the economics of iron deficiency abstract this paper examines the evidence for a causal relationship between iron deficiency and a variety of functional consequences with economic implications motor and mental impairment in children and low work productivity in adults to the extent that we can be confident that iron deficiency does cause a consequence with economic implications this effect is quantified in economic terms illustrative calculations for 10 developing countries suggest that the median value of annual physical productivity losses due to iron deficiency is around 2 32 per capita or 0 57 of gdp median total losses physical and cognitive combined are 16 78 per capita 4 05 of gdp using a cost of 1 33 per case of anemia prevented from one of the few effectiveness studies of national fortification allows us to calculate the benefit cost ratio for long term iron fortification programs the median value is 6 1 for the 10 countries examined and rises to 36 1 including the discounted future benefits attributable to cognitive improvements this paper improves on previous work by including a much more thorough survey of the quantitative magnitudes involved and by incorporating effects of iron deficiency on cognition however more research is needed to verify the accuracy of the assumptions needed for this type of analysis

on the dynamics of demand for leisure and the production of health our article develops and estimates a structural model of household health production that jointly determines the demand for leisure and the demand for consumption for elderly males we use a stochastic dynamic programming framework based on the assumption that an individual maximizes lifetime utility subject to budget and time constraints and a health production function by choosing hours of leisure and levels of consumption of health related and health neutral goods and services moreover we use a very comprehensive health index that combines four scales measuring a variety of dimensions in the quality of life the euler equations derived from our model are estimated using data from six biennial panels of the retirement history survey

allowance price and distributional effects under a personal carbon trading scheme abstract personal carbon trading pct is a downstream cap and trade scheme to reduce carbon emissions from the household sector in comparison to an upstream carbon trading scheme pct is a progressive scheme in which the poorer consumers are mostly winners as their levels of emissions are generally lower this paper investigates the equilibrium price for allowances and distributional effects under a pct scheme first we propose an equilibrium model for pct from which we derive an equilibrium price for allowances second a consumer surplus analysis is conducted to examine the welfare changes caused by the pct scheme generally we find that the pct scheme is progressive and can provide a buffer between the energy and allowance price based on these results the implications are discussed and suggestions for a future study are provided

demand for home modifications a household production function approach coping with activity limitations that occur in old age is an important issue in the context of increasing life expectancy and the still inevitable onset of chronic conditions in old age elderly households can be viewed as coping with activity limitations by producing functionality with the use of direct inputs that include home modifications a model of the household production of functionality is developed within the general framework of household production function models of health hypotheses generated from this model are tested using a logit model for data from the survey of asset and health dynamics among the oldest old ahead the main findings of the empirical analysis are that the demand for home modifications is fairly income inelastic home modifications and personal care are substitutes to some degree the demand for home modifications increases with years of schooling and that particular health conditions and the use of other assistive devices are important determinants of the demand for

education and health in europe abstractthe productive and allocative theories predict that education has positive impact on health the more educated adopt healthier life styles and use more efficiently health inputs and this explains why they live longer we find partial support for these theories with an econometric analysis on a large sample of europeans aged above 50 documenting a significant and positive correlation among education years life styles health outputs and functionalities we however find confirmation for an anomaly already observed in the united states namely the more educated are more likely to contract cancer our results are robust when controlling for endogeneity and reverse causality in iv estimates with instrumental variables related to quarter of birth and neighbours cultural norms

the effect of physician advice on alcohol consumption count regression with an endogenous treatment effect although there are encouraging trends alcohol abuse continues to be a significant public health problem econometric studies of alcohol demand have yielded a great deal of information for alcohol abuse prevention policy these studies suggest that higher alcohol taxes and stricter drunk driving policies can reduce heavy drinking and drunk driving in this paper we explore the role physician advice plays in the campaign to prevent alcohol related problems compared to alcohol taxation physician advice is a more precisely targeted intervention that does not impose extra costs on responsible drinkers compared to the resource costs of arresting processing and punishing drunk drivers physician advice may be a lower cost intervention to provide a basis for alcohol policy analysis we use an alcohol demand framework to test whether physician provided information about the adverse consequences of alcohol abuse shifts demand to more moderate levels there are three aspects of our alcohol demand model that complicate the estimation 1 the dependent variable is non negative it is a count variable number of drinks consumed 2 a non trivial number of sample observations have zero values for the dependent variable and 3 because the data we use is non experimental the treatment variable indicating receipt of advice from a physician may be endogenous we implement an estimation method that is specifically designed to deal with these three complicating factors our results show that advice has a substantial and significant impact on alcohol consumption by males with hypertension and that failing to account for the endogeneity of advice masks this result copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

raising primary school enrolment in developing countries the relative importance of supply and demand abstract few policies are as universally accepted as raising primary school enrolment in developing countries but the policy levers for achieving this goal are not straightforward this paper merges household survey data with detailed school supply characteristics from official sources in order to estimate the relative impact of demand and supply side determinants of rural primary school enrolment in mozambique policy simulations based on a set of plausible interventions show that in rural mozambique building more schools or raising adult literacy will have a larger impact on primary school enrolment rates than interventions that raise household income when relative costs are considered adult literacy campaigns are nearly 10 times more cost effective than the income intervention and 1 5 to 2 5 times better than building more schools

evolution of the infant health production function michael grossman s seminal publication on the demand for health and health production grossman 1972 has spawned a substantial body of research focusing on the production of infant health this article provides a systematic review of the published literature to date on infant health production and how it has evolved over the past 3 4 decades as data have become more available computing has improved and econometric methods have become more sophisticated while empirical research in most fields has expanded in corresponding ways the infant health production research has become an important part of the broader and inherently multidisciplinary literature on intergenerational health the strongest and most robust findings are that policies matter for infant health particularly those affecting access to health care and that prenatal smoking and other chemical exposures substantially compromise infant health promising directions for future research include elucidating relevant pathways reconciling the largely inconsistent estimated effects of nutrition and education and exploring the roles of preconceptional and lifetime health care paternal factors social support housing complementarity and substitutability of inputs factors that modify effects of inputs and evolving medical technologies

cyclicality mortality and the value of time the case of coffee price fluctuations and child survival in colombia recent studies demonstrate procyclical mortality in wealthy countries but there are reasons to expect a countercyclical relationship in developing nations we investigate how child survival in colombia responds to fluctuations in world arabica coffee prices and document starkly procyclical child deaths in studying this result s behavioral underpinnings we highlight that 1 the leading determinants of child health are inexpensive but require considerable time and 2 as the value of time declines with falling coffee prices so does the relative price of health we find a variety of direct evidence consistent with the primacy of time in child health production

socio economic status health and lifestyle abstract the role of lifestyle in mediating the relationship between socio economic characteristics and health has been discussed extensively in the epidemiological and economic literatures previous analyses have not considered a formal framework incorporating unobservable heterogeneity in this paper we develop a simple economic model in which health is determined partially by lifestyle which depends on preferences budget and time constraints and unobservable characteristics we estimate a recursive empirical specification consisting of a health production function and reduced forms for the lifestyle equations using maximum simulated likelihood msl for a multivariate probit mvp model with discrete indicators of lifestyle choices and self assessed health sah on british panel data from the 1984 and 1991 health and lifestyle survey hals we find that sleeping well exercising and not smoking in 1984 have dramatic positive effects on the probability of reporting excellent or good sah in 1991 and that these effects are much larger having accounted for endogeneity the failure of epidemiological analyses to account for unobserved heterogeneity can explain their low estimates of the relevance of lifestyle in the socio economic status health relationship indicators for prudent alcohol consumption and eating breakfast in 1984 are not found to be statistically significant determinants of sah in 1991

nutrition information and household behavior experimental evidence from malawi incorrect knowledge of the health production function may lead to inefficient household choices and thereby to the production of suboptimal levels of health this paper studies the effects of a randomized intervention in rural malawi that over a six month period provided mothers of young infants with information on child nutrition without supplying any monetary or in kind resources a simple model first investigates theoretically how nutrition and other household choices including labor supply may change in response to the improved nutrition knowledge observed in the intervention areas we then show empirically that the intervention improved child nutrition household food consumption and consequently health we find evidence that labor supply increased which might have contributed to partially fund the increase in food consumption this paper is the first to study whether non health choices particularly parental labor supply might be affected by parents knowledge of the child health production function

infant health and the labor supply of mothers this study examines the association between maternal employment and infant feeding and the health of children and the role of prices wages and other exogenous factors in influencing the association in the philippines data were obtained from the 1983 86 cebu longitudinal health and nutrition survey of 2868 women who were permanent residents of the sample areas and had given birth to a single live child in metro cebu during 1983 84 analysis is based on the conceptual framework in which infant feeding and labor supply are jointly chosen to maximize the utility subject to time budget and health production function constraints findings indicate that the labor supply of the mother had little direct effect on infant health when prices wages and other exogenous factors are taken into account maternal wage rates and prices of key foods affected labor supply and infant feeding and care women with better wage offers were more likely to work and to have healthier infants maternal labor supply only had statistically significant effects on infant health when occupation was accounted for it is suggested that women in developing countries should not be discouraged from working womens earnings increase their ability to pay for food and breast milk substitutes that contribute to healthy infants the authors suggest that other health outcomes such as infant morbidity and mortality could be examined or substitutions for other feeding patterns and child care options

the career costs of children this paper analyzes the life cycle career costs associated with child rearing and decomposes their eects into unearned wages as women drop out of the labor market loss of human capital and selection into more child friendly occupations we estimate a dynamic life cycle model of fertility occupational choice and labor supply using detailed survey and administrative data for germany for numerous birth cohorts across dierent regions we use this model to analyze both the male female wage gap as it evolves from labor market entry onward and the eect of pro fertility policies we show that a substantial portion of the gender wage gap is explainable by realized and expected fertility and that the long run eect of policies encouraging fertility are considerably lower than the short run eects typically estimated in the literature

endowments at birth and parents investments in children do parents invest more in higher quality children or do they compensate for lower quality by giving more to children with lower endowments we answer this question in the context of a large scale iodine supplementation programme in tanzania we find that children with higher programme exposure were more likely to receive necessary vaccines and were breastfed for longer siblings of treated children were also more likely to be immunised fertility behavior and investments at the time of birth were unaffected

early maternal time investment and early child outcomes using large longitudinal survey data from the uk millennium cohort study this article estimates the relationship between maternal time inputs and early child development we find that maternal time is a quantitatively important determinant of skill formation and that its effect declines with child age there is evidence of long term effects of early maternal time inputs on later outcomes especially in the case of cognitive skill development in the case of non cognitive development the evidence of this long term impact disappears when we account for skill persistence

prices and health identifying the effects of nutrition exercise and medication choices on blood pressure biomedical studies suggest that a person s behavior matters to health but these studies usually treat human choice as exogenous this study shows that individual choices on nutrient intake exercise and use of medication are influenced by exogenous food prices wages and non labor income using these exogenous variables as instruments for endogenous behavior makes a big difference in the estimated impact of nutrient intake exercise and medication on blood pressure for example application of instrumental variables methods changes the impact of sodium on blood pressure from positive to negative and significant in his 1993 nobel prize speech economic historian robert fogel documented how dramatic improvements in human health and lifespan over the last century have increased labor productivity and economic growth these health improvements were largely ascribed to better nutrition and to an enhanced ability of consumers to transform nutrition information into desired health states at the same time fogel called for joint use of biomedical and economic techniques of analysis so that the consequences of better nutrition for human well being can be more deeply probed the combined techniques would yield insights otherwise unobtainable when relying on one of the disciplines alone fogel s plea for combined techniques rarely has been heeded either in the biomedicine or in the health economics literature biomedical studies adhere strictly to a mind body dualism

parental compensatory behaviors and early child health outcomes in cebu philippines a dynamic optimization model of parents choosing investments in their children s health motivates an empirical model of parents choices of health inputs for their children and the impacts of these decisions on their children s subsequent health estimates of the child health input demand functions and the child health production functions from the cebu longitudinal health and nutrition survey accord with the prediction that optimizing behavior results in higher levels of aggregate child health observable parental behaviors respond to the physical developmental status of their children these parental responses appear to yield large and statistically significant improvements in children s early physiological outcomes however because some health inputs choices are not observable it is impossible to ascertain whether these measured effects are due solely to variations in the observed input choices

health behavior health knowledge and schooling the positive correlation between schooling and good health is well documented one explanation is that schooling helps people choose healthier life styles by improving their knowledge of the relationship between health behaviors and health outcomes that is schooling improves the household s allocative efficiency in producing health this empirical study uses direct measures of health knowledge to test this explanation part of the relationship between schooling and the consumption of cigarettes alcohol and exercise is explained by differences in health knowledge however most of schooling s effects on health behavior remain after differences in knowledge are controlled for

can personal gasoline permit trading be effective an investigation into permit demand this study proposes a personal gasoline permit trading scheme to limit the total gasoline consumption thus reducing its environmental impact we studied the effectiveness of this scheme by analyzing the permit demand of a gasoline driven vehicle in transportation sector a general utility optimization model is formulated and a cobb douglas utility function is further assumed to analyze the response of permit demand to its price changes with the slutsky decomposition of price effects the results when defined in economic terms indicate that the permit demand of consumers in higher income groups are negatively related to permit price permit demand are also negatively related to permit price for consumers in medium income groups but with positive income effect and the direct relationship between permit demand of lower income groups and the price is defined as a giffen good effect that is for those low income groups when the permit price rises their demand for permits would also increase then us and singapore household expenditure data are used to show comparable results of a pilot personal gasoline permit trading scheme further some regulations on critical parameters such as permit allocation and permit prices in the policy design are proposed to make the scheme feasible in different income groups based on these results implications limitation and suggestions for future study are discussed

program interventions intrahousehold distribution and the welfare of individuals modelling household behavior abstract in this essay the implications for the intrahousehold distribution of resources derived from economic models of household behavior that treat the household as maximizing a single welfare function are reviewed particular attention is paid to the within family allocation of time and food and to the effects of these resources on the schooling earnings and health status of individuals as they are affected by direct food intervention and female employment schemes and price altering policies empirical applications are provided from data sets from india indonesia and the philippines to illustrate the power and limitations of such models for illuminating household interventions and for placing restrictions on data

health economics and applications in developing countries the concept of health human capital guides the statistical study of 1 health production functions 2 derived demands for medical and behavioral health inputs and 3 determinants of health and productivity outcomes health inputs are generally endogenous to health outcomes and prices of health inputs are the most common instrumental variable for identifying estimates of the causal effects of health inputs but when health input prices are modified by individual regional migration the regional prices no longer satisfy the requirement of being independent of preferences and omitted variables then the difficulty of evaluating health program effects reinforces the need to design randomized regional treatments in order to be able to evaluate without bias the consequences of critical health interventions such as are needed today to deal with the hiv aids epidemic

the costs of low birth weight birth weight has emerged as the leading indicator of infant health and welfare and the central focus of infant health policy this is because low birth weight lbw infants experience severe health and developmental difficulties that can impose enormous costs on society but would the prevention of lbw generate equally sizable cost savings and health improvements estimates of the return to lbwprevention from cross sectional associations may be biased by omitted variables that cannot be influenced by policy such as genetic factors to address this we compare the hospital costs health at birth and infant mortality rates between heavier and lighter infants from all twin pairs born in the united states we also examine the effect of maternal smoking during pregnancy the leading risk factor for lbw in the united states on health among singleton births after controlling for detailed background characteristics both analyses imply substantially smaller effects of lbw than previously thought suggesting two possibilities 1 existing estimates overstate the true costs and consequences of lbw by at least a factor of four and by as much as a factor of 20 or 2 different lbw preventing interventions have different health and cost consequences implying that policy efforts that presume a single return to reducing lbw will necessarily be suboptimal

the production of functionality by the elderly a household production function approach this paper extends becker s model of the household production function of human capital to the production of elderly functionality in this model elderly functionality is produced with the direct inputs of assistive devices personal assistance and nutritional intake education endowment variables like genetic endowment and sex and health conditions like stroke determine the production function environment data from the survey of asset and health dynamics among the oldest old ahead are used to estimate a production function of bathing functionality using a two stage estimation procedure in the first stage input demands for the endogenous functionality inputs are estimated recognizing health heterogeneity the results suggest that reverses in functionality caused by age and health conditions can be partially compensated for by the use of assistive devices like grab bars and bathing equipment secure nutritional intake and moderate alcohol consumption however non inputs like chronic healt

can higher cigarette taxes improve birth outcomes abstract this study examines whether higher state cigarette taxes can be used to improve birth outcomes data on the outcomes of interest are taken from the 1989 1992 natality detail files generating a sample of roughly 10 5 million births the results suggest that smoking participation among pregnant women declines and average birth weights rise when excise taxes are increased these results can be used to form an instrumental variables estimate of the impact of smoking on birth weight this estimate is remarkably close to numbers from a random assignment clinical trial the smoking participation price elasticity is estimated to be 0 5

wage and labor supply effects of illness in cote d ivoire and ghana instrumental variable estimates for days disabled abstract sickness should make individuals less productive but there are problems in measuring this effect first how is adult morbidity measured in a household survey second how is the impact or morbidity on productivity inferred if earning is partly used to improve health self reported functional activity limitation due to illness is considered an indicator of morbidity for wage earners and self employed people to deal with both the measurement and joint determination problems an instrumental variable estimation approach is used where local food prices and health services instrument for disability days that reduce wages by at least 10 and hours by 3 or more

child care choices and children s cognitive achievement the case of single mothers we evaluate the effect of child care versus maternal time inputs on child cognitive development using single mothers from the nlsy79 to deal with nonrandom selection of children into child care we exploit the exogenous variation in welfare policy rules facing single mothers in particular the 1996 welfare reform and earlier state level policy changes generated substantial increases in their work child care use we construct a comprehensive set of welfare policy variables and use them as instruments to estimate child cognitive ability production functions in our baseline specification we estimate that a year of child care reduces child test scores by 2 1

parental preference heterogeneity and human capital inequality abstract in this article i provide an empirical account of the human capital investment behavior of parents in the face of endowment differences among siblings the data set used contains a three wave panel of 4 030 individuals the article presents a rare case in which endowments are measured explicitly health endowments are estimated from dynamic health production functions while educational endowments are obtained from test scores the simple score of the standard raven s colored progressive matrix cpm test is used to measure educational endowments i use estimation procedures that combine an instrumental variables method with panel data estimators to control for endogeneity and heterogeneity the results suggest that parents compensate for initial differences in health but reinforce initial educational differences among siblings hence an educational subsidy aimed at reducing inequality may end up reinforcing the inequality that might exist in the absence of such subsidy when parents invest mor

nutrition labour productivity and labour supply of men and women in ghana ghana s population is expected to increase from 14 1 million in 1990 to 18 7 million in 2000 bumb et al 1994 this growth in population along with growth in per capita income and urbanisation will create increased demand for food before the launching of the economic reform programme in 1983 ghana s food production had fallen to an abysmally low level in response to the general deterioration in the economy output of food and cash crops declined at a rate of 0 3 percent per year between 1970 and 1980 cereal production which exceeded domestic demand by some 200 000 tonnes in 1971 73 registered a deficit of over 300 000 tonnes in 1981 83 production of starchy staples fell from 7 9 million tonnes to 4 1 million tonnes between 1974 and 1981 as a result of declining food output combined with a rising population per capita food availability in 1981 83 was 30 percent lower than it was in 1975 efforts made under the economic recovery programme have improved the food supply situation in the country although food production levels still remain low output levels of cocoyam and plantain have not reached their average levels in the early 1970 s table 9 1

prenatal care and birthweight production evidence from south america research using us data has shown that increases in prenatal care have positive effects on birthweight and that the existence of unobserved health heterogeneity tends to reduce the measured effect of prenatal care this study extends extant research to the south american countries of bolivia brazil columbia and peru using data from the demographic and health surveys finding a positive effect of increased prenatal care use on birthweight furthermore the largest marginal effect of increased prenatal care use is found at low levels of usage the results highlight both the usefulness of existing methodologies for estimating the effect of prenatal care on birthweight and the importance of extending these methodologies to data from countries other than the usa

infant health during the 1980s peruvian crisis and long term economic outcomes summary in 1988 peru entered a severe economic crisis as a corollary of unfavorable external economic conditions high levels of debt and heterodox policies the so called debt crisis of 1980s this paper investigates the short term health shock experienced by infants during the crisis and its long term impact on human capital accumulation because no longitudinal data are available the estimation of causal effects is performed using multiple cross section surveys that are representative of the same population over time the short term and the long term effects are estimated exploiting the heterogeneous impact of the crisis across and within birth cohorts results indicate that the peruvian crisis significantly affected the health of infants particularly that of children born to low educated mothers from 1988 to 1990 vaccination declined 12 percentage points and infant mortality increased 2 3 percentage points among children born to low educated mothers in the long run the children who suffered the most severe health shocks during the economic downturn of the 1980s performed worse in school they had 0 12 fewer years of formal education and their probability of completing primary education by age 15 was three percentage points lower in relation to similar children born after the crisis the results have strong policy implications children in developing countries should be safeguarded against health shocks during economic crises to avoid a decline in the accumulation of human capital in the long run

multiple output child health production functions the impact of time varying and time invariant inputs author affiliation mark d agee department of economics pennsylvania state university altoona pa 16601 usa mda4 psu edu corresponding authorscott e atkinson department of economics university of georgia athens ga 30602 usa atknsn uga eduthomas d crocker department of economics and finance university of wyoming laramie wy 82071 usa tcrocker uwyo edu acknowledgment comments and suggestions from two anonymous referees are gratefully acknowledged the u s environmental protection agency financially supported this research effort through grant number r82871601 however the research has not been subjected to the agency s required peer and policy review and therefore does not necessarily reflect the views of the agency 1 introductionin this paper we attempt to broaden and to redirect the standard theoretical and empirical approach in economics to the household production of human health especially child health the last decade has witnessed increased concern with the impact of public policies and private investments on child health perhaps motivated by an increased concern for equity and an enhanced recognition that human capital formation in children contributes significantly to society s future well being children live in households with parents or adults who combine their skills with good as well as bad inputs that produce good as well as bad child health outcomes physical behavioral and cognitive a good input could be the time spent reading to a child while a bad input could be parental smoking near a child a good outcome could be higher reading skills while a bad outcome could be a child s ill health three features distinguish our modeling approach to the household production of child outcomes first we argue that multiple good and bad inputs can affect multiple measures of good and bad outcomes for children ignoring this by estimating single equation relationships produces omitted variable bias and fails to model the tradeoffs among inputs and outcomes to examine jointness among several good and bad outcomes as well as inputs and allow for heterogeneity among households in the productivity of observed child inputs we specify and estimate an output based directional distance function chambers chung and fare 1998 for a balanced panel of households with coresident children this function allows us to estimate the maximum expansion of goods and the contraction of bads subject to a given level of observed inputs for a household using the underlying joint technology second we argue that households will produce child health with varying degrees of effectiveness the best practice household is defined as that household that cannot make further increases in all good dimensions of child health and reductions in all bad dimensions by some additive amount using a given level of observed inputs this household practices its child care on the production frontier households within this frontier make less efficient use of personal and marketed child care inputs thus we estimate the technical efficiency for household units in producing multiple outputs from multiple inputs finally although we have panel data and compute a fixed effects estimator we recover the effects of time invariant variables such as sex race and parent attributes on goods and bads in a second stage regression we adjust their estimated standard errors and correct for the bias caused by weak instruments in the first stage using a jackknife technique the next section presents background for our hypotheses of i jointness in the household production of child health outcomes and ii the presence of technical inefficiency among households in the production process in section 3 we discuss properties of the directional distance function and the calculation of partial effects results are presented in section 4 and conclusions follow in section 5

food aid and adult nutrition in rural ethiopia insight into the role of safety nets that contribute to adult nutrition is an important component to understanding the dynamics of poverty in developing countries this article uses panel data from rural ethiopia on individual nutritional status to test for an effect of public transfers on adult body mass index bmi results show that among adult household members male members are the primary beneficiaries of food aid as male and female aid recipients tend to invest aid receipts in male household members these results are consistent with a theory in which additional resources are allocated to members of the household whose market returns are higher or those who engage in activities that expend higher levels of energy for high asset households female household members benefit if the aid recipient is a female women in low asset households appear to be adversely affected by aid receipts and evidence suggests that women with little bargaining power suffer the most the results suggest that aid receipts are useful in mitigating fluctuations in adult bmi over a short time period

impact of immigration on prenatal care use and birth weight evidence from california in the 1990 s the mid 1990 s witnessed the passage of two legislative measures restricting noncitizens use of public services in response to the extensive and costly use of public assistance by immigrants reported by earlier studies jane l ross 1996 first the immigration control and financial responsibility act restricted illegal immigrants access to medical services and to other forms of public assistance in addition the personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act extended the restriction to legal immigrants entering the country after its enactment for at least five years after entry and effectively until they naturalize however some states with large immigrant populations like california chose to institute state funded substitute benefits for immigrants losing federal assistance in spite of these states assistance possibly working as an immigrant magnet george j borjas 2001 the literature emerging after welfare reform has often found a greater decline in the use of public assistance particularly medicaid among noncitizen households relative to citizens this finding has been attributed to the chilling effects of welfare reform wendy zimmermann and michael fix 1998 in light of these findings should we now expect greater noncitizenship rates to ease access to public services or rather to impose a burden on access to public services in this paper we look into this question and examine the impact of noncitizenship rates on women s use of prenatal care pnc over the period 1991 2000 in california we focus on women s pnc use given the health implications that pnc can have for both mother and infant and yet the lack of studies examining the role of noncitizenship rates even in high immigration areas on women s pnc use we use 1991 and 2000 to assess significant changes in the effect of noncitizenship rates on women s pnc use before and after the 1996 reform additionally we focus on california due to its population size and its large immigrant population of whom approximately 61 percent are noncitizens finally given the implications of adequate pnc on newborns birth weight through the early detection and treatment of any existing health problems we examine how pnc in turn has affected the birth weight of babies born in california over the examined time period in sum this study addresses the following questions has the effect of noncitizenship rates on women s pnc use changed before and after the 1996 reform in particular do greater noncitizenship rates result in reduced pnc use due to increased competition for public services or do they lead to increased pnc use due to welfare reform s chilling effect and increased awareness of the importance of pnc furthermore how does pnc use affect birth weight

willingness to pay for ozone control inferences from the demand for medical care abstract the paper applies a discrete choice version of the household production approach to the valuation of nonmarket goods willingness to pay for tropospheric ozone control is estimated using medical care demand under assumptions of input necessity and weak complementarity in example calculations individuals living in high ozone areas are willing to pay over 170 annually for an environment in which ozone concentrations never exceed 12 pphm willingness to pay figures are two to four times larger than medical expense savings caused by the same ozone reductions estimates obtained are compared with results of previous studies and proposed ozone control measures are discussed

gary becker s contributions to economics from his first published work gary becker has consistently strived to extend the domain of economic analysis his interest is in social science broadly defined and he is convinced that economic theory in its established neoclassical form provides the best set of tools for analysing social science questions when he finds an interesting problem on the borderland of what is conventionally thought of as economics and that is where he is looking for his problems he is not worried that he is trespassing on the traditional grounds of sociologists political scientists lawyers anthropologists or biologists on the contrary he clearly delights in showing how economic theory can be brought to bear on such problems he is of course not alone in trying to extend the borders of economics many other scholars have contributed to the movement which some have characterized as economic imperialism becker is one of the most outstanding of the imperialists this review of his work is organized in accordance with the main topics on which becker has worked chronologically his work on the economics of discrimination which grew out of his doctoral dissertation comes first next in order come his fundamental contributions to human capital theory he was also one of the founders of the so called new theory of consumption which is no longer so new and he has made important contributions to the economic study of crime and punishment and to the economics of political decision making some of his most original work is in the economics of the family where he provides economic explanations of such questions as marriage divorce and procreation after the topic by topic review of becker s contributions i will try to provide a more general evaluation of his work and to characterize it more fully in terms of research traditions and methodological attitudes

determinants of child morbidity and factors governing utilization of child health care evidence from rural india prevention as well as effective treatment of respiratory infections and diarrhoea depends on several individual household and community level factors the objective of this article is to estimate the role played by such factors in determining the occurrence of such diseases and utilization of formal health care for children under the age of three in india the major findings are briefly enlisted as follows first a woman with greater educational qualification and autonomy in terms of her power to take decisions on her own control over household resources and complete freedom to move beyond the confines of her household exerts a significant influence on the probability of seeking care in addition to this formal care is more likely to be sought for children whose mothers are more exposed to the media programmes devised to enhance utilization of formal health care for children should be targeted to catering for the needs of the vulnerable group i e female child predominantly residing in households b

capital deepening and wage differentials germany versus us in flexible labour markets capital increases the productivity of skilled workers more than that of unskilled workers and in the us faster investment is associated with wider wage inequality but labour market institutions that keep unskilled workers wages high also imply that firms may find it profitable to invest so as to boost those workers productivity our empirical analysis based on industry level data confirms that a higher capital intensity in germany is associated with smaller wage differentials and with a larger share of unskilled workers in the labour costs changes in capital labour ratios during the 1980s reduced wage differentials by 5 8 in german industries while in the us capital deepening in such industries as machinery and retail was accompanied by an increase of wage differentials larger than 7 winfried koeniger and marco leonardi

intrafamily resource allocations a dynamic structural model of birth weight using large american and british survey data this paper provides structural estimates of the production functions for birth weight and fetal growth in addition to maternal smoking we estimate the impact of when a mother stops work which has not been considered in the literature mothers work interruptions of up to 3 months before birth have a positive effect on birth outcomes especially among british children parental behavior appears to respond to child idiosyncratic endowments in a way that suggests that parents have inequity aversion concerns evidence in favor of inequity aversion emerges also from the analysis of breast feeding decisions

birth spacing and sibling inequality asymmetric information within the family this paper formulates a dynamic model of birth spacing incorporating uncertainty about and heterogeneity in birth outcomes and joint production to assess how the spacing of children responds to exogenous shocks in birth outcomes estimation technics are developed that use assumptions about the constraints on the information available to parental decision makers associated with the sequential nature of childbearing ignored in static models of intra household behavior section 1 examines the technology of birth spacing and its consequences for the level and distribution of child outcomes and resources in section 2 the model compares alternative estimation technics in section 3 data from a probability sample of us white married couples are used to describe intrafamily variation in birth outcomes and spacing and to test for heterogeneity bias the results in section 4 suggest that across family heterogeneity bias may be less important than within family heterogeneity bias in estimates of the effects of birth order and timing patterns of births on health results from family fixed effect of sibling models of child quality determination that ignore intrafamily substitution may be misleading section 5 estimates how birth outcome endowments and information on gender are used to estimate how differences in them affect subsequent birth timing decisions and sibling inequality results suggest that 1 the birth of 1st born children tends to be delayed among families with high income husbands highly educated parents superior health endowment or high tastes for health investments 2 the proximity of the birth of the 2nd child to that of the 1st child is a positive function of the quality of the 1st born and 3 the spacing and existence of a 3rd child is significantly related to the birth outcomes sex composition and sex ordering of the 1st and 2nd children

tiered gasoline pricing a personal carbon trading perspective abstract this paper proffers a tiered gasoline pricing method from a personal carbon trading perspective an optimization model of personal carbon trading is proposed and then an equilibrium carbon price is derived according to the market clearing condition based on the derived equilibrium carbon price this paper proposes a calculation method of tiered gasoline pricing then sensitivity analyses and consumers surplus analyses are conducted it can be shown that a rise in gasoline price or a more generous allowance allocation would incur a decrease in the equilibrium carbon price making the first tiered price higher but the second tiered price lower it is further verified that the proposed tiered pricing method is progressive because it would relieve the pressure of the low income groups who consume less gasoline while imposing a greater burden on the high income groups who consume more gasoline based on these results implications limitations and suggestions for future studies are provided

searching for the opportunity cost of an individual s time a traditional assumption made in the literature is that the value of an individual s time spent in any activity is equal to his or her wage rate this result stems from the derivation of the value of leisure time in the context of the standard labor supply model this paper pre sents some reasons why the relationship be tween the wage rate and the value of time does not hold suggestions for what to do when the relationship breaks down and the investigator needs some value to impute to the individual are given in the final section of the paper

multidimensional welfare distributions empirical application to household panel data from vietnam this article explores the empirical application of theoretical multidimensional welfare distribution analysis techniques to real household welfare distributions the article operationalizes recent conceptual developments in multidimensional distribution theory and assesses their usefulness for the measurement of multidimensional household inequality the results strongly highlight the importance of bringing nonmonetary aspects of household welfare into the forefront of inequality analysis agreement over the various approaches to the measurement of multidimensional inequality entails however nontrivial decisions that may limit the practical usefulness of these measures we suggest that the use of multidimensional inequality ranges and the application of restrictive dominance criteria to multidimensional welfare distributions may open significant scope for further developments in the empirical analysis of multidimensional inequality

introduction to a theory of the allocation of time by gary becker gary becker s classic study a theory of the allocation of time laid the analytical foundations for the study of household production and the allocation of time within the household it spawned a large literature and continues to influence economics and other social sciences the article was written when becker was in his mid 30s teaching at columbia university and conducting research at the national bureau of economic research then headquartered in new york over the period 1958 69 becker along with jacob mincer organised the legendary columbia labour economics workshop becker mincer and their students applied price theory to study the economics of fertility labour supply income inequality education on the job training crime and punishment and the theory of irrational behaviour among other topics the interplay between theory and data was the hallmark of that group from this crucible emerged the modern theory of human capital becker and important components of the modern economics of the family that were distilled and extended in becker s classic a treatise on the family 1981 enlarged in 1991 a generation of productive and influential scholars was trained at columbia during this period heckman 2014 in his introduction to this article becker discusses the body of research on the economics of time that was being conducted at columbia to which he contributed and from which he had drawn this article is the analytical synthesis of a body of ideas developed in that intense intellectual climate many scholars have tried to disentangle the contributions of jacob mincer from those of gary becker during the period of their synergistic collaboration attempts to do so miss the highly interactive and mutually supportive intellectual environment of the columbia group and the ability of becker to create clean analytical insights from diverse bodies of empirical work and to stimulate all those around him

wage gains associated with height as a form of health human capital height is consulted as a latent indicator of early nutrition and lifetime health status height is observed to increase in recent decades in populations where per capita national income has increased and public health activities have grown height is determined by genetic make up and realized in part through satisfactory nutrition and health related care and conditions alternative instrumental variables iv are explored which proxy price and income constraints which are expected to influence the latter reproducible human capital investments in height i report ols and iv estimates of the partial effect of height on log hourly wages in recent national surveys from three countries ghana brazil and the united states i conclude that the human capital productivity effect of height estimated by parent education ivs in the us and ghana are many times larger than the ols estimates and in ghana and brazil the regional price ivs estimates also imply a substantially larger human capital wage effects of height compared with the ols estimates the ols estimates of height effects on wages are dominated by the genetic variation in height and appear to understate substantially the human capital returns to health and nutrition inputs which increase adult height this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

longevity complementarities under competing risks many of the high expenditure health programs established by international organizations or national and subnational governments involve disease specific interventions such as measles vaccinations hiv education programs mammogram screening malaria prevention and lung cancer research typically these programs are evaluated solely upon the success or failure of their impact on the targeted disease this paper argues that such an exclusive evaluation may significantly underestimate the overall effect of disease specific interventions when multiple risks act as competing forces on life we suggest that programs that target one disease may have important spillover effects on the mortality and morbidity of other causes of death in order to better understand and evaluate the overall effects of disease specific programs it is necessary to understand and measure these spillover effects this paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the incentives introduced by disease specific mortality interventions more precisely we discuss predictions about health investment incentives as implied by the competing risk model which is the empirical framework almost exclusively used to study multiple cause mortality we show that important complementary effects between niultiple causes of death operate to equalize the occurrence of the causes we argue that this complementarity should alter the evaluation of cause specific interventions by discrediting the argument that interventions are wasted because competing mortality risks are just around the corner in support of the existence of such complementarities we present substantive evidence from one of the most important public health programs ever introduced in developing countries the expanded programme on immunization epi of the united nations the paper is organized as follows section i provides a theoretical analysis arguing that the competing risk model of multiple causes of mortality corresponds to the leontief production function of survival this implies that there are inherent complementarities between investments in the prevention of cause specific mortality risks both on the individual level and on the aggregate level for competing risks the marginal benefit of investing to avoid one cause of death increases as a function of the survival rates of other causes the implications of this complementarity are important and have not received sufficient attention in theoretical or practical evaluations of causespecific interventions when mortality is treated as exogenous a disease specific intervention may seem wasteful if members of the targeted group are likely to die from a second cause as soon as the first has been eliminated then reducing the mortality from one cause of death would not appear to substantially increase life expectancy indeed this argument is repeatedly made by economists and demographers about medical care interventions in old age however it is sguided to use the preintervention background mortality when assessing the effectiveness of an interventionbehavior under one policy should not be assumed to prevail under a new policy as the leontief nature of competing risks predicts health investments will be focused upon he most immediate cause of death so that there are dow department of health policy and administration cb 7400 university of north carolina chapel hill nc 27599 philipson irving b harris graduate school of public policy studies department of economics and the law school university of chicago 1155 east 60th street chicago il 60637 sala i martin department of econornics columbia university 420 west 118th street 1005 new york ny 10027 and universitat pompeu fabra we are thankful to three anonymous referees for comments that substantially improved the paper and we especially acknowledge the contributions of jessica holmes who was a research assistant and co author on early drafts of this work we also thank gary becker kate howe steen jorgenson casey mulligan sherwin rosen paul schultz and participants at numerous workshops for discussions dow acknowledges financial support from national institute on aging grant no t32 ag00244 philipson from the national science foundation and the rockefeller foundation this research was begun while all authors were at yale university during 1994

estimating a household production function heterogeneity the demand for health inputs and their effects on birth weight the household production literature emphasizes that technical or biological processes condition input selection by households in their production activities along with prices and income exogenous variations in health to the extent that they are perceived by individuals heterogeneity lead to correlations between inputs and health outcomes that cannot be used to derive causal conclusions therefore estimates of health technology must be obtained from a behavioral model in which health inputs are themselves choices consistent estimates are reported of the effect of endogenous inputs such as medical care smoking and fertility on birth weight and fetal growth in the presence of health heterogeneity

household production and sexual orientation the 2006 canada census is used along with a well known model of household production to estimate the value of household commodities produced by gay lesbian and heterosexual couples the results show some intriguing differences and similarities unlike heterosexuals gay and lesbian couples respond differently to changes in the cost of time however all couples are characterized by the importance of market goods over time and the importance of human capital in the market over the home with respect to household production hence although there are differences in the sexual division of labor between households of different sexual orientations the value of household commodities is mostly driven by differences in the amount of market goods used in the home market goods are determined by income and differences in income within a couple type swamp differences in income across couple types and as a result there is no statistical difference in the value of household commodities produced across the three sexual orientations jel d13

networks or neighborhoods correlations in the use of publicly funded maternity care in california abstract this study focuses on network effects in the utilization of publicly funded prenatal care using vital statistics data from california for 1989 2000 networks are defined using 5 digit zip codes and a woman s racial or ethnic group like others we find evidence that the use of public programs is highly correlated within groups defined using race ethnicity and neighborhoods these correlations persist even when we control for many unobserved characteristics by including zip code year fixed effects and when we focus on the interaction between own group behavior and measures of the potential for contacts with other members of the group contact availability however the richness of our data allows us to go further and to conduct several tests of one important hypothesis about networks that the estimated effects represent information sharing within groups the results cast doubt on the idea that the observed correlations can be interpreted as evidence of information sharing in particular we find estimated effects to be as large or larger among women who have previously used the program as among first time users

risks and rewards gary becker s contributions to economics gary becker is one of the most original and influential economists of our age his originality lies in extending the frontiers of economics and broadening the range of important social science problems that are amenable to economic analysis he has gone against the grain of establishment thinking in the economics profession invariably choosing to work on problems that were considered beyond the boundaries of modem economics yet this work made close contact with many of the great economists of the past and many of the concepts he invented and developed are now widely if not routinely used in modem economics several of the approaches to problems he pioneered have evolved into fields and specialities in their own right that becker has had an immense intellectual impact and influence in the economics profession is supported empirically by the voluminous citations to his work over the years and in other ways obviously citation counts have well known difficulties and cannot prove anything by themselves but if used in conjunction with more fundamental evidence they do have the virtue of being quantifiable marshall medoff s 1989 1 recent citation study is one of the best available because citations are weighted by the importance of the journals in which articles appear among non nobel prize economists working in u s universities under 65 years of age becker ranks first in total citations over the 1971 85 period to which medoff s study refers and he is first by a very wide margin though the study is limited to economists in the united states it is clear that becker would rank at or very close to the top of any worldwide list furthermore becker s work is virtually all substantive economic analysis hardly any of it is devoted to the development of methodological tools or to surveys both of which gamer citations more easily and many concepts

the stability of household production technology a replication our article develops and estimates a structural model of household health production that jointly determines the demand for leisure and the demand for consumption for elderly males we use a stochastic dynamic programming framework based on the

money transfer and birth weight evidence from the alaska permanent fund dividend the positive relationship between income and health is well established however the direction of causality remains unclear do economic resources influence health or vice versa exploiting a new source of exogenous income variation this study examines the impact of the alaska permanent fund dividend apfd on newborns health outcomes the results show that income has a significantly positive but modest effect on birth weight we find that an additional 1 000 2 331 in 2011 dollars increases birth weight by 17 7 g and substantially decreases the likelihood of a low birth weight a decrease of around 14 of the sample mean furthermore the income effect is higher for less educated mothers based on a gestation weight profile in the sample increased gestation owing to the apfd could explain a maximum of 34 57 of the measured weight increase although we are unable to examine all the potential mechanisms jel i10 i18 i12

population growth and human capital investments theory and evidence this paper presents evidence from empirical studies that test hypotheses derived from models of household behavior pertaining to the interrelationships among population growth human capital and economic development these studies have exploited quasi natural experiments embodied in the cross area variability in the wage rates of children in a number of low income countries the intercouple variation in the biological propensity to conceive and the geographically selective introduction of new high yielding seed varieties in india in the period 1961 71 the different varieties of evidence support the hypotheses that alterations in the returns to human capital associated with exogenous technical change lead simultaneously to increases in human capital investments and to reductions in fertility and that the costliness of fertility control is a significant but modest factor in inhibiting human capital investments

schooling health knowledge and obesity the connection between schooling and health is well documented an important empirical issue that needs to be examined however is whether schooling s effects are due to individual health knowledge differences this empirical study examines this issue with an increasingly important health indicator obesity since provision of health knowledge is a major tool of public agencies promoting health this empirical study uses a new direct measure of health knowledge to test this hypothesis the results show that knowledge is inversely related to the probability that an individual is obese schooling s effects on relative weight and the probability of being obese are explained by differences in knowledge this result may imply that schooling s effect on the allocative efficiency of the household production of health is the main reason schooling is linked to health behaviour the result also may imply that the most effective method of health education is to highlight the disease element of poor dietary habits a

effects of physical activity on earnings in the brazilian labor market abstract this article investigates the effects of physical activity on earnings in the brazilian labor market analyzing workers aged between 30 and 50 years to that end quantile regression was applied to analyze microdata from the 2008 national household sample survey pnad the results showed that workers who engage in regular physical exercise exhibit better social and economic conditions compared to sedentary individuals sedentary lifestyles are typically more common among female employees than their male counterparts and this is reflected in earnings in the labor market the impact of physical activity on wages varied from 15 0 to 31 0 and was greater among the highest quantiles the lowest salaries were recorded among non white sedentary women

prices infrastructure household characteristics and child height household survey data from brazil matched with information collected at the municipio county level are used to examine the relation between parental characteristics primarily education community infrastructure and services and child height data are drawn from 2 sources informacoes basicas municipais 1974 is a periodic survey of 4000 municipios on infrastructure health and education services estudo nacional da despesa familiar 1974 75 is a household survey covering 37000 children under age 8 on income expenditure anthropometry and socio demographic characteristics local food price indices were derived from these data child height is significantly affected by local infrastructure particularly modern sewerage and piped water in urban areas and electricity in rural settings these effects are stronger for children over 2 those of better educated mothers and those in households spending more higher prices for dairy products and sugar are linked to lower urban child height and higher fish prices to lower rural child height significantly for children of illiterate mothers higher prices for meat and rice are associated with taller height possible because men usually eat these foods mothers with elementary schooling can counteract the effects of food prices on child height number of teachers is positively related to height in rural children numbers of nurses and of hospital beds is associated with shorter children suggesting that large hospitals locate in poor urban areas this study has succeeded in identifying some public investments that affect child health

unemployment and infant health times series evidence from the state of tennessee this is the first study that decomposes unemployment into its structural and cyclical components and investigates their impact on income distribution controlling for the influence of inflation increases in structural unemployment have a substantial

prenatal care demand and birthweight production of black mothers infant mortality in the united states has declined by one half in the past 20 years for both blacks and whites though the black infant mortality rate has steadily remained twice the white rate helen wallace 1994 the incidence of low birthweight unfortunately has remained almost unchanged over the same time period again with the black rate being twice the white rate wallace 1994 these two trends taken together suggest that the reduced mortality rate is due entirely to medical advances which allow more small weak and sick newborns to survive this paper investigates the health of newborns using the approach of mark rosenzweig and paul schultz 1982 1983 see also eugene lewit 1983 their work is extended by incorporating the number of visits and a visitsxdelay interaction term into prenatal care demand the goal is to obtain consistent estimates of the impact of prenatal care on infant birthweight these estimates can then be used to design interventions aimed at reducing the incidence of low birthweight