Negative shocks to childhood health can have a lasting impact on the economic success of an individual by altering families' schooling investment decisions. This paper introduces a new dataset of brothers serving in World War II and uses it to demonstrate that improvements in childhood health led to substantial increases in educational attainment in the first half of the twentieth century. By exploiting variation in health within families, the data show that this relationship between childhood

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... ealth and educational attainment holds even after controlling for both observed and unobserved household and environmental characteristics.