Suchergebnisse

In the 1990s, the Indonesian government placed over 50,000 midwives in communities throughout the country. We examine how this expansion in health services affected children's height- for-age. To address the problem that midwives were not randomly allocated to communities, the estimation exploits the biology of childhood growth, the timing of the introduction of midwives to communities, and rich longitudinal data. The evidence indicates that the nutritional status of children fully exposed to a midwife during early childhood is significantly better than that of their peers of the same age and cohort in communities without a midwife. These children are also better off than children measured at the same age from the same communities, but who were born before the midwife arrived. Within communities, the improvement in nutritional status across cohorts is greater where midwives were introduced than where they were not. This result is robust to the inclusion of community fixed-effects.

Specially collected data on adults in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics are used to provide evidence on the longer-term effects of Head Start, an early intervention program for poor preschool-age children. Whites who attended Head Start are, relative to their siblings who did not, significantly more likely to complete high school, attend college, and possibly have higher earnings in their early twenties. African-Americans who participated in Head Start are less likely to have been booked or charged with a crime. There is some evidence of positive spillovers from older Head Start children to their younger siblings.

Indonesian women's power relative to that of their husbands is examined to determine how it affects use of prenatal and delivery care. Holding household resources constant, a woman's control over economic resources affects the couple's decisionmaking. Compared with a woman with no assets that she perceives as being her own, a woman with some share of household assets influences reproductive health decisions. Evidence suggests that her influence on service use also varies if a woman is better educated than her husband, comes from a background of higher social status than her husband's, or if her father is better educated than her father‐in‐law. Therefore, both economic and social dimensions of the distribution of power between spouses influence use of services, and conceptualizing power as multidimensional is useful for understanding couples' behavior.