Why is Dropping Out of High School Bad? Dropouts and Sexually Transmitted Infections

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Mark Anderson and I just finished a paper looking at one pathway through which dropping out of school might affect future life outcomes. The paper is "Why is Dropping Out of High School Bad? Dropouts and Sexually Transmitted Infections". The abstract for the paper is:

People who drop out of high school fare worse in many aspects of life. We analyze whether there is a causal effect of dropping out of high school on the probability of contracting a sexually transmitted infection (STI). Previous studies on the relationship between dropout status and sexual outcomes have not empirically addressed self-selection effects. Using individual fixed effects estimations we find strong evidence that dropping out increases the risk of contracting an STI for females. Furthermore, we present evidence illustrating differences between the romantic partners of dropouts versus enrolled students. These differences suggest that female dropouts may be more susceptible to contracting STIs because they partner with significantly different types of people than non-dropouts. These results point to a previously undocumented benefit of encouraging those at risk of dropping out to stay in school longer.

Pacific Conference for Development Economics (PacDev)

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I presented my paper on family planning in Ethiopia (joint with Kathleen Beegle and Luc Christiaesen, both from the World Bank) at the 8th annual Pacific Conference for Development Economics held at UC Berkeley. I also chaired a session on "Local Economic Shocks and Risk Sharing." As usual the conference was well attended and Ted Miguel did a great job at putting together a very nice conference.

CSDE seminar presentation on family planning in Ethiopia

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I am presenting my paper "Family Planning and Fertility: Estimating Program Effects using Cross-sectional Data" today at the CSDE seminar series. The seminar runs from 12.30 to 1.30 PM and is at Thomson Hall, rm 125. You can find the current version of the paper here. The paper is joint with Kathleen Beegle and Luc Christiaensen. The abstract is:

This paper uses a novel method of identifying the effects of a family planning program when there is endogenous program placement and only cross-sectional data are available, a situation common in many developing countries. Using data from Ethiopia we find that access to family planning substantially reduces the number of children ever born for women without education; the reduction is especially pronounced for women younger than 20 and older than 30. Completed fertility, measured as children ever born for women aged 40 to 45, falls by more than one birth with access to family planning. These effects are statistically significant and substantially larger than previous studies have found. For women who have gone to school there is no evidence of an impact of family planning on fertility. Based on a relative small reduction in child mortality we argue that the effect on fertility is due to family planning access and not the concurrent presence of health facilities. Finally, family planning access reduces unwanted fertility, especially for older women.

New version of Sex Selective Abortions, Fertility and Birth Spacing

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I have revised and shorten my paper on sex selective abortions in India. You can find the new version here. I have also split off the appendix with additional figures. The appendix is available here. Abstract:

Previous research on sex selective abortions has ignored the interactions between fertility, birth spacing and sex selection. This paper presents a novel approach that jointly estimates the determinants of sex selective abortions, fertility and birth spacing, using data from India's National Family and Health Surveys. For well educated Indian women the predicted number of abortions during childbearing is six percent higher after sex selection became illegal than before while their predicted fertility is eleven percent lower and around replacement level. Women with less education have substantially higher fertility and do not appear to use sex selection.

Podcast on my sex selective abortion research

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I did a podcast with CSDE's Information Core Director, David Hyllegaard, on my recent research on the relation between fertility, birth spacing and the use of sex selective abortions in India. The announcement is at http://csde.washington.edu/news/notices/noticesPodcast_CPortner.shtml. There you can either download the MP3 file or see directions on how to get the podcast through iTunes.

Sex Selective Abortions, Fertility and Birth Spacing

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My paper on sex selective abortions in India is now available here. The abstract is below:

This paper presents a novel approach to estimating the determinants of sex selective abortions, using individual level data on fertility, birth spacing and birth outcomes. The decisions on fertility, abortions and birth spacing are closely related but have received little empirical attention. Theory predicts that lower fertility leads to more sex selective abortions, but abortions also increase the space between births and the decision to use sex selection may change with the distance from last birth. Using data from three rounds of the Indian National Family and Health Survey, low fertility women are shown to use sex selective abortions, whereas households with low cost of children do not. Despite legal efforts to curtail sex selective abortions, use is increasing over time. For women with eight or more years of education, the number of sex selective abortions expected during their childbearing has gone up by six percent from 1985-1994 to 1995-2006 for both urban and rural women. At the same time their predicted fertility has fallen to below replacement level for urban women and only slightly above for rural women. Finally, ignoring birth spacing leads to bias when censoring is important.

Natural Hazards and Child Health

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My paper on disasters and their effects on child health is now available on-line. The abstract for the paper is:

This paper examines how the occurrence of natural disasters affect health status of children using data from Guatemala. Despite a large literature on child health there is relatively little work on how shocks from natural hazards affect the health of children. Using three rounds of DHS data combined with a long time series on the timing and location of weather shocks the paper estimates the impact of several types of natural disasters on child health, controlling for time and area fixed effects. Child health is proxied by height for age and weight for height and direct information on recent symptoms of illness. The effect of shocks from these hazards on the long-term health of children are negative and often very large; each shock reduces height for age by between 0.1 and 0.2 standard deviations. Indigenous children are affected more than non-indigenous children.

Determinants of Sex Selective Abortions

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I presented my paper "The Determinants of Sex Selective Abortions" at the NEUDC conference at Tufts University in Boston 7 November and at University of Copenhagen and University of Aarhus in Denmark in the beginning of December. The paper is still work in progress but a working paper version should be available soon. Until then the presentation is here and the abstract below.

Over the last decades many countries have seen a significant shift in the sex ratio at birth as techniques for pre-natal sex determination have become more widely available. Despite this there has been relatively little research on what determines the use of sex selective abortions at the individual level. A major impediment to analysing determinants of sex selective abortions is the absence of reliable direct information on individuals' use of pre-natal sex determination and abortions, which means that information have to be inferred from other observed outcomes. Previous studies have used the sex of children born and estimated which factors affect the likelihood of having a boy at a given parity. I argue that this method fails to address the close relationship between fertility, birth spacing and the use of sex selective abortions, and leads to biased estimates and low power in the estimations. To examine the determinants of the use of sex selective abortions I therefore estimate a competing risk hazard model, which directly incorporates both fertility and abortion decisions and the potential censoring of birth spacing. This is done using data from the three rounds of the Indian National Family and Health Survey. The results show that women who are likely to want fewer children are significantly more likely to be using sex selective abortions and that these numbers are substantially larger than previously found. Furthermore, contrary to resent research this paper finds no evidence of declining use of sex selective abortions; in fact, sex selective abortions appear to have increased for parity two, once one controls for censoring.

Does the flu vaccine prevent deaths?

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The Atlantic has a very nice article summarising the discussion of whether the flu vaccine prevents death among older people. The basic problem in evaluating interventions like these is self-selection, which can make "cohort studies" unreliable. Not really news to most economists, but it seemed to have created quite a fire storm among public health and MD researchers. A very worthwhile read.

Whether this season’s swine flu turns out to be deadly or mild, most experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before we’re hit by a truly devastating flu pandemic—one that might kill more people worldwide than have died of the plague and aids combined. In the U.S., the main lines of defense are pharmaceutical—vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread of flu and prevent people from dying from it. Yet now some flu experts are challenging the medical orthodoxy and arguing that for those most in need of protection, flu shots and antiviral drugs may provide little to none. So where does that leave us if a bad pandemic strikes?