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Abstract
Early childhood nutrition is thought to have important effects on education,
broadly defined to include various forms of learning. We advance beyond previous
literature on early childhood nutrition on education in developing countries by (1) using
unique longitudinal data from a nutritional experiment with lifetime educational
measures; (2) avoiding confounding the estimates by excluding potentially endogenous
right-side variables; and (3) using estimators that allow for nonnormal distributions. Our
results indicate significantly positive, and fairly substantial, effects of the randomized
intervention a quarter century after it ended: increased grade attainment by women, via
increased likelihood of entering and completing primary school and some secondary
school; speedier grade progression by women; higher scores on cognitive tests for both
men and women; and higher scores on educational achievement tests for both men and
women. To account for possible biases in the calculation of standard errors and to
control for sample attrition, alternative estimations were run and found to be robust.