Research >> Child health

Caste prejudice and infection: why a dangerous lack of hygiene persists in government hospitals
- Topics: Caste, Child health, Maternal health, Sanitation
In light of India’s continuing efforts to reduce maternal mortality and make childbirth safer for women, this article explores why government hospitals continue to be dangerously unhygienic, posing serious risk of infection to patients in maternity wards and labor rooms. ...Read More..

The association of early-life exposure to ambient PM2.5 and later-childhood height-for-age in India: an observational study
- Topics: Child health, Climate change, Environment, Height, Pollution
This paper by Dean and Sangita (co-authored with Sagnik Dey, Sourangshu Choundary, Noah Scovronick and Joshua Apte) is the first study to directly estimate the impact of early-life exposure to ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) on child height-for-age at the...Read More..

The child health impacts of coal: evidence from India’s coal expansion
- Topics: Child health, Environment, Height, Pollution
This paper investigates the child health impacts associated with a large coal plant expansion in India. Using place and cohort fixed effects, exposure to a median-sized coal plant at birth is associated with a height deficit of 0.09-0.10 standard deviations....Read More..

This paper argues that while the results of the WASH Benefits trials are important for understanding sanitation intervention and similar programmes, they do not imply that child health would not be improved by a large transition from open defecation to latrine...Read More..

Where Bharat Goes
- Topics: Caste, Child health, Sanitation, Social inequality
This book chapter discusses why rural Indians tend to reject affordable sanitation options, using which many poorer countries in the developing world have either completely eliminated or have successfully reduced open defecation. The practice of open defecation has negative externalities...Read More..

The association between neonatal death and facility birth in regions of India
- Topics: Child health
This paper assesses evidence for the hypothesis that facility births reduce NNM using new data from the National Family Health Survey, 2015-2016. It finds that for babies born outside of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, facility birth is robustly associated with neonatal...Read More..

Local social inequality, economic inequality, and disparities in child height in India
- Topics: Caste, Child health, Social inequality
This paper investigates disparities in child height — an important marker of population-level health — among population groups in rural India. India is an informative context in which to study processes of health disparities because there is wide heterogeneity in...Read More..

Child height in India: Facts and Interpretations from the NFHS-4, 2015-16
- Topics: Child health, Gender, Height, Maternal health, Sanitation, Social inequality
An analysis of child height-for-age using the newly released data from the National Family Health Survey-4 indicates that the average child height increased by about four-tenths of a height-for-age standard deviation between 2005 and 2015. Although important, this increase is...Read More..

Understanding open defecation in rural India: Untouchability, pollution, and latrine pits
- Topics: Caste, Child health, Government programs, Sanitation, Social inequality
Open defecation in rural India presents a puzzle: India has far higher open defecation rates than other developing regions where people are poorer, literacy rates are lower, and water is more scarce. Because open defecation has terrible consequences for health,...Read More..

Intergenerational effects of women’s status: Evidence from child height in joint Indian households
- Topics: Child health, Employment, Height, Social inequality
The hypothesis that a woman's social status has intergenerational effects on the human capital of her children has featured prominently in development policy and social science. Our paper is the first to econometrically identify such an effect. We exploit an...Read More..

Anemia impairs physical and cognitive development in children and reduces human capital accumulation. The prior economics literature has focused on the role of inadequate nutrition in causing anemia. This paper is the first to show that sanitation, a public good,...Read More..

Health externalities of India’s expansion of coal plants: Evidence from a national panel of 40,000 households
- Topics: Child health, Environment, Pollution
Coal power generation is expanding rapidly in India and other developing countries. In addition to consequences for climate change, present-day health externalities may also substantially increase the social cost of coal. Health consequences of air pollution have proven important in...Read More..

Place and child health : The interaction of population density and sanitation behavior in developing countries
- Topics: Child health, Demography, Sanitation
A long literature in demography has debated the importance of place for health, especially children’s health. In this study, we assess whether the importance of dense settlement for infant mortality and child height is moderated by exposure to local sanitation...Read More..

Disease externalities and net nutrition: Evidence from changes in sanitation and child height in Cambodia, 2005–2010
- Topics: Child health, Sanitation
Child height is an important indicator of human capital and human development, in large part because early life health and net nutrition shape both child height and adult economic productivity and health. Between 2005 and 2010, the average height of...Read More..

Village sanitation and child health: Effects and external validity in a randomized field experiment in rural India
- Topics: Child health, Height, Sanitation
Over a billion people worldwide defecate in the open, with important consequences for early-life health and human capital accumulation in developing countries. We report a cluster randomized controlled trial of a village sanitation intervention conducted in rural Maharashtra, India designed...Read More..

Underweight & pregnant: Maternity entitlements and weight gain during pregnancy
- Topics: Child health, Gender, Government programs, Maternal health
Poor maternal nutrition in India is a major cause for concern. The depth of India's maternal nutrition problems is evident in its high neonatal mortality, widespread underweight pre-pregnancy, low weight gain during pregnancy, and high rates of maternal anemia. Poor...Read More..