When More Prenatal Care Looks Like Less: Selection, Information and Maternal and Infant Health

Chien-Tzu Cheng, Shin-Yi Chou and Hsienming Lien

No 36000, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We use Taiwan's 2003 SARS epidemic as a natural experiment, instrumenting prenatal care with gestational exposure to SARS-induced fear that reduced visits by over 20 percent. Adequate prenatal care reduces preventable maternal complications by 3.4 percentage points (26 percent), with no effect on infant outcomes. OLS estimates are perversely signed for maternal complications but overstate benefits for infant outcomes, consistent with competing patient- and provider-driven selection. Mechanism evidence points to prenatal care as a longitudinal information system: repeated contact facilitates detection of evolving risks and generates clinical information that informs delivery decisions, including delivery-mode routing and subsequent management at delivery.

JEL-codes: I12 I18 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-11
Note: EH
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w36000.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
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:nbr:nberwo:36000

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w36000
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().