Do Maternal Health Problems Influence Child's Worrying Status? Evidence from British Cohort Study

The influence of maternal health problems on child’s worrying status is important in practice in terms of the intervention of maternal health problems early for the influence on child’s worrying status. Conventional methods apply symmetric prior distributions such as a normal distribution or a Laplace distribution for regression coefficients, which may be suitable for median regression and exhibit no robustness to outliers. This work develops a quantile regression on linear panel data model without heterogeneity from a Bayesian point of view, i.e., upon a location-scale mixture representation of the asym- metric Laplace error distribution, this work provides how the posterior distribution can be sampled and summarized by Markov chain Monte Carlo method. Applying this approach to the 1970 British Cohort Study data, it finds that a different maternal health problem has different influence on child’s worrying status at different quantiles. In addition, applying stochastic search variable selection for maternal health problems to the 1970 British Cohort Study data, it finds that maternal nervous breakdown, in this work, among the 25 maternal health problems, contributes most to influence the child’s worrying status.