Copenhagen IV - Conference

I've had a few days to reflect on the health econ conference I just went to and had a few thoughts. I have to say that I definitely got more out of this conference than I did in 2005, when it was held in Barcelona. Thats saying a lot since some of the stuff I started thinking about in Barcelona will form the basis for my dissertation. I think there are a few reasons for this:

-After two years of grad schools and qualifiers, I know a little bit more about health economics than I did in '05.

-I now have a better sense of my interests and made sure to attend sessions relevant to these. As a result, I got more out of a given presentation and made tons of contacts.

-I suspect that the average conference paper was stronger in '07 than '05, though this might be confounded by the first two reasons.

I think my own presentation went off well. I gave a talk based on a joint paper with Brian Fried (political science grad student, and fellow '02 Blue Devil) on fuel markets, prices and child health in Guatemala. Indoor air pollution (IAP), which is associated with acute respiratory illness, is one of the leading causes of death among children in the developing world. The level of household IAP is associated with choice of cooking fuel, where biomass fuels (wood, cow dung, crop residues) are the worst as they generate a lot of particulate matter. Clean fuels, such as liquid petroleum gasoline, kerosene or electricity, are preferred, but can be expensive. The goal of our work is to look at how fuel prices and availability influence household fuel choice and, consequently, child health. This is actually trickier than it sounds since:

-prices are measured with error

-prices and fuel availability might be correlated with other determinants of health that we cannot observe, thus making it hard to recover a causal effect

Our preliminary findings are that prices measured at the community level reflect a wide variety of unobserved factors, and that a better measure of fuel prices might be world oil prices at the time of survey interacted with the region of household residence. We find that this measure has better properties as far as inferring causality and also allows us to link decisions on fuel choice and child health to worldwide changes in commodity prices. In short, as world oil prices increase, so do child respiratory symptoms. Poorer and rural households are more sensitive to prices (as expected).

This is definitely a work in progress, and we got some great comments at the conference about how to proceed. I'll definitely keep you posted as this evolves.