Health shocks and natural resource management
Subtitle: evidence from Western Kenya
By: Joshua Graff Zivin, Maria Damon, Harsha Thirumurthy
Contributors: Damon, Maria; Thirumurthy, Harsha; National Bureau of Economic Research
Series: NBER working paper series -- working paper 16594; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) -- working paper no. 16594.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Description: "The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this.  You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email.  Poverty and altered planning horizons brought on by the HIV/AIDS epidemic can change individual discount rates, altering incentives to conserve natural resources.  Using longitudinal data from household surveys in western Kenya, we estimate impacts of health status on labor productivity and discount rates.  We find that household size and composition are predictors of whether the effect on productivity dominates the discount rate effect, or vice-versa.  Since households with more and younger members are better able to reallocate labor to cope with productivity shocks, the discount rate impact dominates for these households and health improvements lead to greater levels of conservation.  In smaller families with less substitutable labor, the productivity impact dominates and health improvements lead to greater environmental degradation"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Title from PDF file as viewed on 3/31/2011.

Includes bibliographical references.

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