Cesarean Section, Childhood Health, and Schooling: Quasi-Experimental Evidence From Denmark, Norway and Sweden

Despite being one of the most common surgical procedures in industrialized countries, there is limited causal evidence on the long-term consequences of Cesarean section (CS). We study the impacts of CS on health during ages 1–12 years and human capital outcomes at age 16 years, using exogenous variation in the probability of receiving a CS for breech births at term—a group with high CS risk. We use administrative data from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden to show that preventing complicated vaginal births benefits health at birth and reduces the number of all-cause hospital nights during childhood. Our findings for childhood diagnoses for asthma, allergies, diabetes mellitus type 1, and school outcomes are imprecise and do thus not lend strong support for prominent hypotheses on CS causing long-term immune dysfunction disorders and, thereby, worse human capital outcomes.