Race-specific prenatal care demand and birthweight production in New York City.
Item
-
Title
-
Race-specific prenatal care demand and birthweight production in New York City.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9510731
-
identifier
-
9510731
-
Creator
-
Warner, Geoffrey Lawrence.
-
Contributor
-
Advisers: Michael Grossman | Theodore Joyce
-
Date
-
1994
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Economics, General | Health Sciences, Public Health
-
Abstract
-
This dissertation estimates prenatal care demand and birthweight production of Non-Hispanic White women, Non-Hispanic Black women, and Hispanic women of any race who are bearing their first child. The goal is to determine the effect, if any, of prenatal care on an infant's weight at birth.;In estimating birthweight production and prenatal care demand, the effects of the mother's unobservable personal characteristics are controlled for using a technique recently developed by Robert Moffitt. Moffitt's innovation involves using time invariant observables to proxy for the unobservable characteristics. It is important to control for maternal unobservables because they may influence both her demand for prenatal care and the weight of her infant. A repeated cross-sectional approach is used. Successful application of Moffitt's technique will allow repeated cross-section data to be treated as panel data and permit the estimation of consistent prenatal care coefficients.;An additional innovation is the expanded definition of prenatal care. The majority of researchers investigating birthweight have used the delay until the first prenatal care visit as an estimate of prenatal care demand and ignored the number of prenatal care visits. Some have used a modification of the Kessner index, which includes the number of obstetrical visits, to estimate prenatal care demand. The number of prenatal care visits is mechanically related to gestation. A pre-term birth necessarily means fewer prenatal care visits but not necessarily less prenatal care demand. This dissertation controls for gestation by comparing the observed number of visits to the number of visits recommended by the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, (ACOG), for a given gestation length. The results indicate that delaying the first prenatal care visit has an insignificant effect on the infant's birthweight. Reducing the number of visits has a significant detrimental effect on the infant's birthweight. Prenatal care delay and the number of prenatal care visits are substitutes in the production of birthweight. The results also indicate that controlling for maternal unobservables using Moffitt's technique improves the estimation of the effect of prenatal care demand on birthweight production.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
