Essays on Children\u27s Well-being: Impacts of Policies and Approaches to Measurement

This dissertation explores socioeconomic issues related to children’s well-being in developing countries. The first essay examines the effect of the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency on children’s health using the 2011 Uganda Demographic and Health Survey. The distance from each village to the border of South Sudan is used as an instrument for identifying the intensity of the conflict. We find that each conflict event in a village lowers weight-for-age and weight-for-height z-scores for children born after the conflict. We further investigate possible heterogeneous conflict effect on child health in terms of gender, region, and maternal education. Low household assets, limited access to health care, and poor maternal nutrition appear to be channels through which the conflict inhibits the growth and development of children five years after the end of the conflict. The second essay investigates associations between transitions in monetary and multidimensional poverty using the 2006 and 2009 Young Lives surveys in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. While the headcount ratio in both measures of poverty decreases over time, there is only a limited overlap between the groups in monetary and multidimensional poverty in either or both waves. Children remaining in monetary poverty are more likely to stay in multidimensional poverty. However, children escaping from monetary poverty do not always exit from multidimensional poverty. The results suggest the need to go beyond traditional monetary poverty indicators to understand and monitor poverty dynamics among children. The third essay evaluates the impact of Health Care Fund for the Poor (HCFP) on healthcare utilization, health expenditure, and the health and education outcomes using the 2009 Vietnam Young Lives Survey. We find that HCFP beneficiaries are more likely to increase the use of inpatient and outpatient medical care compared to households with no health insurance while their health expenditure is not statistically different from each other in the young cohort. No effect of the program is found in the older cohort. The overall results suggest that the free health insurance program may improve healthcare utilization for households with young children

The impact of economic growth, inflation and unemployment on subjective financial satisfaction: A New global evidence

Using the happiness survey data, a robust body of literature has supported that people's subjective well-being is related to economic growth, employment, and inflation. Motivated by "Happiness Economics," this paper focuses on financial satisfaction, a proxy of subjective well-being. It examines the relationship between people's financial satisfaction and nations' macroeconomic performances. We use the World Values Survey and inflation, unemployment, and economic growth data collected from 2010-2014 to 2017-2022. We use the ordered probit and ordinary least squares regressions for the analysis. The findings show that financial satisfaction has a negative relationship with inflation and unemployment and a positive relationship with economic growth. Heterogeneity checks indicate that the association's strength and statistical significance vary by gender, age, household income, marital status, educational attainment level, and employment status. The overall results suggest policymakers should strive to mitigate the economic vulnerability of women, older adults, low-income earners, low-educated, those who are not married but live together, and those who are not in the labor force to maximize the financial satisfaction of individuals and thus promote subjective well-being of them