Child Health and Mortality: Does Health Knowledge Matter?

This paper studies factors that influence child health in Bissau,the capital of Guinea-Bissau. This environment is characterisedby high infant mortality, but not by malnutrition. We show thatalthough maternal education is important in determining childhealth and mortality this effect diminishes or disappears whenhealth knowledge is introduced as an explanatory variable. Itemerges that health knowledge has large and positive effectson both child mortality and health when instrumented for tocapture endogeneity.