Publication: Reassessing the differential impact of grandmothers and grandfathers : The Old AgeProgram in Nepal
Loading...
Identifiers
Publication date
2014-04-01
Defense date
Authors
Advisors
Tutors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Impact
Export
Abstract
We study the effects on infant mortality of the introduction in 1995 of a non-contributoryuniversal pension scheme in Nepal known as the Old age Allowance Program. We use cross-sectional data from the 1996 and 2001 Nepal Demographic and Health Surveys. Following astandard diff-in-diffs approach, we find positive and significant effects on survival rates for thepresence in the same household of a female beneficiary while negative and sometimes significanteffects for the presence of a male beneficiary. When we conduct pre-treatment common trendtests, we find that we cannot reject it for the case of the female beneficiaries but we stronglyreject it for the case of male beneficiaries. Following Mora and Reggio (2012), we then propose amore flexible model and identification strategy and find that there are no differences in the femaleand the male beneficiary effects. We interpret these results as suggestive that cross-sectionalanalysis may bias downwards the estimates of the effect of grandfathers because of genderdifferences in endogenous household formation.
Description
Keywords
Infant mortality, difference-in-differences, gender differences