Category Archives: economics

mother breastfeed and children health

This is an interesting topic: the behavior of mother breastfeed and children health. Yes, it is the topic of a seminar I audited yesterday.

As usual, here is the related information:

Why Do Mothers Breastfeed Girls less than Boys? Evidence and Implications for Child Health in India [click here to download PDF]
Seema Jayachandran (Stanford University)
UPF Labor, Public, and Development Seminar

Well, although I'm a kind of being addicted to theoretical works, this kind of empirical is still attractive.  She analyzed the development of children health with respect to mothor's breastfeed behaviors. As she said, it is like "quality instead of quantity", and mothers are paying more and more attention to ensure the health of their children.

Fortunately, one guy who lives nextdoor to me has been worked in the field of public health for the last year, and he has lived in India for several years, thus before the seminar he told me many things about the real situation in India. In this way, far beyond listening to the seminar itself, I have learned more about public health, or health economics which is really hot now.

The forever pain for an econometric or empirical analysis is the accuracy of data. She was using NFHS (National Family Health Survey) and DHS  (Demographic and Health Survey) data. However, my nextdoor told me that there were some problems in the questionnaire used, which will influence the reliability of the data, or the answer from those women. He doubted whether it would have potential influence on the regression analysis.

It was also interesting to hear that so many audience there had different kinds of interesting questions.  That is partically why I love economics seminars. But still the question for me is that I am still not able to follow all of the presentation. Apparently I need to store more knowledge.

By the way, I also listened to another seminar this week, it is

Misspecification in Models for Trends and Cycles
Andrew Harvey (University of Cambridge)
UPF Occasional Econometric Seminar

Well, it was a theoretical work, but it was theoretical economics, and I have no idea with that. Unfortunately, I went there early and sat down in the second row of the classroom. Therefore, I had to pretend that I was focusing on what he talked about, but in fact I could not understand anything except HP filter. Oh my poor econometrics, and my poor time series analysis. It also proves that I need to learn more to completely understand the top seminars. Carry on!

At last, I'd like to copy some conclusions from Semma's paper here.

  • the duration of breastfeeding negatively correlates with the mother's likelihood of a subsequent birth.
  • breastfeeding increases with birth order; if parents have a preference for sons, then boys are breastfed more than girls; children with older brothers are breastfed more; these gender e ects are smallest for high and low values of birth order
  • breastfeeding the current child helps prevent or delay a subsequent pregnancy, and a subsequent (perhaps unwanted) pregnancy often causes mothers to wean the current child.
  • If contraception crowds out breastfeeding, then policy makers might consider pairing contraceptive campaigns with promotion of breastfeeding or improvements in water quality. Conversely, if contraception enables a mother to breastfeed her children longer because she can space them further apart, then policies that expand access to contraception might have an added bene t of encouraging breastfeeding.

Survival Analysis, health economics and alive economics

This post is only used to record that I have listened to this seminar:

Survival Extrapolation with applications in health economics [click here to download PDF]
Nikos Demiris (Agricultural University of Athens)
UPF Statistics and Operational Research Seminar

However, I didn't understand anything except the exponential equation. I had thought I would understand more, since I know a little about survival analysis (What I have learned on the Chinese R conference), and a little about health economics. But on the seminar I realized that it was beyond my scope of knowledge. Anyway, there were only 4 people (before I showed up), and my dear math teacher Lugosi was there! Lugosi, YOU ARE AMAZING!

Since I didn't actually benefit something from the lecture, it is impossible to leave any comments here. Therefore, I'd like to talk about something about economics. Well, I always wonder whether I can always pick up someone to go to the seminar together with me. It is not important whether you are able to understand what they are saying, but the atmosphere can help you adapt to the way that economists think in. Without doubt, there are only few people who prefer seminars to those time-consuming problem sets. Thus, the final conclusion is that I should go anywhere alone.

I have no right to force anyone to do anything. It's their own choices - and I choose seminars. Maybe it is a bad habit, since it is probable that I cannot get anything useful from a seminar. But I love the way they talk and communicate in the seminar, and I love the different stories that the researchers show in their presentations.

As what I wrote on the front page of this website (www.cloudlychen.net) -  "Love life, love economics", I always regard economics as a living object. Economics is from the real world, not the mathematical equations. Although we need math that complicated enough to describe the economic world specifically, the economics is, and will always be focusing on the real world. Apart from those who are engaging themselves into developing new mathematical methods for economics (e.g. theoretical  econometricians and mathematical economists), who want to explore the world of economics should pay attention to the real life of economics.

Fine, anyway I should judge anything. At least, for me, economics is always alive around everybody and everyday.

comment on Prestigious Law School

This Tuesday was a disaster for me, because I stayed in the classroom and listened to different things for nearly 10 HOURS! But I shouldn't complain anything, anyway it was my own choice.

At that busy and painful day, I listened to a seminar. As usual, here is related information.

Title: The Returns to Attending a Prestigious Law School

Author: Paul Oyer (Stanford University)

UPF Labor, Public, and Development Seminar

Ok, I should admit that I was too tired to follow and focus on all points of the presentation. Anyway, it was a typical empirical work from labor economists, or education. However, the paper is available online here: http://www.econ.upf.edu/docs/seminars/oyer.pdf

Copy some conclusions from his paper:

  • In 2002 and 2007, those lawyers that went to top 10 law schools made, on average, 25% more than those that went to schools ranked 11-20 and over 50% more than those that went to schools ranked 21-100.
  • Graduates of Top 10 schools were also much more likely to work in large law firms in leading law markets.
  • We find that at least a third of the large returns to law school reputation are due to selection, but this selection is almost entirely on a single variable - quality of the undergraduate institution attended.
  • Our results are consistent with a reasonably large causal effect of attending an elite law school, but the exact size of the premium depends varies with assumptions about the role of unobservables.

For anyone interested, please download the paper and read. I was just interested in the topic, and it indicated it is true that "selection" is the main factor, which means those who attend top law schools are expected better than the rest peers. In the other word, they may be also successful even they are in other areas...

investment for marriage

Every Monday means a new week, but my intensive classes always start from Tuesday. Therefore, the best choice for Monday may be to go and listen to the seminars. This afternoon I listened to this presentation:

Marriage as a rat-race: Pre-marital investments and assortative matching
V. Bhaskar (UCL)
UPF Microeconomics Seminar

Well, I should admit his title really attracted me. Although I have somehow realized that marriage has something to do with investment, but due to my poor scope of knowledge, I know nothing about how to build an economic model and explain the investment behaviors that people take for marriage. His model is not complicated, but very persuasive. By assuming the "match" process with probabilities and noises, he explained how the equilibrium exists and what are  (Pareto) efficient conditions. Here it seems meaningless to put some math equations, and what has drawn my interests is that he considered a special case: the unbalanced population in China/parts of India. I was always wondering how people outside of China analyze China's problems or phenomenon. Today I got a part of answer. At least from the public statistics about Chinese population structure, there are about 50% more men than women, so the boys only have a chance (equals the female/male ratio)  to find his wife (the question here is that because of the "one-child policy" in China, when the first baby of a couple is a girl, they may choose to not  report the birth to the government so that they can try the second chance to see whether they can get a boy. Thus, I don't really believe the public data). And apparently, it influences their investment behaviors and the final efficient equilibrium conditions.

I am wondering what would happen if we consider the dynamic change of marriage market (if it can be regarded as a market match process). What may be taken into account is that not boys/men in China are intending to get married later and later, while girls usually get married at their early age. For example, some of my friends (girls) have a boyfriend 5 or even more years older than them. That is to say, if a boy cannot match a girl when he is young (20-25), he is still possible to find a wife when he becomes older and have more wealth in hand which may attract young girls. Although in the long run it is not a question, I still want to know whether this kind of "match" will have effects on boys' investment behaviors or not.

Similarly, in the labor market, if people feel hard to find a job now, they may go back to school and pursue higher degrees. What will happen if all people do this?  (just like what university graduates do in China now: they spend more time on get an admission from graduate schools with the expectation that they may find a better job with a master degree. However, will individual rationality result in group non-rationality?)

I'm looking for the full text of this paper but unfortunately it is not available online since it seems really new. Hope the author will post this paper on his websites soon, then I'll update the link here.

[Update Oct, 8] I have received the full text from Prof. Bhaskar. If anyone who is also interested, please leave a message below this post with your email address. When he puts it on his website, I'll update the link if possible.

Our results are consistent
with a reasonably large causal e§ect of attending an elite law school, but the exact size of the
premium depends varies with assumptions about the role of unobservables.