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 characterised by high infant mortality, but not by malnutrition. We show that although maternal education is important in determining child health and mortality this effect diminishes or disappears when health knowledge is introduced as an explanatory variable. It emerges that health knowledge has large and positive effects on both child mortality and health when instrumented for to capture endogeneity.