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Abstract
This paper examines the impact of preschool malnutrition on subsequent human
capital formation in rural Zimbabwe using a maternal fixed effects-instrumental variables
(MFE-IV) estimator with a long-term panel data set. Representations of civil war and
drought "shocks" are used to identify differences in preschool nutritional status across
siblings. Improvements in height-for-age in preschoolers are associated with increased
height as a young adult and number of grades of schooling completed. Had the median
preschool child in this sample had the stature of a median child in a developed country,
by adolescence, she would be 4.6 centimeters taller and would have completed an
additional 0.7 grades of schooling.