For informal caregivers in certain demographic groups, the tradeoff between childcare and informal care may be as significant as the tradeoff between informal care and labor supply. We shed light on ...this tradeoff empirically, by combining detailed time use data with a natural experiment created by differential access to publicly funded kindergarten across households and states. We find a substantial elasticity between informal care supply and kindergarten access, especially for female carers. In fact, for women, kindergarten access appears to largely increase their care supply rather than labor supply.
We use nationally representative household data from India to establish the intergenerational effect of early marriage on a broad set of health and educational investments and outcomes, and to ...explicate the underlying mechanisms. The empirical strategy utilizes variation in age at menarche to obtain exogenous variation in the age at marriage. We find that delayed marriage results in significantly better child health and educational outcomes. We further analyze a subsample of uneducated child brides to show that the age at marriage matters by itself, independently of its effects via the woman's educational attainment and her marriage market outcome. From a household-decision-making perspective, the effects appear to be due (at least in part) to a reduction in desired and actual fertility as a result of later marriage, which may be associated with a quantity/quality tradeoff.
•We introduces a new primary dataset on dowry payments in rural India.•We asked parents about actual dowry payments and expected dowry payments.•The actual and expected dowry payments are consistent ...with each other.•Individual characteristics of the bride are significantly more important in explaining expected dowries compare to household characteristics.
This paper introduces a new primary dataset on dowry payments in rural India. A novel feature of the data is that in addition to eliciting actual dowry payments, we also asked rural Indian households how much dowry they expected to pay/receive for each of their currently unmarried children. These expectations are presumably the basis of household decision making (as opposed to actual dowries paid and received) with respect to decisions such as human capital investments, saving and consumption, etc. We find that the distribution of dowry forecasts appears to be consistent with the distribution of actual dowry payments, suggesting that dowry perceptions may be quite accurate. Our analysis of dowry forecasts further indicates that (i) individual-specific attributes are significantly more important than household income and wealth in terms of explaining the magnitude of dowry payments, and (ii) bride quality is also a significant determinant of dowry, which provides a corrective to the emphasis on groom quality in the literature.
A key prediction of dynamic labor demand models is that firing restrictions attenuate firms' employment responses to economic fluctuations. We provide the first direct test of this prediction using ...data from India. We exploit the fact that rainfall fluctuations, through their effects on agricultural productivity, generate variation in local demand within districts over time. Consistent with the theory, we find that industrial employment is more sensitive to shocks where labor regulation is less restrictive. Our results are robust to controlling for endogenous firm placement and vary across factory size in a pattern consistent with institutional features of Indian labor law.
Genomic imprinting plays an important role in growth and development. Loss of imprinting (LOI) has been found in cancer, yet systematic studies are impeded by data-analytical challenges. We developed ...a methodology to detect monoallelically expressed loci without requiring genotyping data, and applied it on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA, discovery) and Genotype-Tissue expression project (GTEx, validation) breast tissue RNA-seq data. Here, we report the identification of 30 putatively imprinted genes in breast. In breast cancer (TCGA), HM13 is featured by LOI and expression upregulation, which is linked to DNA demethylation. Other imprinted genes typically demonstrate lower expression in cancer, often associated with copy number variation and aberrant DNA methylation. Downregulation in cancer frequently leads to higher relative expression of the (imperfectly) silenced allele, yet this is not considered canonical LOI given the lack of (absolute) re-expression. In summary, our novel methodology highlights the massive deregulation of imprinting in breast cancer.
High rates of home births in developing countries are often linked to high rates of newborn deaths, but there is considerable debate about how much of this is causal. This paper weighs in on this ...question by analyzing data on the timing of birth, health care utilization, and mortality for a sample of births between 2009-2014 in 7021 rural Nigerian households. First, we show that timing of birth is strongly linked to use of institutional care: women with a nighttime birth are significantly less likely to use a health facility because of the difficulties associated with accessing care at night. In turn, this is associated with a sharp increase in the rate of newborn mortality at night. Leveraging variation in household proximity to a health care facility that offers 24-h coverage, we show that this increase in mortality is plausibly due to lack of formal health care at the time of birth: infants born at night to households without a nearby health care facility that offers 24-h coverage, experience an increase in mortality equivalent to about 10 additional newborn deaths per 1000 live births. In contrast, when households have a nearby health facility that provides care at night, there is no detectable increase in mortality. These results suggest that well-designed policies to increase access to (and quality of) formal care at birth may lead to significant reductions in newborn deaths.
•This paper presents new evidence about the link between institutional care at birth and mortality.•We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of delivery combined with spatial variation in access to care.•Our findings indicate substantial returns to institutional care in terms of newborn mortality.
This paper examines the relationship between maternal employment and infant health in the context of a large workfare program that explicitly prioritizes female participation, India's National Rural ...Employment Guarantee Scheme. Using multiple estimation strategies including a triple difference strategy that exploits a discontinuity in program eligibility at age 18, we find that the program had negative impacts on newborn infant survival, increasing newborn mortality among women who were eligible to participate in the program.
•We study the effect of a workfare program in India on newborn survival.•Program exposure appears to have increased the rate of neonatal mortality.•Underlying these effects are indicative changes in fetal health, as well as changes in pregnancy care usage.
To characterize visuospatial and nonvisuospatial cognitive domains affected by vestibular loss and determine whether patient-reported outcomes measures (PROMs) correlate with performance on ...neuropsychological tests.
Cross-sectional study.
University-based tertiary medical center.
Sixty-nine age-matched subjects: 25 patients with bilateral vestibular loss (BVL), 14 patients with unilateral vestibular loss (UVL), and 30 normal controls (NC).
Neuropsychological tests used to assess visuospatial and auditory short-term and working memory, number magnitude representation, executive function, and attention. Validated PROMs used to evaluate quality of life and subjective cognitive impairment.
Performance on neuropsychological tests and scores on PROM surveys.
BVL and UVL patients performed significantly worse than NC subjects on tasks requiring visuospatial representation compared with NC subjects ( p < 0.01). BVL patients demonstrated decreased performance on spatial representation tasks compared with UVL and NC subjects ( p < 0.05 and p < 0.05, respectively). All subject groups performed similarly on tasks assessing nonvisuospatial cognitive domains, such as auditory short-term and working memory, executive function, and attention. PROMs did not seem to correlate with performance on neuropsychological tasks.
Patients with vestibular loss exhibit impairments in tasks requiring visuospatial representation but perform similarly to NC subjects in tasks of auditory working memory, executive function, or attention. Currently available questionnaires may be insufficient to screen patients for cognitive deficits.
Nitrogen‐rich carbon nitride is obtained as ultrasmall, discrete, mesoporous nanoparticles (see picture) by reaction of ethylenediamine with CCl4 in the nanochannels of a mesoporous silica template. ...Its high nitrogen content, large surface area, and large pore volume make it a highly active catalyst for transesterification of β‐keto esters of aryl, aliphatic, and cyclic primary alcohols.
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