Modelling Heaped Duration Data: An Application to Neonatal Mortality

Wiji Arulampalam, Valentina Corradi () and Daniel Gutknecht ()
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Valentina Corradi: University of Surrey

No 8493, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In 2005, the Indian Government launched a conditional cash-incentive program to encourage institutional delivery. This paper studies the effects of the program on neonatal mortality using district-level household survey data. We model mortality using survival analysis, paying special attention to the substantial heaping present in the data. The main objective of this paper is to provide a set of sufficient conditions for identification and consistent estimation of the baseline hazard accounting for heaping and unobserved heterogeneity. Our identification strategy requires neither administrative data nor multiple measurements, but a correctly reported duration and the presence of some flat segments in the baseline hazard which includes this correctly reported duration point. We establish the asymptotic properties of the maximum likelihood estimator and provide a simple procedure to test whether the policy had (uniformly) reduced mortality. While our empirical findings do not confirm the latter, they do indicate that accounting for heaping matters for the estimation of the baseline hazard.

Keywords: measurement error; heaping; discrete time duration model; neonatal mortality; parameters on the boundary (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C12 C21 C24 C41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2014-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published - published in: Journal of Econometrics, 2017, 200, (2), 363-377.

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Related works:
Journal Article: Modeling heaped duration data: An application to neonatal mortality (2017)
Working Paper: Modelling Heaped Duration Data: An Application to Neonatal Mortality (2014)
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