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.

Ghana

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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.

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.

Interaction Economics: Instruments that Measure Social-Computational Systems

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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.

Literacy, Skills and Welfare: Effects of Participation in Adult Literacy Programs

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A substantially revised version of "Literacy, Skills and Welfare: Effects of Participation in Adult Literacy Programs" is available. It is joint work with Niels-Hugo Blunch. The abstract is here:

This paper examines the effect of adult literacy program participation on household consumption in Ghana. The adult literacy programs in Ghana are of special interest since they are more comprehensive than standard literacy programs and incorporate many additional topics. We use community fixed effects combined with instrumental variables to account for possible endogenous program placement and self-selection into program participation. For households where none of the adults have completed any formal education we find a substantial, positive and statistically significant effect on household consumption. Our preferred estimate of the effect of participation for households without education is equivalent to a ten percent increase in consumption per adult equivalent. The effects of participation on welfare for other households are smaller and not statistically significant, and become smaller the more educated the household is. We find positive and statistically significant effects of participation on literacy and numeracy rates, although the increases are too small to be the only explanation for the welfare effects. There is also evidence that participants are more likely to engage in market activities and to sell a variety of agricultural goods. Taking account of both direct cost and opportunity cost we argue that the social returns to adult literacy programs are substantial.

Children's Time Allocation, Heterogeneity and Simultaneous Decisions

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My paper on children's time use is now available on-line. The abstract for the paper is:

This paper uses a longitudinal survey from the Philippines with detailed information on family time use to analyse the effects of economic factors on children's time allocation. This is done while taking account of censoring, unobservable family heterogeneity and simultaneous decisions with respect to time spent in different activities. It is shown that there is a statistically significant correlation between unobservable individual and household characteristics when it comes to hours spent working and in school, but that this correlation is substantially smaller than one. Including household heterogeneity leads to substantial changes in the estimated effects of many of the important explanatory variables.