UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item Inheritance Reform, Female Empowerment, and Intergenerational Effects: Theory and Evidence from India(2022) Ibnat, Fabliha; Leonard, Kenneth L.; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Land ownership is an important determinant of intra-household bargaining power in low-income countries, yet women are systematically barred from inheriting land. Granting equal access to land tenuring has the potential to improve women's ability to make decisions within the household, particularly regarding their children. This dissertation examines the effect of women’s land inheritance rights on fertility and child mortality in India. I explore this topic theoretically and empirically in three main chapters. In the first chapter I develop a household bargaining model in which granting mothers inheritance rights may affect child mortality and fertility through a direct land channel and an indirect human capital channel. The model shows how an exogenous change in inheritance rights decreases fertility and has an ambiguous effect on child mortality for some households due to two competing effects. One is an empowerment effect that results from an increase to women's bargaining power and reduces child mortality. The second is an income effect that increases child mortality and results from an increase in the pooled unearned income of the household. Which effect dominates is an empirical question. In the second chapter I empirically estimate the effect of the reforms as they operate through each channel using quasi-random variation from a natural experiment in which four Indian states enacted equal rights for women to inherit joint family property between 1986 and 1994. I construct difference-in-differences estimators using variation in eligibility across marriage cohorts and religions. Using retrospective life history and fertility history data, hazard model estimates show that the reforms reduced child mortality through the land channel and reduced fertility through the human capital channel. Children with eligible mothers have a 57% lower hazard of dying before age five. Eligible women are more likely to delay their first birth and have a 32% lower hazard of having more than two children. The results correspond to 344,169 children who were saved between the reform passage years and 2005, the survey collection year. In the third chapter I use a different dataset to identify the specific subset of households for which the theoretical model generates an ambiguous prediction. I directly test the prediction using an event study difference-in-differences model that exploits variation in eligibility across states and multiple pre- and post-reform marriage cohorts. I find that household level child mortality decreases by 2.2 percentage points, indicating that the empowerment effect dominates the income effect.Item RACIAL DIFFERENCES IN PROTECTIONS AGAINST PREGNANCY: COMPETING GOALS AND DECISIONS(2018) Young Harrison, Eowna; Kahn, Joan; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Racial disparities in unintended pregnancy are largely related to differences in contraceptive practices. Black women are less likely to use an effective contraceptive and more likely to discontinue a method compared to their White counterparts. More concerning is that the Black-White gap in these protections against unintended pregnancy may have widened over time. Reasons for these racial disparities and the pathways to contraceptive practices that leave at-risk women vulnerable to unintended pregnancy are unexplained This project addresses some of the existing gaps in the literature by using a mixed-methods approach to 1) investigate the various factors contributing to Black-White differences in contraceptive practices over time and 2) explore the contraceptive decision-making of women at high risk of unintended pregnancy. Using multinomial logistic regression and a Fairlie decomposition on data from the National Survey of Family Growth 1988 and 2011-2015 survey cycles, I analyze contraceptive use and effective method choice of young adult women. Results reveal that the Black-White gap in contraceptive practices in 2011-2015 are 2-3 times larger than in 1988. Very few factors were statistically significant at explaining the 13% Black-White difference in 2011-2015. Interviews with Black women in Philadelphia were used to improve our understanding of contraceptive practices that are less effective at protecting against pregnancy. Findings highlight criteria for method selection, concern for STDs, and partner trust as key factors guiding contraceptive practices.Item Childhood Events and Long-Term Consequences(2015) Palloni, Giordano; Galiani, Sebastian; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Health and experiences in early childhood are strongly associated with adult outcomes. In this dissertation, I explore the association in detail with a focus on identifying the causal mechanisms that generate variation in early health and uncovering the parental behaviors that determine whether early health and living conditions evolve into long-term deficits or advantages. In chapter 1, I explore whether pre-conception maternal desire for children of a particular sex has implications for the health of children in Indonesia. I show that a simple fertility stopping model predicts that when a child is born of the mother’s preferred sex, they will receive more resources, and I test this prediction empirically using a longitudinal data set. I find that children born of the mother’s preferred sex are heavier, have a higher body mass index, and experience fewer illnesses. I provide evidence that reductions in subsequent fertility are the primary mechanism for these effects. The existing research measuring the long-term implications of early childhood conditions frequently fails to identify the mechanisms through which early deficits become life-long disadvantages. In chapter 2, I examine one instance where deficits may matter for long-term well-being. Using data from Indonesia, I find that when third trimester rainfall is fifty percent higher than expected, birth weight and relative size are approximately .23 standard deviations higher. Despite this early advantage, I find no persistent positive impact fifteen years later. However, parental investment appears to be negatively influenced by in utero exposure to rainfall, suggesting that parents compensate for early health conditions. To date, research on the long-term effects of childhood participation in subsidized housing has been limited by the lack of suitable identification strategies and appropriate data. In chapter 3, I, along with my co-authors, create a new, national-level longitudinal data set on housing assistance and labor market earnings to explore how children’s housing affects their later employment and earnings. We find that while naïve estimates suggest there are substantial negative consequences to childhood participation in subsidized housing, household fixed-effects specifications attenuate these negative relationships for some demographic groups and uncover positive and significant effects for others.Item Essays on Female Empowerment and Its Health Consequences in West Africa(2012) Orfei, Alessandro Emilio; Cropper, Maureen L; Lafortune, Jeanne; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Part 1: The Impact of Female Empowerment on Men's Extramarital Sexual Behavior: Evidence from West Africa Improving women's bargaining power to negotiate safer sex with their partner is widely seen as fundamental to reducing women's vulnerability to HIV infection, although little causal evidence has been provided. This paper uses exogenous variation in a determinant of female bargaining power, women's kin support, to identify the causal effect of women's empowerment on men's extramarital sexual behavior. I establish the relevance of kin support shocks for measures of bargaining power such as women's reported decision-making authority over major and daily household purchases, women's healthcare, and household cooking decisions. Reduced form estimates indicate that having one more adult male sibling alive leads to a decrease of 1.3 percent in the probability of her husband's extramarital behavior. However, the number of living adult female siblings does not influence her husband's behavior. A measure of shocks to kin support, captured by the death of a woman's young siblings, is shown to increase her husband's extramarital behavior. The kin support measures are balanced across observables and results are robust to excluding households in which women's relatives reside, as well as alternate definitions of the kin support measures. This suggests that a woman's bargaining power within the household does influence the likelihood of her husband's extramarital sexual behavior, and thus her risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease. Part 2: Kin Support, Female Bargaining Power, and Fertility Do decreases in a woman's bargaining power relative to her husband lead to higher fertility? This paper attempts to answer this question in the context of West Africa using shocks over time to a determinant of a woman's bargaining power, her kin support, to identify the causal effect. Kin support shocks are captured by deaths of a woman's young siblings, which are argued to be an indication that the woman's natal family has suffered a negative shock. The shocks are shown to be relevant across couples for women's reported household decision-making authority. I exploit differences in the timing of the shocks across couples over time to estimate how changes in a woman's bargaining power impact a couple's fertility. A couple is on average 2.5 percentage points more likely to have a child in any given year after the woman has experienced an additional post-marriage young sibling death. The effect is robust to removing village-year and country-cohort-year effects among other controls. Analysis of the dynamics of fertility changes relative to the timing of the shocks support the validity of the findings.Item TESTING ECONOMIC MODELS OF HOUSEHOLD RESOURCE ALLOCATION(2005-07-29) Caceres-Delpiano, Julio F.; Sanders, Seth; Evans, William; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the role of household resource allocation on individual human capital accumulation. The main contributions of the dissertation is providing evidence first that families play an active role on individual investment and second that cost and benefit within the household are not shared evenly among members. First, using multiple births as an exogenous shift in family size, I investigate the impact of the number of children on child investment and child well-being. Using data from the 1980 US Census Five-Percent Public Use Micro Sample, 2SLS results demonstrate that parents facing a change in family size reallocate resources in a way consistent with Becker's Quantity and Quality model. A larger family generated by a twin on a later birth reduces the likelihood that older children attend private school, increases the likelihood that children share a bedroom, reduces the mother's labor force participation, and increases the likelihood that parents divorce. The impact of family size on measures of child wellbeing, such as educational attainment, the probability of not dropping out of school and teen pregnancy is, however, less clear. The results do indicate that for both measures of child investment and child well being, the 2SLS estimates are statistically distinguishable from OLS estimates indicating an omitted variables bias in the single equation model. Second, using data from the National Health Interview (NHIS) and Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), I examine the effect of female employment and predictors of obesity for married men and women. I use the fact that there is a clear relationship between female labor force participation (FLFP) and age structure of children in the household in order to identify the impact of FLFP. When children are small mothers tend to stay at home; later when children start kinder garden or school mothers are able to come back to paid activities. I find that for married men with less than high school, female employment raises their Body Mass Index (BMI). However I do not find evidence that female employment increases women's BMI or the likelihood of obesity.