Human Capital Development in Children: the Determinants of Health

Many empirical studies in this field in different countries, that base on the representative data about population, have proved that household income has great impact on children’s health status. They have also showed that this impact increases when children grow older (a so-called gradient). Basing on different theoretical sources and earlier researches I developed in this Master Thesis a row of hypothesizes about the relationship between SES and children’s health status. I use the data of RLMS-HSE. I have seen a positive connection between the household income and health status and that this relationship gets more significant with children age. I also added a row of variables to the model which unique for this Russian research, whose influence hadn’t been analyzed in previous researches such as demographics factors, number of adults and children in family, some objective measures of parental health and analyze their influence. I find that there is a strong positive connection between child’s health indicators and objective parental health indicators and so, more healthy parents that pursue a healthy lifestyle are more likely to have healthy children. My hypothesis that the children that live in cities are likely to be healthier than those, who live in villages because of the factors that were named above, wasn’t confirmed for Russia. I estimate my models separately for different age groups of children – 0-4 years, 5-9 years and 10-14 years and see which determinants are important for the formation of children's health in different ages, the impact they have in different age groups, using the marginal effects and the significance of the coefficients to test whether the gradient increases with child age. Research objectives have been achieved and put forward hypotheses were confirmed by panel data analysis.