Understanding the Effects of Siblings on Child Mortality: Evidence from India

Gerald Makepeace and Sarmistha Pal

HEW from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper examines the efffect of siblings on child mortality in the Indian state of West Bengal arguing that prior and posterior spacing between consecutive siblings are important measures of the intensity of competition among siblings for limited resources. Parental decisions regarding spacing is endogenous to allocation of resources though available estimates of child mortality largely ignore it. To correct for this possible endogeneity bias, we allow for family specific unobserved heterogeneity and model birth spacing and child mortality as correlated processes within a sequential framework. These corrected estimates suggest: (a) the hazard of prior spacing may increase while that of posterior spacing decrease with mother’s literacy and household assets. (b) the chances of child survival increase with an increase in both prior and posterior birth interval but decrease with the birth of a twin. (c) prior and posterior birth intervals have different effects on young boys and girls, which, in turn, reflect the nature of decisions made by resource constrained parents characterised by pro-male bias.

Keywords: Sibling competition; Age and gender composition; Birth spacing; Child mortality; Pro-male bias; Unobserved heterogeneity. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 I12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2005-09-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-dev and nep-hea
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 35. Revised version
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/hew/papers/0509/0509010.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Understanding the effects of siblings on child mortality: evidence from India (2008)
Working Paper: Understanding the Effects of Siblings on Child Mortality: Evidence from India (2006)
Working Paper: Understanding the Effects of Siblings on Child Mortality: Evidence from India (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwphe:0509010

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HEW from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).