Download or read book Three Essays on Parental Health and Children s Outcomes written by Kelly Chen and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 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 How Parents and Schools Affect Offspring s Outcomes written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are many ways parents can improve their offspring's outcomes. For example, they can invest in offspring's education or health. They can provide better social connections to obtain job information or personal references. In addition, they can exert political influence to obtain better labor market outcomes for their offspring. Understanding exactly how parents improve their offspring's outcomes is very important for the formation of political perspectives and policy designs. However, it is very difficult to disentangle the factors, as parents of high socioeconomic status do many things to help their children succeed. This dissertation presents three quasi-experimental studies to understand the causal mechanisms of parents' influence on children's outcomes in the context of China and United States. Chapter two examines the implementation of court-ordered racial desegregation of schools and finds that school desegregation increases biracial births. This provides the first evidence of how an education policy that affects racial integration also has demographic implications and an intergenerational impact on social and economic opportunities.

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 Three Essays on the Determinants of Children s Health written by Mayu Fuji and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Determinants of Children s Health written by Mayu Fuji and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Children s Health the Nation s Wealth written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2004-10-18 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children's health has clearly improved over the past several decades. Significant and positive gains have been made in lowering rates of infant mortality and morbidity from infectious diseases and accidental causes, improved access to health care, and reduction in the effects of environmental contaminants such as lead. Yet major questions still remain about how to assess the status of children's health, what factors should be monitored, and the appropriate measurement tools that should be used. Children's Health, the Nation's Wealth: Assessing and Improving Child Health provides a detailed examination of the information about children's health that is needed to help policy makers and program providers at the federal, state, and local levels. In order to improve children's health-and, thus, the health of future generations-it is critical to have data that can be used to assess both current conditions and possible future threats to children's health. This compelling book describes what is known about the health of children and what is needed to expand the knowledge. By strategically improving the health of children, we ensure healthier future generations to come.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Empirical Relationships Between Health Schooling and Wages in Rural Guatemala written by Michael Maravilla Alba and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Household Determinants of Child Health and Well being written by Megan Elizabeth Costa and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cross-disciplinary evidence suggests that household factors including maternal socioeconomic status, maternal health, and living arrangements can affect child health and well-being. This dissertation examines an array of countries and economic contexts to weigh the relative importance of household characteristics for child nutritional status. In Chapter 1, I examine characteristics predicting parental ideal family size and whether children of birth orders exceeding parental ideals experience worse nutritional status among the Tsimane, a high-fertility and high-mortality indigenous population in the Bolivian Amazon. I find minimal evidence that birth orders exceeding parental ideals are associated with worse height-for-age, weight-for-age, stunting, hemoglobin, and anemia in children aged 0-5. The observed mismatch between ideal and achieved family size does not predict lower child nutritional status in this population, perhaps due to mitigation of exceeding ideals via effective buffering strategies. In Chapter 2, I focus on a larger sample of Tsimane children to examine the association between maternal socioeconomic status and childhood nutritional status. I find that maternal Spanish proficiency is associated with improved height-for-age z-scores, a one-third reduction in odds of stunting for children aged 0-2, and nearly a halving in odds of stunting for children aged 2-5. This analysis suggests the importance of Spanish proficiency, which allows for increased access to markets, information, and health care. Chapter 3 examines the association between grandparental coresidence and child nutritional status in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. Grandparents are not uniformly associated with childhood nutritional status by sex, age, or wealth. There is evidence of a positive association between coresident grandmothers and child nutritional status in Peru, but in several countries households with higher wealth indices appear to buffer children against any negative nutritional outcomes stemming from the burden of coresident grandparents. Grandparental coresidence may affect other aspects of child development, but children in multigenerational households in the low- and middle-income countries in this sample have similar nutritional status to peers with non-coresident grandparents.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Health and Family Behavior written by Joanna Eliza Sikora and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is comprised of three papers on health and household behavior. Two of the papers focus on the influence of family on health outcomes. The third paper examines household member preferences and their association with outcomes for other individuals within the family unit. The first paper tests the relationship of adult-child and elderly-parent contact frequency on elderly cognitive functioning (dementia) using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The paper examines various mechanisms through which the intensity of contact with adult, nonresident children impacts elderly cognitive functioning. An instrumental variables model is used to account for the endogeneity in the level of parent-child contact. Results indicate a positive association between intensity of contact from nonresident adult children and mothers' cognitive functioning; however, no causal relationship is found suggesting that higher levels of contact are due to selection. The second paper examines the prediction of stated, altruistic, preferences on an individual's revealed preferences, observed intergenerational family transfers. Measures of altruism toward children and parents are constructed, using hypothetical questions in the 1996 wave of the HRS that assess individuals' willingness to transfer income to others, and evaluated for their additional explanatory power, within traditional models of intergenerational transfers, on observable transfer behavior. Results indicate that higher levels of altruistic preferences are associated with higher probabilities of transfers and larger transfer amounts from respondents to children; however, transfers to parents do not appear to be related to the altruism measure. The final paper investigates the link between relationship status and body mass index. There are four hypotheses (selection, protection, social obligation and marriage market) that might explain the relationship between marital status transitions and changes in Body Mass Index (BMI). Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, individual fixed effects models are estimated to examine associations between the change in log BMI, and the incidence of overweight and obesity, and changes in relationship status. There is no support for the marriage protection hypothesis. Rather evidence supports the social obligation and marriage market hypotheses-BMI increases for both men and women during marriage and in the course of a cohabiting relationship.

Download or read book Essays on Mental Health and Behavioral Outcomes of Children and Youth written by Kabir Dasgupta and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation incorporates three essays related to youth's health and human capital outcomes. The first two essays investigate the impacts of important public policies on adolescents' mental health and risky behavioral outcomes. Essay three examines the effects of mothers' non-cognitive skills on children's home environment qualities and their cognitive and behavioral outcomes. Domestic violence is a large public issue in the United States. Chapter 1 investigates the effectiveness of warrantless arrest laws enacted by states for domestic violence incidents on multiple youth mental and behavioral outcomes. Under these laws, police officers can arrest a suspect without a warrant even if they did not witness the crime. Although young women remain at the highest risk of victimization of domestic violence, children ages 3 to 17 years are also at elevated risk for domestic violence. Further, over 15 million children witness domestic violence in their homes every year in the United States. Exposure to domestic violence is associated with various social, emotional, behavioral, and health-related problems among youth. Using variation in timing of implementation of the arrest laws across states, I utilize differences-in-differences analyses in multiple, large-scale data sets of nationally representative samples of youth population to study the impact of the laws on a number of youth mental and behavioral outcomes. Results indicate the presence of heterogeneity with respect to the impact of states' arrest laws on the outcomes studied. The study is useful for policymakers as it provides important evidence on the effectiveness of state measures designed to reduce domestic violence. The estimates obtained in the analyses are robust to multiple sensitivity checks to address key threats to identification. Chapter 2 empirically examines the effects of state cyberbullying laws on youth outcomes with respect to measures of school violence, mental health, and substance use behavior. Electronic form of harassment or cyberbullying is a large social, health, and education issue in the United States. In response to cyberbullying, most state governments have enacted electronic harassment or cyberbullying law as a part of their bullying prevention law. The analysis uses variation in the timing of implementation of cyberbullying laws across states as an exogenous source of variation. Using nationally representative samples of high-school teenagers from national and state Youth Risk Behavior Surveys, the study finds evidence of a positive relationship between adoption of cyberbullying laws and students' reporting of certain experiences of school violence, mental health problems, and substance use activities. Regression analyses also study the effects of some important components of state cyberbullying laws. Finally, this study examines the sex-specific impacts of cyberbullying laws and its components on youth. The causal estimates are robust to the inclusion of multiple sensitivity checks. This study provides evidence on the efficacy of public measures designed to address cyberbullying among school-age children. Chapter 3 utilizes matched data from National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY79) and Children and Young Adults (NLSY79 CYA), to estimate the impact of mothers' self-esteem on young children's home environment qualities that enhance early childhood cognitive functioning and extend better emotional support. The estimates suggest that mothers with higher self-esteem provide better home environment to their children during early stages of childhood. The results are robust across different estimation methods, empirical specifications, and demographic groups. This study also finds that mothers with higher self-esteem are more likely to engage in parental practices that support young children's cognitive and emotional development. Further analysis shows that mothers' self-esteem has a causal relationship with cognitive and behavioral outcomes of school-age children. The results obtained in this study indicate that early childhood development policies directed towards enhancement of non-cognitive skills in mothers can improve children's human capital outcomes.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Role of Public Policy in Shaping Parental Behavior in a Child s Early Life written by Sarah Marie Martin-Anderson and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is comprised of three article-length essays, all of which concern important issues in early-life health and well-being. All three essays focus on the decision to formula feed or breastfeed--one of the first decisions a mother makes in her child's life. Two of the papers--one quantitative and one qualitative--study the environment of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and the potential effect of hospital policy and procedures on breast milk feeding. The remaining paper investigates a large federal policy and the consequences of altering the costs of infant formula relative to breast milk. All papers are tied together by an eye towards the plasticity of these early life experiences, as well as the troubling persistence of health disparities by race, class and maternal education. Essay One: Breast milk feeding in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) is associated with a host of improved health outcomes. However, breast milk feeding rates differ by socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity and maternal education indicating that these results are vulnerable to selection bias. Qualitative work by this author and others suggests that women giving birth in the late-night hours are less likely to begin a successful milk expression regimen due to the lack of experienced clinicians working during these shifts. Using the hour of birth as an instrument for breast milk feeding, this study attempts to isolate the effects of breast milk feeding on incidence of deadly conditions in the NICU, as well as the infant's growth patterns and length of stay. This study also uses innovative measures of the indications for delivery type in order to construct a sub-sample whose distribution of delivery times is the most random, thereby increasing the validity of the analysis. The first-stage of the analysis revealed no significant relationship between late-night births and breast milk feeding at discharge, contrary to the claims of clinicians and mothers interviewed in a separate study. C-Section delivery and shorter maternal lengths of stay significantly predictive of decreased breast milk feeding at discharge, even after controlling for potential confounders. The reduced-form analysis suggests that infants born in the evening (5pm-Midnight) are roughly 2-4% more likely to contract Necrotizing Enterocolitis at some point during their stay in the NICU. The majority of associations between hour of birth and other health outcomes were insignificant. Evidence of heterogeneity in hour of birth effect size by birth weight, gestational age, race/ethnicity and maternal age were also explored. Essay Two: It is impossible in most countries to randomize assignment into child health programs that may offer benefits. In the absence of this gold standard of program evaluation, researchers face the threat of selection bias--the possibility that there are unmeasured differences, relevant to outcomes, between those who are treated and those to whom they are compared. A common concern is that people who are eligible for a program but choose not to enroll may differ from those who do enroll. Because policies geared towards a country's most vulnerable people are determinants of health inequities, it is imperative that sources of selection bias be identified and that evaluation methods minimize the impact of selection bias on our estimations of treatment effects. Using a case study of a large Federal nutrition program in the United States, this study reviews how researchers have attempted to minimize selection bias and presents an analysis illustrating how the decision to take up the program can highlight sources of this bias. Relying on data from a longitudinal study of mothers and infants, I show that prenatal attitudes and beliefs may determine postnatal program enrollment, and that the direction of the bias differs by demographic variables. Further, I show that magnitude of supposed program effects vary significantly as a function of these prenatal beliefs. In sum, this paper makes the case for more careful study of the factors that determine take-up of a program, and inclusion of those factors in an evaluation of the program Essay Three: The third paper in this series diverges from the methodology of the first two essays. This paper is the culmination of a year-long survey data collection effort; the work is a collaboration between UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and Alta Bates Summit Medical Center (Berkeley, CA). The objective of this study was to investigate determinants of breast milk feeding in the NICU, and to try and account for the pervasive racial, ethnic, socioeconomic and language disparities in breast milk outcomes. The survey was developed by the authors of this essay based on established theories of decision making about infant feeding. Over the course of the study period, mothers giving birth at less than 32 weeks gestational age were invited to participate in the study, either through filling out a survey in the hospital, participating in a one-on-one interview, or both. This essay focuses on the results from the survey which were later linked to medical outcome data of the infant upon discharge home. An innovation of this study is the collection of breast milk exclusivity--that is, if a dose-response relationship between breast milk and outcomes did exist, our data collection method would be able to capture it. Results indicate that mothers who participated in the study were less likely to breast milk feed if they were: of black race, non-Hispanic (any race), low-income, or living a long distance from the NICU. Measures of social support, peer effects, and attitudes towards breast milk feeding also predicted the proportion of an infant's feeding that was breast milk.. Implications of these findings are discussed, as are the lessons learned from pursuing this type of study.

Download or read book Essays on Children s Health and Education Policies written by Kathleen Ngar-Gee Wong and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is comprised of three independent research papers, which broadly focuses on the introduction and outcomes of policies concerning children's health and education. Although the chapters are related in theme, the objective, scope and empirical strategy of each paper differs. The first chapter, "How Did SCHIP Affect the Insurance Coverage of Immigrants Children?" (with Thomas Buchmueller and Anthony Lo Sasso), focuses on the passage of the State Children's Health Insurance Program in the late 1990s, which expanded public insurance eligibility and coverage for children in "working poor families". Despite this success, over 6 million children are eligible for public insurance, but remain uninsured. The study focuses on children born to immigrant parents because of their low rates of insurance coverage and unique enrollment barriers. The results indicate SCHIP was successful in increasing overall insurance take-up and in reducing disparities in access to health insurance coverage. The second chapter, "Looking Beyond Test Score Gains" determines whether the introduction of school accountability programs (prior to the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001) affected individuals' educational attainment and labor market outcomes. The effects are evaluated along two dimensions: differences in the length of program exposure and variation in program quality. The results indicate school accountability had mixed success in increasing outcomes across gender and racial/ethnic groups. They also suggest the heterogeneous treatment effects are consistent with some of the unintended consequences documented in the school accountability literature. The third chapter, "The Role of Education on Health Behaviors, Investments and Outcomes", uses a new combination of instrumental variables to predict individuals' schooling and determine whether there is a causal effect of education on young adults' health behaviors. The instruments rely on changes to state policies, dating back to the 1970s, that dictate when children are permitted to start and stop attending school. The results indicate education not only decreases the likelihood of smoking, heavy drinking and obesity, but affects the frequency of these behaviors and degree of obesity. Education also promotes behaviors that are akin to health investments, such as increasing sunscreen use and the receipt of preventive services.

Download or read book Parenting Matters written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Determinants of Child Health written by Aparna Lhila and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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: