The demand for health inputs and the production of birthweight in South Carolina: A latent variable approach.
Item
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Title
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The demand for health inputs and the production of birthweight in South Carolina: A latent variable approach.
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Identifier
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AAI9119608
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identifier
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9119608
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Creator
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Anderson, Richard Terence.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Michael Grossman
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Date
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1991
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Economics, General | Sociology, Individual and Family Studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation applies a theoretical model that estimates both infant health production functions and demand functions for prenatal care in the context of a static economic model of the family and household production. The hypothesis of the model is tested empirically using data on births and abortions in South Carolina during 1986 which was provided by the Office of Vital Records and Public Health Statistics of the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control. The specific aim of the research is to investigate the causes of race-specific birth outcomes and the sources of differences in these outcomes. To accomplish this, race-specific birthweight production functions and prenatal care demand functions that control for self-selection in the resolution of a pregnancy as a live birth or abortion are estimated.;A brief examination of race-specific trends in the problems of neonatal mortality and low birthweight is followed by a review of recent research into these questions and a discussion of some of the methodological problems encountered. The analytical framework is then discussed with particular emphasis on the source of the dominant unobserved determinant of reproductive outcomes and how to measure it. The next section details the sources of the data used and describes each variable that appears in the model. This includes an explanation of the specification, the test for endogeneity, and the identification of the model. The empirical results are presented separately for adults and for teenagers following previous literature. Regardless of race, the results provide significant evidence of the existence of selectivity bias in both the estimation of birthweight production functions and prenatal care demand functions for adults and teenagers. Additionally, the sign pattern of the residual covariances suggest a model that emphasizes the cost of abortion as the dominant unmeasured component of birth outcomes. The results support the importance of recent findings in the field which have emphasized the importance of self-selection in the resolution of a pregnancy.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
