The recent economic literature on child development has underscored the importance of giving babies a healthy start. Despite the widespread use of prenatal care, whether this early investment improves infant health is not well understood. This study provides new causal evidence on this crucial issue using 1.4 million sibling births. The baseline within-family analysis shows a modest effect of prenatal care on the mean birth weight but large effects on adverse outcomes at the lower end of the birth weight distribution, where two channels are preventing low maternal weight gain and promoting prenatal smoking cessation. Similar results hold when we examine different subperiods or subgroups, consider multiple dimensions of care utilization, or use additional birth-varying controls. Overall, this study shows that adequate prenatal care has a significant payoff in terms of newborn health stock. From a policy perspective, it is important to improve prenatal care access for childbearing women.

中文翻译：

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健康的婴儿：产前保健真的很重要吗？

最近有关儿童发育的经济学文献强调了给婴儿健康成长的重要性。尽管广泛使用了产前保健，但这种早期投资是否能改善婴儿的健康状况尚未得到很好的了解。这项研究使用140万同胞出生为这一关键问题提供了新的因果证据。家庭内基线分析显示，产前保健对平均出生体重影响不大，但对出生体重分布下限的不良后果影响较大，这两个方面可以防止孕产妇体重增加低并促进产前戒烟。当我们检查不同的亚周期或亚组，考虑护理利用的多个维度或使用其他改变生育的控制方法时，也会得到类似的结果。总体，这项研究表明，就新生儿健康状况而言，充分的产前保健具有可观的收益。从政策角度来看，重要的是要改善育龄妇女的产前保健服务。