Seminar: Prenatal transfers and infant health
The Centre for Health Economics at Monash Business School invites you to the research webinar 'Prenatal transfers and infant health: Evidence from Spain,' presented by Associate Professor Libertad González (with Sofia Trommlerová) from Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics.
We estimate the impact of a cash transfer targeting women who give birth on their subsequent fertility and their (future) children’s health outcomes at birth, exploiting the introduction of a universal child benefit in Spain in 2007. Using population-wide, individual-level, high-quality administrative data from birth records and a regression discontinuity approach, we find that low-income women who received the benefit were much less likely to have low-birth-weight children, several years down the road. The €2,500 transfer led to a 1.2 and 1.0 pp decline in probability to be born with <2,000 and <1,500 grams among children born in poor households, which represents a 73% and 151% reduction, respectively. We also find a decrease in extreme prematurity in poor households, suggesting that the low-birth-weight effect is due to both lower gestational length and faster intrauterine growth, which might be related to improved maternal nutrition or other maternal behaviors. Previous evidence on the causal effects of cash transfers to poor families on child health and development has been mixed. Some recent research suggests that targeting pregnant women may be more effective than later interventions, given the strong persistence of fetal health effects. Our results suggest that the impact may be stronger if women are targeted even earlier, before conception.
Speaker
Libertad González is an associate professor of Economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. She received her PhD from Northwestern University in 2003, and has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University and Boston University. She is also affiliated with the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) in Bonn. Her research lies in the areas of labor, public, and health economics. She has published in many prestigious journals, including the Journal of the European Economic Association, the Journal of Public Economics, the American Economic Journal-Economic Policy, the Journal of Human Resources, etc. She is currently the holder of an ERC Consolidator grant, with a project focused on estimating the effects of very early interventions on child human capital development.
CHE seminar series
At the Centre for Health Economics, 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:
- 16 September 2020 at 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
- Venue:
- This seminar will take place via Zoom - please email shannon.stanwell@monash.edu to register
- Categories:
- Health Economics
Description
The Centre for Health Economics at Monash Business School invites you to the research webinar 'Prenatal transfers and infant health: Evidence from Spain,' presented by Associate Professor Libertad González (with Sofia Trommlerová) from Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics.
We estimate the impact of a cash transfer targeting women who give birth on their subsequent fertility and their (future) children’s health outcomes at birth, exploiting the introduction of a universal child benefit in Spain in 2007. Using population-wide, individual-level, high-quality administrative data from birth records and a regression discontinuity approach, we find that low-income women who received the benefit were much less likely to have low-birth-weight children, several years down the road. The €2,500 transfer led to a 1.2 and 1.0 pp decline in probability to be born with <2,000 and <1,500 grams among children born in poor households, which represents a 73% and 151% reduction, respectively. We also find a decrease in extreme prematurity in poor households, suggesting that the low-birth-weight effect is due to both lower gestational length and faster intrauterine growth, which might be related to improved maternal nutrition or other maternal behaviors. Previous evidence on the causal effects of cash transfers to poor families on child health and development has been mixed. Some recent research suggests that targeting pregnant women may be more effective than later interventions, given the strong persistence of fetal health effects. Our results suggest that the impact may be stronger if women are targeted even earlier, before conception.
Speaker
Libertad González is an associate professor of Economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. She received her PhD from Northwestern University in 2003, and has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University and Boston University. She is also affiliated with the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) in Bonn. Her research lies in the areas of labor, public, and health economics. She has published in many prestigious journals, including the Journal of the European Economic Association, the Journal of Public Economics, the American Economic Journal-Economic Policy, the Journal of Human Resources, etc. She is currently the holder of an ERC Consolidator grant, with a project focused on estimating the effects of very early interventions on child human capital development.
CHE seminar series
At the Centre for Health Economics, 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!