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 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 Three Essays on Social Determinants of Child Health and Education in India written by Ankur Sarin and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Social Determinants of Early Childhood Health and Development written by Andrew Barenberg and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This three-paper dissertation examines the social determinants of early childhood and in-utero health. The first chapter examines the impact of early childhood stunting on educational outcome in Tanzania. Using the extent of third-trimester overlap with the Tanzania hunger season to create an exogenous variation in stunting, I find that a one standard deviation stunting decreases educational achievement by .88 school years compared to a child's siblings. A placebo group not affected by the hunger season is used to confirm that in-utero nutrition deprivation is the cause of the education differences. The second paper utilizes the food price shocks and price increases to examine the impact of nutritional sufficiency on child development in four sub-Saharan countries. I find adverse effects of third-trimester and early-childhood exposure to food price increases, but get inconsistent results on infancy that requires additional research. The final paper uses an instrumental variable method to determine the impact of public health spending on infant mortality in India. The results imply that a one percent of state-level GDP increase in public health prevents seven children deaths for every 1,000 live births. Together the three papers highlight the possible role investments in early childhood health could have in increasing human capabilities and well-being.

Download or read book Three Essays on Economic Determinants of Child Malnutrition written by Alessandra Marini and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 362 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 Deteminants of Child Health written by Aparna Lhila and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three essays on child health and skill formation written by Sumanta Mukherjee 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 Child Health and Policy Implications written by A. Chakravarty and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Child Health and Policy Implications written by Abhishek Chakravarty and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays On Children s Health Care Use And Health written by Maki Ueyama and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early years of children's lives are crucial to their future health and development. Disparities in health and skills that emerge during children's first few years increase with age. Many factors affect children's health. At an individual level, mother's education is an influential factor. At a societal level, public policies affect children's surrounding environment that influences their health. Therefore it is critical that public policies and other determinants of children's health be studied carefully. As a nation, U.S. has made significant improvements in children's health over the past century. However, there is a significant increase in the number of children in the U.S. today that suffer from conditions and diseases that have emerged in recent years, including asthma and obesity. These conditions are impediments to children's healthy development and have long lasting effects. Investment in children's health yields long term payoffs at the individual as well as societal levels. Healthy children have more opportunities to succeed in schools and more likely to become healthy, productive adults. Benefits extend to society as a whole including reduced dependency and disability, a healthier future workforce, and consequently a stronger economy. Due to these reasons, it is important to understand how health care use and health among children in the U.S. have been affected by some of their key determinants in recent decades. This dissertation is divided into three chapters. The first chapter examines the feasibility of using compulsory schooling policies as instruments for mother's schooling to examine the causal effect of mother's schooling on children's health care use and health. The second chapter examines the causal effect of insurance coverage on children's health care use and health using evidence from the Medicaid and SCHIP expansions. The third chapter examines the causal effect of welfare reform on children's health care use and health. Findings from this dissertation provide informative insights on key factors that shape children's health and wellbeing and highlight important methodological issues involving such empirical research.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Health in Developing Countries written by Eiji Mangyo and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Early Childhood Health in Burkina Faso written by Lea Christine Prince and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite advances in scientific research and the increased emphasis on and promotion of health interventions by international organizations, mortality and morbidity in young children remain high in Burkina Faso and close to half of the deaths in children under five each year are related to illnesses that can be treated such that death may be avoided. This paper contributes to the literature by offering a better understanding of the failures related to and the actions that could prevent these types of death in the Orodara region of Southwest Burkina Faso. I present an analysis of the determinants of health care decisions as they relate to children suffering from diarrhea, which is accountable for over 10% of under-five deaths in Burkina Faso each year. Next, I explore broader patterns of care-seeking behavior. Specifically, I examine correlations across time and space of care-seeking behavior as it relates to treating ill children. Finally, I estimate and compare the cost-effectiveness of three different scenarios for zinc distribution and delivery to young children for the treatment and/or prevention of diarrhea. Two themes emerge from this body of work. First: policy-makers should encourage investment in village-level health services. Second: information-sharing can result in vicious or virtuous cycles of care-seeking behavior, as it relates to early childhood care, and so investments should be made in improvements to educational programs related to child health care. Specifically, health services and education should be accessible to remote caregivers and should be sensitive to different beliefs, practices, and dialects of different ethnic groups in different regions as well as seasonal constraints specific to agricultural households.

Download or read book Journal of Economic Literature written by and published by . This book was released on 2006-12 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Health Economics written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intersection of health, inequality, and human capital is the source of some of the large and complex problems that continue to challenge our health care system and our health policy decision makers. My study touches on two areas at this nexus: socioeconomic determinants of health/development and economic costs (e.g., human capital, labor market) of chronic illness and disability. The first chapter examines the labor market outcomes of women co-residing with a disabled parent or parent-in-law. Because the vast majority of women providing this form of eldercare are still in their working years, informal care responsibilities may involve considerable opportunity costs. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I construct a longitudinal dataset documenting the labor market and co-residential eldercare experiences of sample women over 25 years. On average, I find that women co-residing with a disabled elder are less likely to engage in labor market work. However, responses vary over the life course. Co-residence prior to age 40 is associated with a 9 percentage point reduction in the likelihood of employment, an effect size twice that found for women over 50. The second chapter examines how poverty may affect brain structure and development. Little is known about how poverty is translated into deficits in cognition and achievement. Using a sample of children and adolescents (4 to 22 years) from the NIH Pediatric MRI Data Repository, we consider a potential neurobiological channel. We find that children from poor households display a maturational lag. Moreover, this atypical development is reflected in standardized assessments of academic ability and achievement. The third chapter examines the influence of sibling chronic illness or disability on children's early educational outcomes. Using a sample of sibling pairs from the PSID Child Development Supplement, we consider several categories of common childhood disabilities to explore whether and to what extent sibling health spillovers may vary according to the domain or severity of sibling impairment. We find evidence of substantial and heterogeneous effects of poor childhood health on well-sibling outcomes. Estimated spillovers in the case of developmental disabilities, in particular, are large and robust across a series of sensitivity analyses.

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.