ASHE Conference

I will be attending the American Society for Health Economists (ASHE) Conference this weekend through early next week. Follow the link to check out the conference bill: it looks phenomenal! I will make a concerted attempted to blog about the proceedings in semi-real time, so definitely stay tuned.

Also, I will be presenting and discussing a paper at the conference. The abstract for my paper is provided below (let me know if you are interested in the topic and want to learn more or collaborate). Regarding the latter, I read a long time back in some economist's autobiographical account that being a good discussant and reviewer helps you develop street cred as a researcher. Nothing like a little self-promotion before I disappear from the research world to get plundered by medical school...

Paper Title: The Intergenerational Transmission of Height: Evidence from Mexico

A growing body of work suggests that health may be transferred across generations. This paper has two aims: to quantify intergenerational associations in height, a summary measure of long-run health and nutritional status, and to explore different factors and mechanisms that may generate these correlations. Using data from a rich household survey in Mexico, I use a variety of econometric methods to explore the nature of intergenerational correlations in the heights of parents and their children (aged 0-6 years). In particular, I use conditions faced by mothers and fathers during their childhood years as instruments for their heights, arguing that this strategy focuses attention on the portion of parental height sensitive to environmental conditions and public investment. I also explore gender differences in parent-child associations in height. I find that IV estimates on maternal height are generally twice as large as the corresponding OLS estimates, with the IV coefficient on paternal height near zero. These findings are highly robust to inclusion of a rich set of parental and household characteristics. Furthermore, the association between instrumented maternal height and child height is much larger for boys than for girls across all specifications, which is in contrast to the coefficients on predicted paternal height and measures of household resources. The results suggest that the portion of maternal height sensitive to environmental conditions faced during childhood is an important determinant of child health and, consequently, that early life conditions faced by girls may have intergenerational consequences. More speculatively, the results also suggest biological explanations beyond simple genetic transfers may explain an important portion of mother-child associations in height.