Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Family Health Behavior and Child Health written by David Simon and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parental behavior has potentially large implications for child health and child economic outcomes. In three essays, I explore two topics: how the health behavior of parents impacts their children's health and wellbeing, and the degree to which policy can alter parental behavior such that child health improves. The first essay examines how cash transfers to pregnant single mothers via the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) improve child birth weight. The second essay shows that cigarette taxes reduce maternal smoking and improve childhood health outcomes. The final essay documents the correlation between parental and teen smoking using the Current Population Survey Tobacco Use Supplement. As a whole, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of how health transmits from parent to child, an important mechanism in the intergenerational transmission of inequality.

Download or read book Three Essays on Health and Family Economics written by Jorge I. Ugaz and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three empirical essays that explore the effects of natural disasters and family transitions on long-term child outcomes and short-term parental behavior. The first essay ("Impact of Shocks in Utero and in Early Life on Stunting: the Case of Philippines' Typhoons") assesses the long-term effects of natural disasters early in life on health outcomes, mainly stunting, and explores some of the possible channels causing those long term effects. The second essay ("Effects of Natural Disasters on Fertility Behavior: Evidence of Treatment Heterogeneity") assesses the effects of natural disasters also, typhoons in particular, on fertility behavior, and explores the existence of treatment heterogeneity. Finally, the third essay ("Parents' shared and solo time with children: Composition and correlates") studies different correlates of the composition of parental time investments under the perspective of a child, and explores how that composition changes when parents adapt to the birth of a new child.

Download or read book Essays on Health Economics written by Eamon Joseph Molloy and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays of this dissertation study the effect of alcohol advertising on individual drinking, alcohol firm advertising decisions, and the relationship between education and mortality. The first essay focuses on the possible effects of alcohol advertising on youth drinking. Researchers still disagree about how advertising affects alcohol consumption. This disagreement largely arises because alcohol firms target marketing at people who already drink. Drinkers prefer particular media; firms recognize this and target alcohol advertising at these media. Endogenous targeting of alcohol advertisements presents a challenge for empirically identifying a causal effect of advertising on drinking. In this chapter, I overcome these challenges by leveraging a plausibly exogenous source of variation in advertising exposure, and by utilizing novel data with detailed individual measures of media viewing and alcohol consumption. I adopt three approaches to control for endogeneity bias due to targeting. First, I use average audience characteristics of the media an individual views to capture targeting. Second, I use media fixed effects to directly control for media choice. Third, I exploit variation in advertising exposure due to a 2003 change in an industry-wide rule that governs where firms may advertise. I use the rule change as an instrument for exposure to alcohol advertising. Though the unconditional correlation between advertising and drinking is strong, this relationship is not robust to more rigorous controls for targeting and to the use of an instrumental variables estimator. The results suggest that any effect of alcohol advertising on youth drinking is modest. The second essay studies the effects of the end of the liquor broadcast advertising ban on firm behavior. I study which firms and brands first took advantage of this new medium I study which spirits brands take advantage of the newly available medium of television. I compare the consumer characteristics and market competition of brands that transition to television advertising to those that do not, using two different definitions of television advertising adoption. I model brand-level, yearly television advertising spending and estimate hazard models of the transition to the use of television advertising. I find evidence that competitive pressure correlates with a brand's adoption of the "new" medium. Firms that are dominant in their market are much more likely to adopt television advertising when their competitors possess a larger share of the market. However, I find little evidence that the demographic characteristics (age, gender, race, income, education, magazine reading, and television viewing) and alcohol consumption of a brand's consumers are related to the adoption of television advertising. The results suggest that television advertising in the spirits market may play larger role dividing market shares than growing market size. The third essay revisits the question of whether people live longer if they get more education or if people who get more education have unobservable traits and habits that cause them to live longer. Like previous studies, we use compulsory schooling laws as instruments for education, However, we use better instruments and Panel Study of Income Dynamics data that include each respondent's date and cause of death. We find our compulsory schooling instruments are stronger predictors of education than those used in previous studies. However, relying on within-state variation greatly reduces the predictive power of our instruments, which only weakly predict educational attainment. We model three different measures of mortality: probit models of mortality over 5- and 10-year age spans and continuous-time survival models of the number of months a person lives past forty years of age. We confirm a strong statistical association between education and mortality in all three model types. However, due to the weakness of our instruments, our results are imprecise and provide little useful insight into whether education reduces mortality. We show the relationship between schooling and mortality is strongest for post-secondary education, though there exists little evidence in the literature concerning whether this link is causal.

Download or read book Clinics Stoves and Ill behaved Children written by James Gerald Manley and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Family Economics written by Hui Mai and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data, my dissertation investigates several key issues in family economics. The first chapter studies the role of family relocation on children's schooling and youth behavior problems. By exploiting the variation in sibling's age at the time of family relocation, we find no detectable negative effects of family relocation on various children's outcomes. We extend our discussion to the context of school mobility and child outcomes. In the second chapter, we use individual school change history from the NLSY 97 and control for sibling fixed effects to estimate how the variation in children's age at school change would affect a set of outcome variables. We find school change made at age 16-18 would significantly reduce children's education achievement by age 20 and increase their possibility for repeating grade in school. In the third chapter, we examine the impact of family size on maternal health outcomes by exploiting the exogenous change in family size using contraceptive failure as instrument variable. This result indicates that mothers' mental health at age 40 is negatively affected by having additional child while their physical health stays intact.

Download or read book A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2019-09-16 with total page 619 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The strengths and abilities children develop from infancy through adolescence are crucial for their physical, emotional, and cognitive growth, which in turn help them to achieve success in school and to become responsible, economically self-sufficient, and healthy adults. Capable, responsible, and healthy adults are clearly the foundation of a well-functioning and prosperous society, yet America's future is not as secure as it could be because millions of American children live in families with incomes below the poverty line. A wealth of evidence suggests that a lack of adequate economic resources for families with children compromises these children's ability to grow and achieve adult success, hurting them and the broader society. A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty reviews the research on linkages between child poverty and child well-being, and analyzes the poverty-reducing effects of major assistance programs directed at children and families. This report also provides policy and program recommendations for reducing the number of children living in poverty in the United States by half within 10 years.

Download or read book Families and Child Health written by Nancy S Landale and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-02-03 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ​​In recent years, there has been an explosion of research on the early origins of adult health. A growing body of evidence documents that maternal health before conception, prenatal and perinatal exposures, and conditions in childhood play critical roles in health over the life course. Scientific understanding of the multiple and interacting influences on child health and their role in later health continues to evolve rapidly, but greater attention to how families shape the conditions of early life that underlie childhood health is needed. This volume aims to advance understanding of this topic, with attention to mechanisms through which health disparities emerge and are sustained across the lifespan.​

Download or read book Essays on Child Health and Family Economics written by Ana Costa Ramón and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in the Economics of Risky Health Behaviors written by Sharmini Radakrishnan and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first essay in my dissertation investigates the impact of a state policy designed to reduce substance abuse. Prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) are state-run electronic databases that track the prescribing and dispensing of controlled substances. I examine the impact of PDMP implementation on various measures of opioid pain reliever abuse. I estimate difference-in-differences models, and address possible policy endogeneity by controlling for pre-implementation trends and related state laws. The preferred estimates suggest that PDMPs reduced opioid abuse treatment admissions by 13.1%. However I cannot reject the null hypothesis that PDMPs had no effect on self-reported nonmedical use and overdose deaths. The second essay investigates the relationship between parental job loss and child health outcomes. I use data on parental job displacement and child health outcomes from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Parental displacement results in a drop in family income and employer-provided health insurance, which is only partially offset by an increase in public and privately-purchased insurance. I find that parental job displacement is associated with a significantly lower likelihood of mental illness diagnosis, and a higher likelihood of ever drinking and using marijuana. I do not find significant effects of displacement on depressive symptoms, health status, and smoking. The third essay is joint work with John Cawley and Joseph Price. This paper investigates one possible determinant of physical activity: the success of local sports teams. We hypothesize that individuals living in an area with a successful local sports team will be more likely to engage in that sport as a result of role model or bandwagon effects. We merge individual U.S. data from the Simmons National Consumer Survey with data on sports team performance for a variety of sports at the professional and college level. We estimate ordered probit models of participation in a particular sport as a function of local sports team success, with controls for demographics as well as fixed effects of time and geographic area. We find some evidence that children are more likely to participate in sport when local teams perform well, and find weaker evidence of such a relationship for teens.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Health written by Yleana Pamela Ortiz Arevalo and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Health and Development Economics written by Reshmaan Nahar Hussam and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is a compilation of three empirical studies exploring significant but underexamined health and development challenges of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in South Asia. Chapter One investigates the effects of the expansion of ultrasound technology throughout India in the 1980s on the childbearing decisions of parents and the marriage market dynamics of exposed children. While ample work has documented the relationship between access to sex selection technology and heavily male-skewed child sex ratios, we know little about how such exposure translates into later life marriage market outcomes of children in highly sex-skewed regions, nor about how parental choice regarding sex selection is affected by such shifts in their children's marital prospects. I build on a theory proposed by Edlund (1999) that, in environments where hypergamy is practiced and parents derive utility from married children, a male-skewed sex ratio can generate a permanent female underclass. By examining the relationship between the child sex ratio of couples of childbearing age and that of their contemporaneous marriage market, I offer evidence that parents do indeed internalize the marriage prospects of their unborn children and adjust their use of sex selection technology accordingly. Importantly, this adjustment occurs significantly more amongst poor families than wealthy families. By exploiting spatial and temporal variation in exposure to ultrasound technology, I then examine the implications of such socioeconomically skewed ultrasound use on the marital outcomes of children in regions with high ultrasound access. I find that, relative to her unexposed counterpart, the average exposed married female has significantly poorer health and less education; there exists a wider marriage and education gap between herself and her husband; and she reports lower autonomy, less decision making power, and more abuse, among other bargaining outcomes. While existing literature suggests that scarcity of females in a marriage market should increase their bargaining power, I offer evidence to the contrary in this nationwide setting of endogenous and socioeconomically stratified sex selection. This exercise underscores the intergenerational welfare consequences of poorly regulated access to sex selection technology: not only upon the millions of 'missing women' lost to sex selection, but upon surviving females as well. Chapter Two explores the impact of a 1999 public health campaign in Bangladesh, which sought to protect millions of individuals from exposure to arsenic-contaminated water, on infant and child mortality. The study was motivated by the dearth of literature on the effects of arsenic exposure on children (whereas its effects on adults, often manifested in the cancer arsenicosis, are well known). It quickly evolved into an examination of the unintended consequences of a highly influential but poorly planned public health campaign. Exploiting the local random nature of arsenic contamination of groundwater in Bangladesh, paired with the timing of child births and thus exposure to such contaminated water, we find that households in which children were exposed to arsenic for a shorter duration (because the household responded to the health campaign by switching away from arsenic-contaminated groundwater sources) in fact experience significantly higher rates of infant and child mortality relative to their counterparts. We present evidence that this unanticipated rise in mortality is due to the quality of alternatives that a switching household faced: households had to choose between arsenic-laden but easily accessible shallow tubewell water, which was protected from fecal bacteria; arsenic-free and easily accessible surface water, which was heavily exposed to fecal bacteria; or distant and inconvenient potable water, which was more likely to be exposed to bacteria at the point-of-use. As bacterial contamination is a leading cause of infant and child death in Bangladesh, we argue through a series of exercises that this is a likely driver of the rise in mortality rates amongst young children whose families switched away from arsenic-contaminated tubewells. In determining their water source, households were essentially trading off arsenic exposure and the resulting rise in old-age mortality with bacterial exposure and the resulting rise in the mortality of their young. The study motivates caution in the execution of large-scale public health and behavioral change campaigns when alternatives to the discouraged behavior are poorly understood. While my first two chapters investigate household health behavior, a demand-side component of the healthcare market, the next chapter explores a critical player on the supply side. Chapter Three studies the impact of a nine-month generalized training program on the knowledge and performance of private informal healthcare providers in West Bengal, India. These providers, colloquially referred to as "quacks" and described here as "informal providers" (IPs), constitute nearly 80% of the Indian healthcare provider market. However, none possess medical degrees and few have any formal certification to practice medicine. They have been the focus of considerable debate in recent years, with many pushing for their elimination while others propose their integration into the public healthcare system. To inform the debate, it is important to understand whether the quality of healthcare provided by IPs can be improved sufficiently for effective and welfare-increasing integration. The training program examined in this study was the first of its kind to be rigorously evaluated for its impact on IP knowledge and quality of care. We employ a randomized controlled trial (RCT) design, in which we randomly assigned 152 IPs to treatment and 152 IPs to control. Treatment IPs were invited to attend the program, which was taught by certified doctors and consisted of two two-hour classes per week over nine months. Endline data was collected twelve to fourteen months after the start of training. Standardized patient data, corroborated by clinical observations, demonstrate that those IPs offered the program spent significantly more time with their patients, completed a more thorough set of history questions and examinations, and provided more effective treatments. However, we see no shift in the frequency with which they practiced polypharmacy nor the dispensation of unnecessary antibiotics, two harmful practices which plague both the private and public healthcare system. We conclude that training offers a low cost, highly effective method to improve the quality of care delivered by IPs, but that deeper knowledge failures or misaligned incentives may be driving practices such as polypharmacy, for which training may not be a sufficiently powerful intervention.

Download or read book Family Health Behaviors written by Itzik Fadlon and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper studies how health behaviors and investments are shaped through intra- and inter-generational family spillovers. Specifically, leveraging administrative healthcare data, we identify the effects of health shocks to individuals on their family members' consumption of preventive care and utilization indicative of health-related behaviors. Our identification strategy relies on the timing of shocks by constructing counterfactuals to affected households using households that experience the same shock but a few years in the future. We find that spouses and adult children immediately increase their health investments and improve their health behaviors in response to family shocks, and that these effects are both significant and persistent for at least several years. Notably, we find that these spillover effects in consumption of healthcare are far-reaching and cascade to siblings, stepchildren, sons and daughters in-law, and even "close" coworkers. Using different strategies we show that while a variety of mechanisms seem to be at play, including learning new information about one's own health, there is consistent evidence in support of salience as a major operative explanation, even when the family shock was likely uninformative. Our results have implications for models of health behaviors, by underscoring the importance of one's family and social network in their determination, and are potentially informative for policies that aim to improve population health.

Download or read book Essays on Health Economics and Health Behaviors written by Daniel Sebastian Tello-Trillo and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Child Health written by Lenisa Vangjel and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Health Behaviors written by Kai-Wen Cheng and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in the Economics of Child Mental Health written by A. Bowen Garrett and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Health Economics with a Focus on Consumer Behavior written by Dilan Su Alpergin and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work spans the two fields of health economics and health policy and applied microeconomics with a focus on consumer behavior. Each chapter focuses on a separate question and evaluates its consequences and impacts on consumers and society. The questions in this paper identify (1) the optimal health expenditures in society from a theoretical perspective and compare the results with the Medicare reimbursement scheme, (2) the causal impact of the risk perception of COVID-19 on consumption expenditure changes in the U.S., and finally, (3) how a sudden health shock experienced by a family member affects his spouse's healthcare expenditures through the behavioral spillover channel.