The Library

The linked survival prospects of siblings : evidence for the Indian states

Tools

Arulampalam, Wiji and Bhalotra, Sonia. (2008) The linked survival prospects of siblings : evidence for the Indian states. Population Studies, Vol.62 (No.2). pp. 171-190. ISSN 0032-4728

Preview

PDF
WRAP_Arulampalam_http_pdfserve_informaworld_com_Pdf_AddCoversheet_xm_mnt_pdfserve_pdfserve_984499_751308121_794525784.pdf - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader
Download (197Kb)

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00324720802000176

Abstract

This paper reports an analysis of micro-data for India that shows a high correlation in infant mortality among siblings. In 13 of 15 states, we identify a causal effect of infant death on the risk of infant death of the subsequent sibling (a scarring effect), after controlling for mother-level heterogeneity. The scarring effects are large, the only other covariate with a similarly large effect being mother’s (secondary or higher) education. The two states in which evidence of scarring is weak are Punjab, the richest, and Kerala, the socially most progressive. The size of the scarring effect depends upon the sex of the previous child in three states, in a direction consistent with son-preference. Evidence of scarring implies that policies targeted at reducing infant mortality will have social multiplier effects by helping avoid the death of subsequent siblings. Comparison of other covariate effects across the states offers some interesting new insights.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman
Divisions:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Economics
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Infants -- Mortality -- India, Brothers and sisters -- India
Journal or Publication Title:	Population Studies
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
ISSN:	0032-4728
Date:	July 2008
Volume:	Vol.62
Number:	No.2
Page Range:	pp. 171-190
Identification Number:	10.1080/00324720802000176
Status:	Peer Reviewed
Access rights to Published version:	Open Access
Description:	Final version (published as open access).
References:	Aizer, Anna and Janet Currie. 2004. Networks or neighborhoods? Correlations in the use of publicly-funded maternity care in California, Journal of Public Economics 88(12): 2573-2585. Altonji, Joseph G. and Thomas A. Dunn. 1996. Using siblings to estimate the effect of school quality on wages, The Review of Economics and Statistics 78(4): 665-671. Andrews, Donald W. K. 2001. Testing when a parameter is on the boundary of the maintained hypothesis, Econometrica 69(3): 683-734. Arulampalam, Wiji and Sonia Bhalotra. 2004. Inequality in infant survival rates in India: identification of statedependence effects. Discussion Paper 04/558, Department of Economics, University of Bristol. Arulampalam, Wiji and Sonia Bhalotra. 2006. Sibling death clustering in India: state dependence vs unobserved heterogeneity, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A 169(4): 829-848. Behrman, Jere R. and Barbara L. Wolfe. 1984. The socioeconomic impact of schooling in a developing country, The Review of Economics and Statistics 66(2): 296-303. Bhalotra, Sonia and Arthur van Soest. 2008. Birth-spacing, fertility and neonatal mortality in India: dynamics, frailty and fecundity, Journal of Econometrics 143(2): 274-290. Black, Robert E., Saul S. Morris, and Jennifer Bryce. 2003. Where and why are 10 million children dying every year?, Lancet 361(9376): 2226-2234. Bolstad, William M. and Samuel O. Manda. 2001. Investigating child mortality in Malawi using family and community random effects: a Bayesian analysis, Journal of the American Statistical Association 96(453): 12-19. Bongaarts, John and Robert G. Potter. 1983. Fertility, Biology and Behaviour: An Analysis of the Proximate Determinants. New York: Academic Press. Butcher, Kristin F. and Anne Case. 1994. The effect of sibling sex composition on women’s education and earnings, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 109(3): 531-563. Chamberlain, Gary. 1984. Panel data, in S. Griliches and M. Intriligator (eds.), Handbook of Econometrics. Amsterdam: North-Holland, pp. 1247-1318. Claeson, Mariam, Eduard Bos, Tazim Mawji, and Indra Pathmanathan. 2000. Reducing child mortality in India in the new millennium, Bulletin of the World Health Organisation 78(10): 1192-1199. Cleland, J. G. and Zeba A. Sathar. 1984. The effect of birth spacing on childhood mortality in Pakistan, Population Studies 38(3): 401-418. Curtis, Sian L., Ian Diamond, and John W. McDonald. 1993. Birth interval and family effects on post-neonatal mortality in Brazil, Demography 33(1): 33-43. Das Gupta, Monica. 1990. Death clustering, mothers’ education and the determinants of child mortality in rural Punjab, India, Population Studies 44(3): 489-505. Davanzo, Julie and Anne R. Pebley. 1993. Maternal depletion and child survival in Guatamala and Malaysia, RAND Labor and Population Program Working Papers 93-18. Rand: Santa Monica CA. Dreze, Jean and Amartya Sen. 1997. Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gang, Ira N., Kunal Sen, and Myeong-Su Yun. 2002. Caste, ethnicity and poverty in rural India. Discussion Paper No. 629. Bonn: IZA. Government of India. 2003. Economic Survey: 2002-2003. Guo, Guang. 1993. Use of sibling data to estimate family mortality effects in Guatemala, Demography 30(1): 15- 32. Heckman, James J. 1981. The incidental parameters problem and the problem of initial conditions in estimating a discrete time-discrete data stochastic process, in Charles F. Manski and Daniel L. McFadden (eds.), Structural Analysis of Discrete Data with Econometric Applications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 114-178. Heckman, James J. and Burton Singer. 1984. A method for minimizing the impact of distributional assumption in econometric models for duration data, Econometrica 52(2): 271-320. Heckman, James J., V. Joseph Hotz, and James R. Walker. 1985. New evidence on the timing and spacing of births, American Economic Review 75(2): 179-184. IIPS and ORC Macro. 2000. National Family Health Survey (NFHS-2) 1998-9: India. Mumbai: International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) and Calverton: ORC Macro. Kaestner, Robert. 1997. Are brothers really better? Sibling sex composition and achievement revisited, Journal of Human Resources 32(2): 250-284. Kennedy, Kathy I. and Cynthia M. Visness. 1992. Contraceptive efficacy of lactational amenorrhoea, Lancet 339(8787): 227-230. Lancet. 2003. Special issues on Child Survival, Volumes 359-363. Manski, Charles F. 1995. Identification Problems in the Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Miller, Barbara D. 1981. The Endangered Sex: Neglect of Female Children in Rural North India. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Moffitt, Robert A. 2004. Policy interventions, low-level equilibria and social interactions, in Steven N. Durlauf and H. Peyton Young (eds.), Social Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Narendranathan, Wiji and Peter Elias. 1993. Influences of past history on the incidence of youth unemployment: empirical findings for the UK, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 55(2): 161-185. Neumark, David and Sanders Korenman. 1994. Sources of bias in women’s wage equations: results using sibling data, The Journal of Human Resources 29(2): 379-405. Neyman, J. and Elizabeth L. Scott. 1948. Consistent estimates based on partially consistent observations, Econometrica 16(1): 1-32. Oettinger, Gerald S. 2000. Sibling similarity in high school graduation outcomes: causal interdependency or unobserved heterogeneity?, Southern Economic Journal 66(3): 631-648. Pinker, Steven. 2002. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press. Preston, Samuel H. 1985. Mortality in childhood: lessons from WFS, in John Cleland and John Hobcraft (eds.), Reproductive Change in Developing Countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 46-59. Rahman, Atif, Zafar Iqbal, James Bunn, Hermione Lovel, and Richard Harrington. 2004. Impact of maternal depression on infant nutritional status and illness: a cohort study, Archives of General Psychiatry 61(9): 946- 952. Rawlings, James S., Virginia B. Rawlings, and John A. Read. 1995. Prevalence of low birth weight and preterm delivery in relation to the interval between pregnancies among white and black women, The New England Journal of Medicine 332(2): 69-74. Rosenzweig, Mark R. and Kenneth I. Wolpin. 1986. Evaluating the effects of optimally distributed public programs: Child health and family planning interventions, The American Economic Review 76(3): 470-482. Rosenzweig, Mark R. and Kenneth I. Wolpin. 1994. Are there increasing returns to the intergenerational production of human capital? Maternal schooling and child intellectual achievement, The Journal of Human Resources 29(2): 670-693. Rutstein, Sean O. 2005. Effects of preceding birth intervals on neonatal, infant and under-five years mortality and nutritional status in developing countries: evidence from the demographic and health surveys, International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics 89(1): S7-S24. Sastry, Narayan. 1997. Family-level clustering of childhood mortality risk in Northeast Brazil, Population Studies 51(3): 245-261. Self, Steven G. and Kung-Yee Liang. 1987. Asymptotic properties of maximum likelihood estimators and likelihood ratio tests under nonstandard conditions, Journal of the American Statistical Society 82(398): 605-610. Solon, Gary, Mary Corcoran, Roger H. Gordon, and Deborah Laren. 1991. A longitudinal analysis of sibling correlations in economic status, The Journal of Human Resources 26(3): 509-534. Stata 8. 2004. Stata Statistical Software. College Station Tx: StataCorp LP. Steer, Robert A., Theresa O. Scholl, Mary L. Hediger, and Richard L. Fischer. 1992. Self-reported depression and negative pregnancy outcomes, Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 45(10): 1093-1099. Stephansson, Olof, Paul W. Dickman, and Sven Cnattingius. 2003. The influence of interpregnancy interval on the subsequent risk of stillbirth and early neonatal death, Obstetrics Gynaecology 102(1): 101-108. Strauss, John and Duncan Thomas. 1995. Human resources: empirical modelling of household and family decisions, in Jere Behrman and T. N. Srinivasan (eds.), Handbook of Development Economics, Volume 3A. Amsterdam: North-Holland, pp. 1883-2023. UNDP. 2003. Human Development Report: Millennium Development Goals: ACompact Among Nations to End Human Poverty. Wooldridge, Jeffrey M. 2002. Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wooldridge, Jeffrey M. 2005. A simple solution to the initial conditions problem in dynamic, nonlinear panel data models with unobserved heterogeneity, Journal of Applied Econometrics 20(1): 30-54. World Bank. 2004. Attaining the Millennium Development Goals in India: How Likely and What will it take to Reduce Infant Mortality, Child Malnutrition, Gender Disparities and Hunger-Poverty and to Increase School Enrolment and Completion? Human Development Unit, South Asia Region, April. Zenger, Elizabeth. 1993. Siblings’ neonatal mortality risks and birth spacing in Bangladesh, Demography 30(3): 477-488.
URI:	http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/195