Download Free Three Essays On The Health And Family Behavior Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Three Essays On The Health And Family Behavior and write the review.

This dissertation is comprised of three papers on health and household behavior. Two of the papers focus on the influence of family on health outcomes. The third paper examines household member preferences and their association with outcomes for other individuals within the family unit. The first paper tests the relationship of adult-child and elderly-parent contact frequency on elderly cognitive functioning (dementia) using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The paper examines various mechanisms through which the intensity of contact with adult, nonresident children impacts elderly cognitive functioning. An instrumental variables model is used to account for the endogeneity in the level of parent-child contact. Results indicate a positive association between intensity of contact from nonresident adult children and mothers' cognitive functioning; however, no causal relationship is found suggesting that higher levels of contact are due to selection. The second paper examines the prediction of stated, altruistic, preferences on an individual's revealed preferences, observed intergenerational family transfers. Measures of altruism toward children and parents are constructed, using hypothetical questions in the 1996 wave of the HRS that assess individuals' willingness to transfer income to others, and evaluated for their additional explanatory power, within traditional models of intergenerational transfers, on observable transfer behavior. Results indicate that higher levels of altruistic preferences are associated with higher probabilities of transfers and larger transfer amounts from respondents to children; however, transfers to parents do not appear to be related to the altruism measure. The final paper investigates the link between relationship status and body mass index. There are four hypotheses (selection, protection, social obligation and marriage market) that might explain the relationship between marital status transitions and changes in Body Mass Index (BMI). Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, individual fixed effects models are estimated to examine associations between the change in log BMI, and the incidence of overweight and obesity, and changes in relationship status. There is no support for the marriage protection hypothesis. Rather evidence supports the social obligation and marriage market hypotheses-BMI increases for both men and women during marriage and in the course of a cohabiting relationship.
This dissertation contains three empirical essays that explore the effects of natural disasters and family transitions on long-term child outcomes and short-term parental behavior. The first essay ("Impact of Shocks in Utero and in Early Life on Stunting: the Case of Philippines' Typhoons") assesses the long-term effects of natural disasters early in life on health outcomes, mainly stunting, and explores some of the possible channels causing those long term effects. The second essay ("Effects of Natural Disasters on Fertility Behavior: Evidence of Treatment Heterogeneity") assesses the effects of natural disasters also, typhoons in particular, on fertility behavior, and explores the existence of treatment heterogeneity. Finally, the third essay ("Parents' shared and solo time with children: Composition and correlates") studies different correlates of the composition of parental time investments under the perspective of a child, and explores how that composition changes when parents adapt to the birth of a new child.
Parental behavior has potentially large implications for child health and child economic outcomes. In three essays, I explore two topics: how the health behavior of parents impacts their children's health and wellbeing, and the degree to which policy can alter parental behavior such that child health improves. The first essay examines how cash transfers to pregnant single mothers via the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) improve child birth weight. The second essay shows that cigarette taxes reduce maternal smoking and improve childhood health outcomes. The final essay documents the correlation between parental and teen smoking using the Current Population Survey Tobacco Use Supplement. As a whole, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of how health transmits from parent to child, an important mechanism in the intergenerational transmission of inequality.
Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data, my dissertation investigates several key issues in family economics. The first chapter studies the role of family relocation on children's schooling and youth behavior problems. By exploiting the variation in sibling's age at the time of family relocation, we find no detectable negative effects of family relocation on various children's outcomes. We extend our discussion to the context of school mobility and child outcomes. In the second chapter, we use individual school change history from the NLSY 97 and control for sibling fixed effects to estimate how the variation in children's age at school change would affect a set of outcome variables. We find school change made at age 16-18 would significantly reduce children's education achievement by age 20 and increase their possibility for repeating grade in school. In the third chapter, we examine the impact of family size on maternal health outcomes by exploiting the exogenous change in family size using contraceptive failure as instrument variable. This result indicates that mothers' mental health at age 40 is negatively affected by having additional child while their physical health stays intact.
This work spans the two fields of health economics and health policy and applied microeconomics with a focus on consumer behavior. Each chapter focuses on a separate question and evaluates its consequences and impacts on consumers and society. The questions in this paper identify (1) the optimal health expenditures in society from a theoretical perspective and compare the results with the Medicare reimbursement scheme, (2) the causal impact of the risk perception of COVID-19 on consumption expenditure changes in the U.S., and finally, (3) how a sudden health shock experienced by a family member affects his spouse's healthcare expenditures through the behavioral spillover channel.
BEHAVIORAL PADIATRICS has been developed to provide the primary-care physician with a practical guide to early recognition of an intervention in the significant problems increasingly affecting the emotional health of our children and adolescents. The first part of the volume introduces general concepts of normal development, assessment, and treatment. Part two focuses on specific behavioral pediatric disorders, with particular attention to practical approaches to diagnosis, management, and referral.