Seminar: Mosquito-borne disease and newborn health
Dr Viviane Sanfelice from Temple University will be joining us by Zoom, offering insights into ‘Mosquito-borne disease and newborn health‘
While mosquito-borne diseases are currently most prevalent in mid-latitude countries, rising global temperatures are expanding their range. This paper investigates whether one such disease, dengue, harms newborns. Health at birth has been shown to impact economic outcomes throughout life. The empirical design exploits variation in lagged dengue rates in a town’s closest neighbors and largest trading partner. The underlying source of exogeneity in this variation comes from two components: the uneven allocation, across municipalities, of funding to combat the mosquito vector and random weather patterns. Past disease rates in adjacent areas are used as instruments for the dengue rate in a newborn’s municipality of residence. Using administrative individual data from birth records in Brazil, I find that a one standard deviation increase in the incidence of dengue in the third trimester of gestation reduces birth weight by 0.75grams on average. The effect is more pronounced for baby girls and for children of more educated mothers. Moreover, there seems to exist a positive effect of dengue exposure during the early stages of gestation among children of mothers that do not receive scheduled prenatal care. The likely channel is that these women access pregnancy resources as a consequence of seeking medical treatment for dengue.
Viviane is an applied economist working on topics in labour economics, health economics, and the economics of crime. She uses both reduced form and structural methods to conduct causal inference for relevant questions of policy interest. Her previous work has explored how universal public childcare impacts female labor force participation using administrative data from Brazil, how local crime rates are impacted by safe-street initiatives at the neighbourhood level, among other work. She received a PhD from the University of Rochester in 2019.
We'll be asking all to mute their microphones during the presentation, but to switch video settings on where possible, so that our presenter can see their audience. Questions and discussion will be invited from the audience at several points during the presentation.
At CHE, we are working on running as many of our seminars as possible online while COVID-19 remains an obstacle to getting together. As we will be working with experts and colleagues in other parts of the world there will be some movement in the times and days that seminars run to take into account different time zones and availabilities.
If you would like to be on our seminar email list, please be directly in contact by email to shannon.stanwell@monash.edu.
Hope to see you there!
Event Details
- Date:
- 22 April 2020 at 9:00 am – 10:00 am
- Venue:
- Webinar - https://monash.zoom.us/j/804286169
- Categories:
- Health Economics
Description
Dr Viviane Sanfelice from Temple University will be joining us by Zoom, offering insights into ‘Mosquito-borne disease and newborn health‘
While mosquito-borne diseases are currently most prevalent in mid-latitude countries, rising global temperatures are expanding their range. This paper investigates whether one such disease, dengue, harms newborns. Health at birth has been shown to impact economic outcomes throughout life. The empirical design exploits variation in lagged dengue rates in a town’s closest neighbors and largest trading partner. The underlying source of exogeneity in this variation comes from two components: the uneven allocation, across municipalities, of funding to combat the mosquito vector and random weather patterns. Past disease rates in adjacent areas are used as instruments for the dengue rate in a newborn’s municipality of residence. Using administrative individual data from birth records in Brazil, I find that a one standard deviation increase in the incidence of dengue in the third trimester of gestation reduces birth weight by 0.75grams on average. The effect is more pronounced for baby girls and for children of more educated mothers. Moreover, there seems to exist a positive effect of dengue exposure during the early stages of gestation among children of mothers that do not receive scheduled prenatal care. The likely channel is that these women access pregnancy resources as a consequence of seeking medical treatment for dengue.
Viviane is an applied economist working on topics in labour economics, health economics, and the economics of crime. She uses both reduced form and structural methods to conduct causal inference for relevant questions of policy interest. Her previous work has explored how universal public childcare impacts female labor force participation using administrative data from Brazil, how local crime rates are impacted by safe-street initiatives at the neighbourhood level, among other work. She received a PhD from the University of Rochester in 2019.
We'll be asking all to mute their microphones during the presentation, but to switch video settings on where possible, so that our presenter can see their audience. Questions and discussion will be invited from the audience at several points during the presentation.
At CHE, we are working on running as many of our seminars as possible online while COVID-19 remains an obstacle to getting together. As we will be working with experts and colleagues in other parts of the world there will be some movement in the times and days that seminars run to take into account different time zones and availabilities.
If you would like to be on our seminar email list, please be directly in contact by email to shannon.stanwell@monash.edu.
Hope to see you there!