Clean Water Availability in Early Childhood and Long-term Educational Performance

This paper studies the effect of access to clean water in early childhood on long-term educational performance. Using several administrative data from Taiwan in the 1980s, we estimate the effect of living in a house with tap water in early childhood on the university enrollment. Since the installation of water usage is managed by the tap water operation office locating in the same county in which the family lives, our identification strategy exploits two geographic attributes: (i) use the distance from the house to the nearest operation office as an instrumental variable; (ii) choose families living on the border of counties. We find that newborns who had access to tap water are more likely to be admitted to universities. Additionally, using the detailed information on birth and death registry, we rule out the possibilities that the educational gains are driven by improving birth outcomes and parental health through tap water.