Maternal education and child height

Economic Development and Cultural Change

Volumn 47, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 420-439

  Handa, Sudhanshu ^a  

^a INTERNATIONAL FOOD POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CHILD DEVELOPMENT; MOTHERS EDUCATION;

JAMAICA;

EID: 0032937960     PISSN: 00130079     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/452408     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Jere Behrman and Anil Deolalikar, "Health and Nutrition," in Handbook of Development Economics, vol. 1, ed. Hollis Chenery and T. N. Srinivasan (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1988); Duncan Thomas, John Strauss, and Maria-Helena Henriques, "How Does Mother's Education Affect Child Height?" Journal of Human Resources 26 (1991): 183-211; Duncan Thomas and John Strauss, "Prices, Infrastructure, Household Characteristics and Child Height," Journal of Development Economics 39 (1992): 301-32.
2. Jere Behrman and Anil Deolalikar, "Health and Nutrition," in Handbook of Development Economics, vol. 1, ed. Hollis Chenery and T. N. Srinivasan (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1988); Duncan Thomas, John Strauss, and Maria-Helena Henriques, "How Does Mother's Education Affect Child Height?" Journal of Human Resources 26 (1991): 183-211; Duncan Thomas and John Strauss, "Prices, Infrastructure, Household Characteristics and Child Height," Journal of Development Economics 39 (1992): 301-32.
3. Jere Behrman and Anil Deolalikar, "Health and Nutrition," in Handbook of Development Economics, vol. 1, ed. Hollis Chenery and T. N. Srinivasan (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1988); Duncan Thomas, John Strauss, and Maria-Helena Henriques, "How Does Mother's Education Affect Child Height?" Journal of Human Resources 26 (1991): 183-211; Duncan Thomas and John Strauss, "Prices, Infrastructure, Household Characteristics and Child Height," Journal of Development Economics 39 (1992): 301-32.
4. On household and community variables, see Albino Barrera, "The Role of Maternal Schooling and Its Interaction with Public Health Programs in Child Health Production," Journal of Development Economics 32 (1990): 69-91; Thomas and Strauss; John Strauss, "Households, Communities, and Preschool Children's Nutrition Outcomes: Evidence from Rural Côte d'Ivoire," Economic Development and Cultural Change 38 (1990): 231-62. On information processing and acquisition, see Thomas, Strauss, and Henriques; and see Susan Horton, "Child Nutrition and Family Size in the Philippines," Journal of Development Economics 23 (1986): 161-76; Jere Behrman and Barbara Wolfe, "How Does Mother's Schooling Affect Family Health, Nutrition, Medical Care Usage and Household Sanitation?" Journal of Econometrics 36 (1987): 185-204, regarding family background and genetic endowment.
5. On household and community variables, see Albino Barrera, "The Role of Maternal Schooling and Its Interaction with Public Health Programs in Child Health Production," Journal of Development Economics 32 (1990): 69-91; Thomas and Strauss; John Strauss, "Households, Communities, and Preschool Children's Nutrition Outcomes: Evidence from Rural Côte d'Ivoire," Economic Development and Cultural Change 38 (1990): 231-62. On information processing and acquisition, see Thomas, Strauss, and Henriques; and see Susan Horton, "Child Nutrition and Family Size in the Philippines," Journal of Development Economics 23 (1986): 161-76; Jere Behrman and Barbara Wolfe, "How Does Mother's Schooling Affect Family Health, Nutrition, Medical Care Usage and Household Sanitation?" Journal of Econometrics 36 (1987): 185-204, regarding family background and genetic endowment.
6. On household and community variables, see Albino Barrera, "The Role of Maternal Schooling and Its Interaction with Public Health Programs in Child Health Production," Journal of Development Economics 32 (1990): 69-91; Thomas and Strauss; John Strauss, "Households, Communities, and Preschool Children's Nutrition Outcomes: Evidence from Rural Côte d'Ivoire," Economic Development and Cultural Change 38 (1990): 231-62. On information processing and acquisition, see Thomas, Strauss, and Henriques; and see Susan Horton, "Child Nutrition and Family Size in the Philippines," Journal of Development Economics 23 (1986): 161-76; Jere Behrman and Barbara Wolfe, "How Does Mother's Schooling Affect Family Health, Nutrition, Medical Care Usage and Household Sanitation?" Journal of Econometrics 36 (1987): 185-204, regarding family background and genetic endowment.
7. On household and community variables, see Albino Barrera, "The Role of Maternal Schooling and Its Interaction with Public Health Programs in Child Health Production," Journal of Development Economics 32 (1990): 69-91; Thomas and Strauss; John Strauss, "Households, Communities, and Preschool Children's Nutrition Outcomes: Evidence from Rural Côte d'Ivoire," Economic Development and Cultural Change 38 (1990): 231-62. On information processing and acquisition, see Thomas, Strauss, and Henriques; and see Susan Horton, "Child Nutrition and Family Size in the Philippines," Journal of Development Economics 23 (1986): 161-76; Jere Behrman and Barbara Wolfe, "How Does Mother's Schooling Affect Family Health, Nutrition, Medical Care Usage and Household Sanitation?" Journal of Econometrics 36 (1987): 185-204, regarding family background and genetic endowment.
8. Behrman and Wolfe; Barbara Wolfe and Jere Behrman, "Women's Schooling and Children's Health," Journal of Health Economics 6 (1987): 239-54; and Strauss.
9. Significant effects are found by Thomas and Strauss but not by Susan Horton, "Birth Order and Child Nutritional Status: Evidence from the Philippines," Economic Development and Cultural Change 36 (1988): 341-54.
10. Barrera.
11. Thomas, Strauss, and Henriques; and Strauss, concerning the Côte d'Ivoire.
12. Thomas, Strauss, and Henriques (n. 1 above).
13. Duncan Thomas, "Intra-Household Resource Allocation," Journal of Human Resources 25 (1990): 635-64; and Strauss (n. 2 above).
14. Strauss.
15. Gary Becker, A Treatise on the Family, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).
16. Behrman and Deolalikar (n. 1 above); John Strauss and Duncan Thomas, "Empirical Modelling of Household and Family Decisions," Handbook of Development Economics, vol. 3A, ed. Jere Behrman and T. N. Srinivasan (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1995).
17. Among studies that take the production function approach are Mark Rosenzweig and T. P. Schultz, "The Stability of Household Production Technology: A Replication," Journal of Human Resources 23 (1988): 535-49; Behrman and Wolfe (n. 2 above); and Cebu Study Team, "A Child Health Production Function Estimated from Longitudinal Data," Journal of Development Economics 38 (1992): 323-52.
18. Among studies that take the production function approach are Mark Rosenzweig and T. P. Schultz, "The Stability of Household Production Technology: A Replication," Journal of Human Resources 23 (1988): 535-49; Behrman and Wolfe (n. 2 above); and Cebu Study Team, "A Child Health Production Function Estimated from Longitudinal Data," Journal of Development Economics 38 (1992): 323-52.
19. Technically these are quasi-reduced form equations, since they generally include instrumented income as a regresser instead of the exogenous determinants of income (such as productive assets). See Thomas and Strauss (n. 1 above) for a detailed discussion of the issue.
20. See Margaret Grosh, "The Household Survey as a Tool for Policy Change: Lessons from the Jamaican Survey of Living Conditions," World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study Working Paper no. 80 (World Bank, Washington, D.C., 1991) for a detailed description of the data set.
21. Unfortunately, parental height and weight are not available in the Jamaican SLC.
22. WHO, Measuring Change in Nutritional Status (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1983); the international reference is based on a sample of children from the United States.
23. Thomas and Strauss use unearned income, while Harold Alderman and Marito Garcia, "Food Security and Health Security: Explaining the Levels of Nutritional Status in Pakistan," Economic Development and Cultural Change 42 (1994): 485-507, use productive assets and demographic composition as identifying instruments for consumption. Some have argued that these are inappropriate, since unearned income may represent past labor supply and also reflect unobserved productivity and tastes correlated with child health, while the decision to purchase certain durable goods may also be jointly determined with child health.
24. The durable goods include vehicles, stereo equipment, kitchen appliances, washing machines, and sewing machines. The first stage regression results are available from me on request.
25. Households were also asked their travel time to the nearest private hospital and health center, but the responses contained a large number of missing values and so could not be used in the analysis.
26. Thomas, Strauss, and Henriques (n. 1 above).
27. The R-squared for the first stage regression was 31% for the restricted instrument set and 50% for the expanded set, and the set of dummy variables describing dwelling type and walls were each jointly significant at the 1% level.
28. The coefficient estimates for sex, age, age squared, rural, and town are the same for all variants of the model and are suppressed from this and subsequent tables for brevity.
29. Previous studies have also examined the influence of sanitation and sewerage facilities at the barangay, village, or municipal level, and these have been treated as exogenous to the household. See, e.g., Horton, "Child Nutrition and Family Size in the Philippines" (n. 2 above); Strauss (n. 2 above); and Thomas and Strauss (n. 1 above).
30. These results are presented in S. Handa, "More Evidence on the Role of Maternal Education in the Production of Child Height" (Department of Economics, University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica, 1995, mimeographed), and are available from me on request.
31. Thomas, Strauss, and Henriques.
32. For example, Kingston Public Hospital, the largest public health facility on the island, is located in one of the worst slums of downtown Kingston, which poses a security risk to patients and staff.
33. A quadratic term in travel time to public hospital was also tried in the original model but was not significant.
34. There are 258 households with more than one child younger than 5 years, for a total of 603 children and 374 mothers. Of these 603 children, 202 live in the same household but have different mothers.
35. See Jocylin Massiah, "Special Issue on Women in the Caribbean," Social and Economic Studies 35 (1986); and Sudhanshu Handa, "The Determinants of Female Headship in Jamaica: Results from a Structural Model," Economic Development and Cultural Change 44 (1996): 793-815. Child "shifting" or "fostering" (where children are sent to live with friends or relatives due to economic or other constraints) is one manifestation of this social norm.
36. See Jocylin Massiah, "Special Issue on Women in the Caribbean," Social and Economic Studies 35 (1986); and Sudhanshu Handa, "The Determinants of Female Headship in Jamaica: Results from a Structural Model," Economic Development and Cultural Change 44 (1996): 793-815. Child "shifting" or "fostering" (where children are sent to live with friends or relatives due to economic or other constraints) is one manifestation of this social norm.
37. I also constructed a Hausman-test statistic to determine if the seven variables common to both the OLS and fixed-effects equations were significantly different. It, too, did not reject the null hypothesis.
38. See the 1990 special issue of the Journal of Human Resources, vol. 25, no. 4.
39. M. Manser and M. Brown, "Marriage and Household-Decision Making: A Bargaining Analysis," International Economic Review 21 (1980): 31-44; M. McElroy and M. J. Horney, "Nash-Bargained Household Decisions: Toward a Generalization of the Theory of Demand," International Economic Review 22 (1981): 333-49 .
40. M. Manser and M. Brown, "Marriage and Household-Decision Making: A Bargaining Analysis," International Economic Review 21 (1980): 31-44; M. McElroy and M. J. Horney, "Nash-Bargained Household Decisions: Toward a Generalization of the Theory of Demand," International Economic Review 22 (1981): 333-49 .
41. Mark Rosenzweig and T. P. Schultz, "Market Opportunities, Genetic Endowments and Intrafamily Resource Distribution: Child Survival in Rural India," Amerian Economic Review 72 (1982): 803-15; Thomas (n. 8 above).
42. Strauss (n. 2 above) uses two variables that indicate whether the mother of the child is the senior or junior wife of the household head.