The Effects of Mexico’s Seguro Popular Health Insurance on Infant Mortality: An Estimation with Selection on the Outcome Variable

Abstract

This paper estimates the effects of Mexico’s Seguro Popular health insurance on infant mortality during its first 5 years of implementation. It uses data on births reported in the micro sample from Mexico’s 2010 general population census. However, births of surviving children are more likely to be observed than births of non-surviving ones. This selection on the outcome variable is addressed using the weighted exogenous sampling maximum likelihood (WESML) estimator, originally developed for the case of choice-based samples. The results indicate that the program can be expected to reduce Mexico’s infant mortality by close to 5 out of 1,000 births.