We follow six cohorts of childhood Supplemental Security Income (SSI) disability awardees for a time horizon up to 30 years, using program records on demographics, type of impairment, SSI and Disability Insurance (DI) recipiency, and mortality. We use descriptive analysis and multinomial logit...

We revisit the cyclical nature of birth rates and infant health and investigate to what extent the relationship between aggregate labor market conditions and birth outcomes is mitigated by the consumption smoothing income assistance delivered through unemployment insurance (UI). We introduce a...

Many developed countries have recently experienced sharp increases in home birth rates. This paper investigates the impact of home births on the health of low-risk newborns using data from the Netherlands, the only developed country where home births are widespread. To account for endogeneity in...

During the 1980s and 1990s there were great increases of health insurance coverage for poor children through the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and extended Medicaid eligibility. Problems remain for the small number of children with serious medical conditions whose care is a high...

We examine whether the Colombian government, when instituting and expanding social programs in the early nineties, inadvertently created incentives for people to become informal. We use data from repeated cross-sections of the Colombian Household Survey for periods before and after...

Even though the State Child Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) has strong bipartisan support, the Bush Administration and the 110th Congress were unable to agree to a comprehensive reauthorization of the program. The Bush Administration disagreed with a bipartisan majority of the House of...

Whether user fees for basic health services should be charged or abolished for the poor has recently been debated. This study examines the impact on child health status of removing user fees in South Africa. Our main innovation is to exploit plausibly exogenous variation in access to free...

Evidence suggests that hospital mergers can reduce costs but less is known about their effects on patient outcomes. We study how a wave of mergers that led to the shutdown of one third of all Swedish maternity wards affected the health of mothers who gave birth and their newborns. Applying a...

This chapter provides an overview of the literature on child health in developed countries. I first lay out a simple economic model of the demand for child health inputs, and discuss whether the evidence is consistent with that model. Next, two main causes of market failure in the market for...

We investigate the impact of obstetrician supervision, as opposed to midwife supervision, on the short-term health of low-risk newborns. We exploit a unique policy rule in the Netherlands that creates a large discontinuity in the probability of a low-risk birth being attended by an obstetrician...