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Belonging to a specific school cohort can have long-lasting social effects. Relatively older students may obtain higher scores through primary and secondary school and be more likely to be selected for more advanced curriculum groups with the result of being more likely to pursue further education and a professional career. We use the natural experiment generated by the random assignment of mothers’ month of birth during the year together with the school entry cutoff date to estimate unbiased estimates of pursuing a career and delaying motherhood a few months on infant health. Using administrative data from Spanish birth certificates from 1996 to 2016 we find that delaying motherhood by just 8 to 9 months has significant negative impacts on infant health at birth: a 7 percent increase in the likelihood of low birthweight and premature birth, and about a 6 percent increase in the likelihood of C-section birth.
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