This paper studies the impact of Thailand's Universal Health Coverage Scheme (UCS) on households' consumption and savings by using a synthetic panel data approach. Using difference-in-differences estimation, this study finds that, in the short run, the UCS had little or no impact on either households' savings or households' consumption expenditures. In the long run, the UCS still had no effect on savings (unless savings is defined to include consumption of durable goods), but there is evidence of an increase in consumption, especially consumption of durable goods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe estimate the impact of international child sponsorship on adult income and wealth of formerly sponsored children using data on 10,144 individuals in six countries. To identify causal effects, we utilize an age-eligibility rule followed from 1980 to 1992 that limited sponsorship to children 12 years old or younger when the program was introduced in a village, allowing comparisons of sponsored children with older siblings who were slightly too old to be sponsored. Estimations indicate that international child sponsorship increased monthly income by $13-17 over an untreated baseline of $75, principally from inducing higher future labor market participation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGiven its modest position as a lower-middle income country, Vietnam stands out from the rest of the world with its remarkable performance on standardized test scores, school enrollment, and completed years of schooling. We provide an overview of the factors behind this exemplary performance both from an institutional viewpoint and by analyzing several different data sources, some of which have rarely been used. Some of the highlights are universal primary school enrollment, higher girls' net enrollment rates, and the role of within-commune individual factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe role of psychological attributes such as hope in escaping poverty has attracted increasing attention. Crucial questions include the impact of early development of positive psychological attributes on socioeconomic outcomes, and whether interventions to reduce poverty increase such attributes. We examine the impact of international child sponsorship on the psychology of Indonesian children by employing a novel program evaluation technique-a quantified analysis of children's self-portraits.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper examines - for two developing countries, Vietnam and Peru - whether disadvantaged children learn less than advantaged children when both types of children are enrolled in the same school. This is done by estimating education production functions that contain two school fixed effects for each school, one for advantaged children and one for disadvantaged children. The paper examines six different definitions of advantage, based on household wealth, cognitive skills at age 5, gender, ethnicity (Peru only), maternal education, and nutritional status.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMore than 20 percent of all school-aged children in the United States have vision problems, and low-income and minority children are disproportionately likely to have unmet vision care needs. Vision screening is common in U.S.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe examine the role of information in understanding the differential effects of income on the demand for health. In the health capital framework of Grossman (JPE, 1972), we derive the testable hypotheses that individuals adjust their diet in a healthier direction upon receiving negative health information, and that the effect is greater for richer individuals. Based on unique Chinese longitudinal data and a regression discontinuity design that exploits the exogenous cutoff of systolic blood pressure in the diagnosis of hypertension, we find that, upon receiving hypertension diagnosis, individuals reduce fat intake significantly, and richer individuals reduce more.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFYouth smoking can biologically reduce learning productivity. It can also reduce youths' expected returns to education and lower their motivation to go to school, where smoking is forbidden. Using rich household survey data from rural China, this study investigates the effect of youth smoking on educational outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany children younger than 5 years in developing countries are exposed to multiple risks, including poverty, malnutrition, poor health, and unstimulating home environments, which detrimentally affect their cognitive, motor, and social-emotional development. There are few national statistics on the development of young children in developing countries. We therefore identified two factors with available worldwide data--the prevalence of early childhood stunting and the number of people living in absolute poverty--to use as indicators of poor development.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnalysis of the impact of child health and nutrition on subsequent school performance is hampered by many difficulties. Research using retrospective data is complicated by the possibility that unobserved factors may determine both nutrition and education outcomes, which will generate correlation between these two outcomes that is not necessarily causal. Randomized trials offer a clearer method for identifying causal relationships, but they are relatively rare and encounter several difficulties in practice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF© LitMetric 2025. All rights reserved.