Chapter 14 - Household care as a determinant of nutritional status – application of instrumental variable estimation

Abstract

This chapter gives an overview on household care as a determinant of nutritional status that is an application of instrumental variable estimation. One of the strongest and most consistent findings in the health economics literature is the positive relationship between maternal schooling and child health. This empirical relationship has been confirmed across different time periods, countries, and measures of child health. This chapter uses an instrumental variable estimation technique since child-care practices are essentially endogenous. In other words, child-care practices are determined by a set of independent variables and the instrumental variables. This approach is appropriate since child-care practices need to be instrumented out by a set of exogenous variables that are correlated with child-care practices, but are not correlated with the child outcome variable—namely, weight for age. Along with this, there is a discussion on the literature of how child-care and maternal nutritional knowledge are critically important in determining children nutritional outcomes such as weight for age. It also provides the empirical model and discusses the results and presents some concluding remarks and research agendas on child-care practices on child nutritional outcomes.