In tomorrow’s Applied Micro seminar, Regina Almeyda Duran speaks on “Proximate Literacy, Inter and Intrahousehold Externalities and Child Health Outcomes: Evidence from India.” Here’s the abstract:
From Regina Almeyda Duran:
Literacy has positive effects on health and education. For the most part,
empirical studies have considered benefits from literacy to spread only to
the nuclear family. Literacy may also, however, generate externalities
outside the immediate family. In the literature, this has been called
proximate literacy. Proximate literacy refers to the idea that an
illiterate person acquires a sort of literacy by being around other
literate individuals. On the other hand, bargaining models of household
allocation provide evidence that individuals within a household may not
fully pool their resources. Being literate in a household where everybody
else remains illiterate may shift the balance of power and work in the
advantage of the literate, producing a negative externality. The primary
objective of this paper is to examine whether there exist positive or
negative externalities or spillovers of literacy within and across
households on child health when the literate in the household is a
non-parent. The estimation results show that in cases where parents are
both illiterate: (1) there are positive significant externalities on child
health that accrue from the presence of a female literate in the
household. The effect from the presence of a male literate is not
significantly different from zero. (2) These spillovers are also positive
and significant at the village level; and (3) there is some evidence of
negative literacy externalities of male adults in long term child
nutritional status.
This looks intersting. I’m curious to see how the model is estimated since it’s inherently a multilevel pheonomenon. (For Columbia people: the talk is Tuesday, September 20th, 1:10-2:00pm, in International Affairs Building, Room 1027.)
P.S. It’s interesting that this is in the economics seminar since it seems more like sociology to me.