Download or read book Essays on Investment in Children s Health written by Tsui-Fang Lin and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Empirical Essays on Health Care for Children and Families written by Zuleyha Neziroglu Cidav and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three empirical essays investigating different aspects of health care for children and families. The first essay examines the effectiveness of adherence to American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines for preventive pediatric health care. Using a national longitudinal sample of children age two years and younger, we investigate whether compliance with prescribed periodic well-child care visits has beneficial effects on child health. We find that increased compliance improves child health. In particular, higher compliance lowers future risks of fair or poor health, of some history of a serious illness and of having a health limitation. The second essay examines child health care utilization in relation to maternal labor supply. We test the hypothesis that working-mothers trade off the advantages of greater income against the disadvantages of less time for other valuable tasks, such as seeking health care for their children. This tradeoff may result in positive, negative, or no net impacts on child health investment. We estimate health care demand regressions that include separate variables for mother's labor supply and her labor income. Our results indicate that higher maternal work hours reduce child health care visits; higher maternal earnings increase them. In addition, wage-employment, as opposed to self-employment, is detrimental to child health investment. A further finding is that preventive care demand for younger children is less sensitive to maternal time and income changes. We also find that detrimental time effects dominate beneficial income effects. The third essay studies intra-household resource allocation as it pertains to its demand for preventive medical care. We test the income-pooling hypothesis of the common preference model by using individual specific medical care consumption data and present evidence on the allocation of household resources to the medical needs of the child, husband and wife. Our results are in line with the findings of previous studies that emphasize the ongoing importance of the traditional gender role of woman as the primary caregiver. We find that the resources of the wife have a greater positive impact on child's and her own preventive care demand than does the resources of the husband. In contrast to most studies from developing countries, we find that US families do not exhibit differential health care demand based on child gender. It is also noteworthy that the wife's education level has a greater positive impact than that of her husband does on both the husband's and her own preventive care utilization.

Download or read book Essays on Investment in Children s Health written by Tsui-Fang Lin and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 262 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 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 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 Children s Health Family and Society written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation deals with three topics that are broadly related to children's health, family, and the society. In Chapter 2, the levels of parental investment that children diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) receive are discussed. Empirical work shows that ADHD is a strong predictor of parental investment for boys and girls. It is found that ADHD diagnoses are negatively associated with parent-child interaction and parent-financed activities for boys. For girls, ADHD is negatively associated with parent-financed activities. Chapter 3 addresses the issue of racial/ethnic disparities in children's receipt of mental health assessment in relation to school characteristics. It is found empirically that racial/ethnic minority children are less likely to be professionally evaluated for their mental health problems even when background covariates are controlled for. However, when school-related variables are included in the analysis, the magnitudes of racial/ethnic disparities are somewhat attenuated. Chapter 4 discusses the relationship between match quality, or perceived quality of parents' relationships, and their children's exposure to in-home tobacco smoke. Empirical work shows that each of the three measures of marital match quality (marital dissatisfaction, marital conflict, and predicted marital instability) is associated with infants' exposure to in-home smoking, with lower match quality being associated with higher risk of exposure. Results are similar when lagged measures of match quality are used.

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 Essays on Public Investments in Children written by Esra Kose and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the impact of childhood exposure to public investments on later life outcomes from the lenses of changes in the political landscape due to women's enfranchisement and increases in early childhood education investments. Chapter 1, joint with Elira Kuka and Na'ama Shenhav, examines the long-term impact of women's political empowerment on children's educational outcomes following the suffrage laws in the early 1900s in the U.S. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in U.S. state and federal suffrage laws, we find that exposure to women's enfranchisement during childhood leads to large increases in educational attainment for children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, in particular blacks and Southern whites. We show that the educational gains are plausibly driven by the rise in public expenditures following suffrage. Our findings contribute to the first long-term estimates of a broad-based expansion of women's political power. Chapter 2 analyzes the impact of the Head Start program on academic achievement by exploiting a new source of variation in program funding intensity across local communities and over time during the 1990s. Head Start is the largest federal preschool program that provides education, health, nutrition, and other social services to low-income children age three to five and their families. Since its inception in 1965, Head Start has been a key intervention for reducing educational gaps across socioeconomic groups in school readiness. However, its impact on test scores remains unclear. Using student-level data from Texas, I find that exposure to more generous Head Start funding at age four significantly improves test scores in third grade through fifth grade for low-income children. My results show that Head Start benefited Hispanics with limited language proficiency the most. I provide quantitative evidence that Head Start significantly improves language proficiency among Hispanics, which could partly explain the test score gains in this group. I also show that the gains in test scores can be explained by an increase in both program quality and capacity. These findings contrast to the previous literature, which reports smaller or no detectable impacts on children's test scores over the medium-run and contribute to the extensive literature that evaluates Head Start's effectiveness. Finally, Chapter 3 examines the intergenerational impact of Head Start on infant health. Head Start has served low-income children over 50 years and has been shown to be a success in improving long-term outcomes of children who participated the early phases program. This paper evaluates the effects of maternal access to Head Start on infant health outcomes using Vital Statistics Natality data. Using variation in the year of Head Start's introduction in each county from 1966 to 1970, I find that maternal access to Head Start at ages three to five improves infant health for both whites and blacks, with larger impacts on blacks. It also increases the probability that a new mother is more educated, reduces the number of births, reduces likelihood of smoking and drinking during pregnancy. These findings suggest that the estimates of the returns to early childhood programs may significantly understate the total benefit.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Investments in Health written by 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 Essays on Human Capital Investments in Developing Countries written by Emilie T. Bagby and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation encompasses three chapters that explore determinants of parental investments in their children0́9s health and education in developing countries. Below are the individual abstracts for each chapter. Chapter 1: Child Ability, Parental Investments and Child Nutrition in Ecuador This paper investigates the role of family composition and child cognitive ability in explaining how resource-constrained households make nutritional investment decisions in their children. Parents have private information about their children0́9s abilities and health that is typically not available to researchers. I use a unique panel household dataset from Ecuador0́9s Bono de Desarrollo Humano that contains a measure of child cognitive ability and allows me to estimate its affect on resource allocation. I address reverse causality due to the effects of investments on ability and I use within household fixed effects to look at children to look at the intra-household investment decision. Findings point to the existence of sibling rivalry due to resource constraints; children with more siblings, and children in poor households, are less likely to eat high-quality food. Children with higher abilities are less likely to share a nutritional supplement with another family member, suggesting that parents must decide how to invest their limited resources, and child ability informs that decision. Within households of more than one child, children with higher abilities are more likely to eat higher quality foods than their siblings, even after controlling for child body size. Chapter 2: Child Ability and Household Human Capital Investment Decisions in Burkina Faso Using data we collected in rural Burkina Faso, we examine how children0́9s cognitive abilities influence resource constrained households0́9 decisions to invest in their education. We use a direct measure of child ability for all primary school-aged children, regardless of current school enrollment. We explicitly incorporate direct measures of the ability of each child0́9s siblings (both absolute and relative measures) to show how sibling rivalry exerts an impact on the parent0́9s decision of whether and how much to invest in their child0́9s education. We find children with one standard deviation higher own ability are 16 percent more likely to be currently enrolled, while having a higher ability sibling lowers current enrollment by 16 percent and having two higher ability siblings lowers enrollment by 30 percent. Results are robust to addressing the potential reverse causality of schooling influencing child ability measures and using alternative cognitive tests to measure ability. Chapter 3: Risk and Protective Factors for School Dropout in Mexico and Chile Fourteen percent of Chilean youth and 30 percent of Mexican youth have dropped out prior to completing secondary school. Of these youth, 90 to 97 percent are considered 0́−at risk,0́+ meaning that they engage in or are at risk of engaging in risky behaviors that are detrimental to their own development and to the well-being of their societies. This paper uses youth surveys from Chile and Mexico to demonstrate that early school dropout is strongly correlated with a range of risky behaviors as well as typically unobservable risk and protective factors. We test which of a large set of potential factors are correlated with dropping out of school early and other risky behaviors. These factors range from relationships with parents and institutions to household behaviors (abuse, discipline techniques) to social exclusion. We use stepwise regressions to sort out which variables best explain the observed variance in risky behaviors. We also use a non-parametric methodology to characterize different sub-groups of youth according to the amount of risk in their lives. We find that while higher socioeconomic status emerges as key explanatory factors for school dropout and six additional risky behaviors for boys and girls in both countries, it is not the only one. A good relationship with parents and peers, strong connection with local governmental institutions and schools, urban residence, younger age, and spirituality also emerge as being strongly correlated with school dropout and different risky behaviors. Similarly, young people that leave school early also engage in other risky behaviors. The variety of factors associated with leaving school early suggests that while poverty is important, it is not the only risk factor. This points to a wider range of policy entry points than currently used, including targeting parents and the relationship with schools.

Download or read book Supporting Family and Community Investments in Young Children Globally written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To examine the science, policy, and practice surrounding supporting family and community investments in young children globally and children in acute disruptions, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a workshop in partnership with the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from July 27-29, 2015. The workshop examined topics related to supporting family and community investments in young children globally. Examples of types of investments included financial and human capital. Participants also discussed how systems can better support children, families, and communities through acute disruptions such as the Ebola outbreak. Over the course of the 3-day workshop, researchers, policy makers, program practitioners, funders, young influencers, and other experts from 19 countries discussed how best to support family and community investments across areas of health, education, nutrition, social protection, and other service domains. This report summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

Download or read book Essays on Early Investments in Child Health written by Miriam Wüst and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Health Economics written by Archita Banik and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Empirical Essays in Health and Human Capital written by Gary Brant Morefield and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation studies two dynamic processes, the production of human capital and evolution of health. The first essay uses data on parents and their children in the longitudinal Panel Study of Income Dynamics and PSID-Child Development Supplement to estimate the effect negative changes in parental health on the children's development of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. The analysis suggests that the onset of a parental health event, on average, does not affect children's cognitive measures and has small negative effects on the level of children's noncognitive skills. However, small average effects mask heterogeneous effects across: the sex of the parent, sex of the child, and the type of health condition. Parental health events are found to significantly impair noncognitive skill development when a father is afflicted with a health event, affect sons more negatively than daughters, and are worse for certain--vascular or cancerous--conditions. Further exploration shows that effects of parental health events on skill development are related to changes in the hypothesized mechanism, changes in skill investments. Specifically, when parental health events are estimated to create the poorest behavior outcomes, large reductions in one measure of skill investment, time that parents participate in activities with children, is also commonly found. The second essay (joint with David Ribar and Christopher Ruhm) uses longitudinal data from the 1984 through 2007 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine how occupational status is related to the health transitions of 30 to 59 year-old U.S. males. A recent history of blue-collar employment predicts a substantial increase in the probability of transitioning from very good into bad self-assessed health, relative to white-collar employment, but with no evidence of occupational differences in movements from bad to very good health. These findings are robust to a series of sensitivity analyses. The results suggest that blue-collar workers "wear out" faster with age because they are more likely, than their white-collar counterparts, to experience negative health shocks. This partly reflects differences in the physical demands of blue-collar and white-collar jobs. The third essay (joint with Jeremy Bray) uses the framework of Bray (2005) to develop a theoretical and accompanying empirical model examining how the productivities of the human capital inputs work and school are affected if individuals work while enrolled in school. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, we model the dynamic processes of work and school input decisions jointly with the effects of these decisions on future wages to discern whether work and school are contemporaneous complements or substitutes in the production of human capital. Endogeneity is corrected through the use of the Discrete Factor Method. The model shows that, on average, work and school are indeed complementary in the production of human capital. However, examination of in-school work at differing schooling levels or across different student occupations shows that certain types of work and school are complementary when simultaneously undertaken while others are substitutes in the production of human capital."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.

Download or read book Using Existing Platforms to Integrate and Coordinate Investments for Children written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The integration and coordination of health, education, nutrition, social protection, and other services have the potential to improve the lives of children and their caregivers around the world. However, integration and coordination of policies and programs affecting early childhood development can create both risks and benefits. In different localities, these services are more or less effective in achieving their objectives. They also are more or less coordinated in delivering services to the same recipients, and in some cases services are delivered by integrated multisectoral organizations. The result is a rich arena for policy analysis and change and a complex challenge for public- and private-sector organizations that are seeking to improve the lives of children. To examine the science and policy issues involved in coordinating investments in children and their caregivers, the Forum on Investing in Young Children Globally held a workshop in Hong Kong on March 14-15, 2015. Held in partnership with the Centre for Health Education and Health Promotion and Wu Yee Sun College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the workshop brought together researchers, policy makers, program practitioners, and other experts from 22 countries. This report highlights the presentations and discussions of the event.

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: