My student, Mark Anderson was on Hawii Public Radio recently talking about his forthcoming paper in Journal of Health Economics showing that the Montana Meth Project had no discernible effect on meth use once the pre-existing downward trend is taken into account. You can listen to the interview. The paper is available from his home page. Mark will be on the job market this year.
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.
I am co-author on a chapter on "Human Health and Climate Change" in the book "Reducing Poverty, Protecting Livelihoods, and Building Assets in a Changing Climate: Social Implications of Climate Change Latin America and the Caribbean." The book is edited by Dorte Verner and just came out from the World Bank. More information is available from World Bank Publications. Update: You can also read the book through the embedded book below. [issuu layout=http%3A%2F%2Fskin.issuu.com%2Fv%2Flight%2Flayout.xml showflipbtn=true documentid=100708190344-b94b553ea2dc42089e4e36f33afb22a2 docname=9780821382387 username=World.Bank.Publications loadinginfotext=Reducing%20Poverty%2C%20Protecting%20Livelihoods%2C%20and%20Building%20Assets%20in%20a%20Changing%20Climate showhtmllink=true tag=adaptation width=420 height=315 unit=px]
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.
I will be in Ghana from tomorrow until 22 June. Niels-Hugo Blunch and I are working on setting up a randomised evaluations of adult literacy programs in Ghana. Our paper, forthcoming in Economic Development and Cultural Change, explains more about the programs and their effects. Unfortunately, the data were not detailed enough for us to examine why there is a large positive effect of participation. The randomised evaluation is meant to address this question as described in the project summary.
Nalina Varanasi passed her final exam today. The title of her dissertation is "Essays in Labor Economics". She will be taking up a position as a post-graduate fellow at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation here at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Congratulations to Yu-I Peng and Edwin Wong. Both passed their final exams today. Yu-I Peng will be an assistant professor at the Department of Public Finance at National Taipei University in Taiwan and Edwin Wong will take up a post-doc at the VA here in Seattle.
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.
Edwin Wong has been offered a post-doc at the VA Health Services Research and Development Service here in Seattle. Edwin works on issues relating to adult health and mortality using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We have a joint project under way where we look at determinants of mortality and issues of non-response in the HRS.
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.
My paper "Literacy, Skills and Welfare: Effects of Participation in Adult Literacy Programs" (joint with Niels-Hugo Blunch) has been accepted for publication by the Economic Development and Cultural Change. It is tentatively scheduled for publication in July 2011.
I presented my paper on sex selective abortions at the Economic Demography Workshop and at the Population Associations of America's Annual Meeting in Dallas. I also presented my paper on natural hazards and child health in the session on "Environmental Impacts on Population Dynamics and Health" at the PAA meeting.
I presented my paper, The Determinants of Sex Selective Abortions, at the Pacific Development Conference. This year PacDev was held at University of Southern California and John Strauss and Jeff Nugent did an excellent job in organising. More information on the paper is on the post below.
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.
I gave a presentation in our weekly labour/development brown bag series on a NSF grant that I am co-PI on. This is very different from most of the other things I work on, but I think it has great potential. You can find the presentation here.
This project merges the fields of Economics and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) into a new field of Interaction Economics. This field studies the costs and benefits of computer systems that define how people decide to use them. This project makes three contributions that form the basis of Interaction Economics. First, we will scientifically measure the objective, quantitative amount that a user interface motivates or demotivates a user to accomplish a task with it. This capability has broad implications, and our method is faster and cheaper than traditional user studies. Second, we will create economic models of these motivations, predicting how systems of interfaces differentially affect production. Third, we will repeatably experiment with social systems by creating multiple copies of them with controlled and manipulated variables, and running the systems to observe the effects of our changes. These three contributions will let us experimentally optimize current systems, and design new systems, of greater complexity and novelty, with greater certainty of success. Our methodology relies on a novel use of Internet labor markets, specifically Amazon‘s Mechanical Turk, a place where interactive tasks (HCI) meet incentives and markets (Economics). With controlled payments to real people we can simulate and study a wide range of social-computational phenomena that was not possible before.