Behrman, Jere R
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Publication The Impact of the PROGRESA/Oportunidades Conditional Cash Transfer Program on Health and Related Outcomes for the Aging in Mexico(2011-10-07) Behrman, Jere R; Parker, Susan W.Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs link public transfers to human capital investment in hopes of alleviating current poverty and reducing its intergenerational transmission. Whereas nearly all studies of their impacts have focused on youth, these CCT programs may also have an impact on aging adults, by increasing household resources or inducing changes in allocations of time of various household members, that may be of substantial interest, particularly given the rapid aging of most populations. This paper contributes to this under-researched area by examining health and work impacts on the aging for the best-known and most influential of these programs, the Mexican PROGRESA/Oportunidades program. For a number of health indicators, the program appears to significantly improve health, with impacts that are larger with a greater time receiving the program. However, most of these health impacts are concentrated on women.Publication Out of Sync? Demographic and Other Social Science Research on Health Conditions in Developing Countries(2010-08-31) Behrman, Jere R; Perez, Nykia M; Behrman, Julia AA framework is presented for considering for what health conditions in developing countries the marginal social benefits of demographic and social science research are likely to be relatively high. Based on this framework, it is argued that the relative current and future predicted prevalence of burdens of different health/disease conditions as measured by Disability-Adjusted-Life-Years (DALYs) represent fairly well some important factors related to the relative marginal social benefits of demographic and social science research on different health conditions. World Health Organization (WHO) DALYs projections for 2005-30 are compared with (a) demographic and other social science studies on health in developing countries during 1990-2005 and (b) presentations at the Population Association of America annual meetings during the same time period. These comparisons suggest that, recent demographic and social science research on health in developing countries has overfocused substantially relatively on HIV/AIDS and underfocused substantially relatively on non-communicable diseases.Publication Resilience, Accelerated Aging and Persistently Poor Health: Diverse Trajectories of Health among the Global Poor(2022-08-01) Kohler, Iliana V; Hoang, Cung Truong; Amin, Vikesh; Behrman, Jere R; Kohler, Hans-PeterObjectives: This study is among the first to document lifecourse trajectories of physical and mental health across adult and older ages (20-70 years) for a poor sub-Saharan African population having faced frequent and sustained adversities. Methods: The 2006-19 waves of the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH) were analyzed using group-based trajectory models (GBTM) to identify trajectories of heath (SF12 mental/physical health and BMI) across the lifecourse. Predictors of trajectory membership were estimated using fractional multinomial logits. Results: Analyses identified three distinct trajectories: (1) good initial mental/physical health that persisted throughout the lifecourse ("resilient aging"); (2) good initial mental and physical health that deteriorated with age ("accelerated aging"); or (3) poor initial mental and physical health with possibly further declines over the lifecourse ("aging with persistently poor health"). Predictors of trajectory group membership included gender, childhood poverty, and schooling. Discussion: Despite lifecourses being characterized by poverty and frequent adversities in this poor population, our analyses identified a sizable group (30%) of resilient individuals who experienced successful aging with good initial health that persisted across the lifecourse and into old age. Accelerated aging was the most common trajectory for SF12 physical and mental health in this poor population, while for BMI, persistently poor health was most common. Men were more likely to enjoy resilient aging than women in terms of physical/mental health, contrary to previous findings from high-income contexts. Other predictors of trajectory membership sometimes confirmed, and sometimes contradicted, hypotheses derived from high-income country studies.Publication Schooling has Smaller or Insignificant Effects on Adult Health in the US than Suggested by Cross-Sectional Associations: New Estimates Using Relatively Large Samples of Identical Twins(2013-12-09) Behrman, Jere R.; Amin, Vikesh; Kohler, Hans-PeterAdult health outcomes and health behaviors generally are strongly associated with schooling attainment. But such associations do not necessarily imply that schooling has causal effects on health outcomes and behaviors of the magnitudes of the associations. Schooling may be proxying for unobserved factors that are related to genetics and family background. Recently several studies have used within-identical (monozygotic, MZ) twins methods to control for those unobserved factors that are shared completely by identical twins. Estimates based on relatively small samples for the US, as well as some larger samples for other countries, suggest that causal impacts of schooling on health outcomes and behaviors are insignificant or much smaller than suggested by cross-sectional associations. This study contributes new estimates of cross-sectional associations and within-MZ causal effects of twins using three relatively large US samples: Mid-Atlantic Twin Registry, Minnesota Twin Registry and NAS-NRC Twin Registry of WWII Military Veterans. The estimates suggest that schooling is significantly associated with numerous health outcomes and behaviors in the US. However if within-MZ twins estimators are used to control for unobserved factors, there is no causal relationship between schooling and better health behaviors. There is some evidence that more schooling causally affects self-reported health and overweight status, net of unobservable cofounders, though not to the extent that cross-sectional associations suggest. Finally, spousal schooling is associated with better health outcomes and behaviors, but there is no evidence of any causal effect.Publication Does Increasing Women's Schooling Raise the Schooling of the Next Generation?(2002-03-01) Behrman, Jere R.; Rosenzweig, Mark R.Publication After-School Tutoring, Household Substitution and Student Achievement: Experimental Evidence from Rural China(2020-01-21) Behrman, Jere R.; Fan, C. Simon; Wei, Xiangdong; Zhang, Hongliang; Zhang, JunsenWorldwide children’s access to after-school learning activities is highly dependent on family backgrounds. Concern over the implications of such activities for child development and educational inequality has led to a global rise of public provision of after-school learning support. However little is known about interactions of public after-school activities and household investments in children’s learning. This paper contributes to the literature on the effects of public inputs on household inputs and student achievement in after-school settings. We build a model that integrates public and private inputs to produce student achievement through two competing mechanisms – diminishing returns to total inputs and complementarity between public and private inputs. When diminishing returns dominate complementarity, the model predicts the substitution away of private inputs due to increases in public inputs for all households, although the extent of crowding-out is smaller and therefore the test score gains are larger for children from disadvantaged family backgrounds facing higher costs of private inputs. We implement a randomized controlled after-school tutoring experiment in rural China where many children are left-behind by both parents and cared for by grandparents. During the program, tutees living with parents reported large and significant reductions in the amount of tutoring received at home, whereas tutees living apart from both parents reported much smaller, and often insignificant, reductions. We find that tutees’ math scores improved significantly, and more for children living without parents, although there is no evidence for improvement in tutees’ endline reading scores.Publication Math Skills and Market and Non-market Outcomes: Evidence From an Amazonian Society(2013-01-01) Undurraga, Eduardo A.; Behrman, Jere R.; Grigorenko, Elena L.; Schultz, Alan; Yiu, Julie; Godoy, Ricardo A.Research in industrial nations suggests that formal math skills are associated with improvements in market and non-market outcomes. But do these associations also hold in a highly autarkic setting with a limited formal labor market? We examined this question using observational annual panel data (2008 and 2009) from 1,121 adults in a native Amazonian society of forager-farmers in Bolivia (Tsimane’). Formal math skills were associated with an increase in wealth in durable market goods and in total wealth between data collection rounds, and with improved indicators of own reported mental health and child health. These associations did not vary significantly by people’s Spanish skills or proximity to town. We conclude that the positive association between math skills and market and non-market outcomes extends beyond industrial nations to even highly autarkic settings.Publication Social Science Methods for Twins Data: Integrating Causality, Endowments and Heritability(2010-01-01) Kohler, Hans-Peter; Behrman, Jere R; Schnittker, JasonTwins have been extensively used in both economic and behavioral genetics to investigate the role of genetic endowments on a broad range of social, demographic and economic outcomes. However, the focus in these two literatures has been distinct: the economic literature has been primarily concerned with the need to control for unobserved endowments—including as an im¬portant subset, genetic endowments—in analyses that attempt to establish the impact of one vari¬able, often schooling, on a variety of economic, demographic and health outcomes. Behavioral genetic analyses have mostly been concerned with decomposing the variation in the outcomes of interest into genetic, shared environmental and non-shared environmental components, with recent multivariate analyses investigating the contributions of genes and the environment to the correlation and causation between variables. Despite the fact that twins studies and the recogni¬tion of the role of endowments are central to both of these literatures, they have mostly evolved independently. In this paper we develop formally the relationship between the economic and behavioral genetic approaches to the analyses of twins, and we develop an integrative approach that combines the identification of causal effects, which dominates the economic literature, with the decomposition of variances and covariances into genetic and environmental factors that is the primary goal of behavioral genetic approaches. We apply this new integrative approach to an illustrative investigation of the impact of schooling on several demographic outcomes such as fertility and nuptiality and health.Publication The Asian Games, Air Pollution and Birth Outcomes in South China: An Instrumental Variable Approach(2021-06-10) Liu, Xiaoying; Hannum, Emily; Behrman, Jere R.; Zhao, Qingguo; Miao, Huazhang; Liang, ZhijiangWe estimate the causal effects of air pollution exposure on low birthweight, birthweight, and prematurity risk in South China, for all expectant mothers and by maternal age group and child sex. We do so by exploiting exogenous improvement in air quality during the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games, when strict regulations were mandated to assure better air quality. We use daily air pollution levels collected from monitoring stations in Guangzhou, the Asian Games host city, and Shenzhen, a nearby control city, between 2009 and 2011. We first show that air quality during the Asian Games significantly improved in Guangzhou, relative to Shenzhen. Further, using birth-certificate data for both cities for 2009 to 2011 and using expected pregnancy overlap with the Asian Games as an instrumental variable, we study the effects of three pollutants (PM10, SO2, NO2) on birth outcomes. Results show that 1) air pollutants significantly reduced average birthweight and increased preterm risk; 2) for birthweight, late pregnancy is most sensitive to PM10 exposure, but there is not consistent evidence of a sensitive period for other pollutants and outcomes; 3) for birthweight, babies of mothers who are at least 35 years old show more vulnerability to all three air pollutants; and 4) male babies show more vulnerability than female babies to PM10 and SO2, but birthweights of female babies are more sensitive than those of male babies to NO2.Publication First-Round Impacts of the 2008 Chilean Pension System Reform(2011-03-01) Berhman, Jere R; Calderon, Maria Cecilia; Mitchell, Olivia S; Vasquez, Javiera; Bravo, DavidChile’s innovative privatized pension system has been lauded as possible model for Social Security system overhauls in other countries, yet it has also been critiqued for not including a strong safety net for the uncovered sector. In response, the Bachelet government in 2008 implemented reforms to rectify this shortcoming. Here we offer the first systematic effort to directly evaluate the reform’s impacts, focusing on the new Basic Solidarity Pension for poor households with at least one person age 65+. Using the Social Protection Survey, we show that targeted poor households received about 2.4 percent more household annual income, with little evidence of crowding-out of private transfers. We also suggest that recipient household welfare probably increased due to slightly higher expenditures on basic consumption including healthcare, more leisure hours, and improved self-reported health. While measured short-run effects are small, follow-ups will be essential to gauge longer-run outcomes.