The role of neonatal health in the incidence of childhood disability

Roughly 6.4 million children in the U.S. receive special education services in the United States, representing 13 percent of all public school students, yet our understanding of how underlying health affects identification is limited. We use linked birth and education records for all children born in Florida between 1992 and 2002 to assess the effects of neonatal health on special education identification. We find that numerous measures of health available on birth records influence identification, although birth weight plays by far the most empirically relevant role. The estimated effects of birth weight grow steadily as children progress through elementary school and are systematically larger in models that include maternal fixed effects than in models using between-family variation. The strong association between birth weight and disability holds across disability categories and a wide range of socioeconomic characteristics, including maternal education, marital status, and race.