 years (adjusted OR (aOR) 1.72,95% CI 1.34 to 2.21) and 7 years (aOR 1.46, 95% CI 1.08 to 1.97) but not at age 11 years (aOR 1.51, 95% CI 0.99 to 2.30). Being born LPT still had statistically significant effects on writing and mathematics at age 11 years. CONCLUSIONS: There is a strong association between LPT and education at age 5 years, which remains strong and statistically significant through age 11 years for mathematics but not for other key subjects.

The Use of Instrumental Variables in Peer Effects Models.

Instrumental variables are often used to identify peer effects. This paper shows that instrumenting the 'peer average outcome' with 'peer average characteristics' requires the researcher to include the instrument at the individual level as an explanatory variable. We highlight the bias that occurs when failing to do this.

Housework share between partners: Experimental evidence on gender-specific preferences.

This paper uses a novel vignette-based experimental design to investigate the reasons underlying the gendered division of housework. We are particularly interested in the role of gender-specific preferences: are there differences in the utility that men and women derive from housework, and might these be responsible for the fact that women continue to do more housework than men? It is difficult to address these questions with conventional survey data, because of inherent problems with endogeneity and ex-post rationalization; our experimental design circumvents these problems. We find remarkably little evidence of any systematic gender differences in preferences, and a general inclination towards an equal distribution of housework; this suggests that the reasons for the gendered division of housework do not derive from gender differences in preferences, and must lie elsewhere.