WOMEN EMPOWERMENT & CHILD HEALTH IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

拟议的研究项目的目标是审查赋予妇女权力对儿童健康的影响。人们普遍认为，改善妇女相对于男子的状况将是改善儿童健康的有效途径。然而，令人惊讶的是，很少有令人信服的经验证据表明妇女赋权对儿童健康的因果关系。我计划估计旨在改善妇女受教育机会、收入和政治参与的政策如何影响儿童健康。更具体地说，该项目有三个目标：1。估计提高妇女教育水平对其生育能力和子女健康的影响，并将这种影响与提高男子教育水平的影响进行比较。妇女受教育程度与儿童健康之间的相关性是否真的揭示了教育本身的影响，或者更确切地说，是一些未被观察到的家庭或社区特征的影响？为了回答这个问题，我将研究印度尼西亚一项重大学校建设计划所带来的妇女受教育程度的提高如何影响她们子女的健康。2. 确定女性短期收入波动对儿童健康的影响是否不同于男性的短期收入波动。我将利用科特迪瓦作物种植中的性别隔离来为这个问题提供证据。我将结合使用面板数据和降雨数据，研究女性作物歉收时是否比男性作物歉收时对儿童健康和营养的不利影响更大。3. 估计妇女参政对提供有利于儿童健康的公共产品的影响。我将利用一项随机实验来解开妇女参与的因果关系，在该实验中，西孟加拉邦（印度）三分之一的村委会主席职位由女性保留。主席职位保留给妇女的村委会是否承担了更多的项目来改善与卫生有关的基础设施？

The goal of the proposed research project is to examine the effect of women's empowerment on child health. It is widely believed that improving the situation of women relative to men is would be an efficient way to improve child health. Yet, there is surprisingly little convincing empirical evidence on the causal effect of women's empowerment on child health. I plan to estimate how policies designed to improve women's access to education, earnings, and political participation affect child health. More specifically, the project has three aims: 1. To estimate the effect of increasing the education of women on their fertility and children's health, and to compare this effect to the effect of increasing the education of men. Does the correlation between women's education and child health really uncover the effect of education per se, or rather the effect of some unobserved family or community characteristics? I will answer this by examining how increases in women's education due to a major school construction program in Indonesia affects the health of their children. 2. To determine whether women's short term income fluctuations have a different effect on child health than men's short term income fluctuations. I will provide evidence on this question by taking advantage of gender segregation in crop growing in Cote d'Ivoire. Using panel data in combination with rainfall data, I will examine whether child health and nutrition is more adversely affected when it is the women's crop that fails than when it is the man's crop. 3. To estimate the effect of women's political participation on the provision of public goods conducive to child health. I will disentangle the causal effect of women's participation by taking advantage of a randomized experiment, in which the chairperson position of one-third of the village councils in West Bengal (India) was reserved for a woman. Did the village councils in which the chairperson position was reserved for a woman undertake more projects to improve health related infrastructure?