Mothers-in-law and son preference in India

In India, the mothers-in-law are often portrayed as the most powerful entity in the household in Indian popular culture and media. Similarly, in the literature, the influence of the Indian mothers-in-law is often taken for granted. However, most of the empirical evidence relies on qualitative data or on small samples. Looking at stated son preference and using the third nationally representative National Family and Health Survey dataset, we show that mothers-in-law do indeed have an influence on their daughter-in-law, everything else constant. Given the stronger son preference among mothers-in-law, this contributes to the high imbalance in the male to female sex-ratio observed among children in India

Food Consumption Patterns and Malnourished Indian Children: Is there a Link?

Despite its economic success, India has made little progress towards meeting its Millennium Development Goal targets of reducing undernourishment, particularly among children. Using nationally representative data, our analysis finds evidence of an improvement in the anthropometric measures of height-for-age, but a worsening in weight-for-height z-scores for children aged 0 – 3 over the period 1998 – 2006. There is also a worsening in both cereal consumption and calorie intake over this period, with some of the most noticeable declines taking place in households with children aged 0 – 3. This suggests a possible link between declining food intake and poor nutritional outcomes of children during this period.India, Weight-for-height, Height-for-age, calorie consumption, expenditure patterns

The tyranny of distance and the gravity of resources

To what extent does geography remain an important determinant of comparative advantage and factor incomes in resource markets? We estimate gravity models for resources and find that some minerals and fuels, particularly Iron Ore and Gas, do have very high elasticities of trade with respect to distance. To assess the implications of this we then consider a simple counterfactual where location advantages are eliminated. We find that for a few countries, including Australia and New Zealand, distance barriers have a large impact of their market share

Does globalisation affect crime? theory and evidence

Globalization skeptics argue that trade liberalization has high social costs, including an increase in expropriative behavior such as civil-conflict, coercion of labor and crime. We show that a theoretical relationship between trade and expropriation exists, but the sign differs for developed and developing economies. We verify this empirically using data on crime rates. Specifically we find trade liberalization,as measured by both higher openness and lower import duty rates, tends to increase burglaries and theft in very labor abundant countries. For other countries, however,we find that trade liberalization has either a small negative effect on crime,or no effect, depending on the country’s capital abundance

Sex-selective abortions and infant mortality in India: the role of parents’ stated son preference

In India, millions of female foetuses have been aborted since the 1980s alongside an abnormally high infant girl mortality rate; this has generated a vast literature exploring the root causes of son preference. The literature is sparse, however, on how the decisions to abort or neglect girls are made. This paper examines mothers’ and fathers’ respective roles behind those decisions. Using NFHS-3 data, we show that sex- selective abortions are most commonly used if both spouses or if only the fathers prefer sons, while sex-selective neglect is used if only the mothers prefer sons

Semaglutide and cardiovascular outcomes in patients with obesity and prevalent heart failure: a prespecified analysis of the SELECT trial

Background: Semaglutide, a GLP-1 receptor agonist, reduces the risk of major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) in people with overweight or obesity, but the effects of this drug on outcomes in patients with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and heart failure are unknown. We report a prespecified analysis of the effect of once-weekly subcutaneous semaglutide 2·4 mg on ischaemic and heart failure cardiovascular outcomes. We aimed to investigate if semaglutide was beneficial in patients with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease with a history of heart failure compared with placebo; if there was a difference in outcome in patients designated as having heart failure with preserved ejection fraction compared with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction; and if the efficacy and safety of semaglutide in patients with heart failure was related to baseline characteristics or subtype of heart failure. Methods: The SELECT trial was a randomised, double-blind, multicentre, placebo-controlled, event-driven phase 3 trial in 41 countries. Adults aged 45 years and older, with a BMI of 27 kg/m2 or greater and established cardiovascular disease were eligible for the study. Patients were randomly assigned (1:1) with a block size of four using an interactive web response system in a double-blind manner to escalating doses of once-weekly subcutaneous semaglutide over 16 weeks to a target dose of 2·4 mg, or placebo. In a prespecified analysis, we examined the effect of semaglutide compared with placebo in patients with and without a history of heart failure at enrolment, subclassified as heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, or unclassified heart failure. Endpoints comprised MACE (a composite of non-fatal myocardial infarction, non-fatal stroke, and cardiovascular death); a composite heart failure outcome (cardiovascular death or hospitalisation or urgent hospital visit for heart failure); cardiovascular death; and all-cause death. The study is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT03574597. Findings: Between Oct 31, 2018, and March 31, 2021, 17 604 patients with a mean age of 61·6 years (SD 8·9) and a mean BMI of 33·4 kg/m2 (5·0) were randomly assigned to receive semaglutide (8803 [50·0%] patients) or placebo (8801 [50·0%] patients). 4286 (24·3%) of 17 604 patients had a history of investigator-defined heart failure at enrolment: 2273 (53·0%) of 4286 patients had heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, 1347 (31·4%) had heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, and 666 (15·5%) had unclassified heart failure. Baseline characteristics were similar between patients with and without heart failure. Patients with heart failure had a higher incidence of clinical events. Semaglutide improved all outcome measures in patients with heart failure at random assignment compared with those without heart failure (hazard ratio [HR] 0·72, 95% CI 0·60-0·87 for MACE; 0·79, 0·64-0·98 for the heart failure composite endpoint; 0·76, 0·59-0·97 for cardiovascular death; and 0·81, 0·66-1·00 for all-cause death; all pinteraction>0·19). Treatment with semaglutide resulted in improved outcomes in both the heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HR 0·65, 95% CI 0·49-0·87 for MACE; 0·79, 0·58-1·08 for the composite heart failure endpoint) and heart failure with preserved ejection fraction groups (0·69, 0·51-0·91 for MACE; 0·75, 0·52-1·07 for the composite heart failure endpoint), although patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction had higher absolute event rates than those with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. For MACE and the heart failure composite, there were no significant differences in benefits across baseline age, sex, BMI, New York Heart Association status, and diuretic use. Serious adverse events were less frequent with semaglutide versus placebo, regardless of heart failure subtype. Interpretation: In patients with atherosclerotic cardiovascular diease and overweight or obesity, treatment with semaglutide 2·4 mg reduced MACE and composite heart failure endpoints compared with placebo in those with and without clinical heart failure, regardless of heart failure subtype. Our findings could facilitate prescribing and result in improved clinical outcomes for this patient group. Funding: Novo Nordisk

Boletín Oficial de la Provincia de Oviedo: Número 24 - 1914 enero 30

Half a million girls a year are sex-selectively aborted in India (Jha et al., 2006); many others never reach their fifth birthday due to infanticide or sex-selective neglect. The Indian government has tried to curb discrimination against girls by adopting different policies, such as banning sex-selective abortions. However, based on the 2001 census, the ratio of girls to boys aged less than six years old keeps decreasing. Even putting moral considerations to one side, the importance of curbing this trend is considerable. Social unrest, violence, kidnapping of women and the like have been documented to occur whenever the sex ratio becomes too skewed among young adults (Hudson and Den Boer, 2002). It should, therefore, be a priority for the Indian government to halt these social practices leading to discrimination against and to the elimination of female foetuses and female toddlers. In this thesis, it is hypothesised that parents perform a cost-benefit analysis while deciding the allocation of vital resources among their children. This cost-benefit analysis is based on many factors. The economic system, the cultural system including, notably, religion, and household characteristics are believed to have an impact on parents’ willingness to discriminate against some of their daughters. Parents, however, have limited resources and, therefore, cannot implement perfectly their desire to keep, or not, all their children. The focus of this thesis is on the impact of religion on gender inequality in child mortality and its proximate determinants, namely, height-for-age z-score, weight-for-age z-score, vaccination, treatment/advice for diarrhoea and access to oral rehydration salts. Chapters two and three discuss the factors which lead parents to discriminate against some of their children; chapter two is devoted to religion while chapter three summarizes other key arguments from the literature. After discussing the data—mainly from the National Family and Health Survey (NFHS)—and the model specification in chapter four, chapter five uses a model-based approach to determine empirically what leads some parents to discriminate against their daughters. Using different techniques, that is, OLS, logit, Poisson, the Heckman correction for sample selection and the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition, this chapter reaches some interesting conclusions. First, Indian girls are clearly more at risk of dying during infancy, relative to boys, than would be expected based only on biological differences. The difference in mortality between boys and girls seems to be caused mainly by differences in access to health care. We also conclude that the Sikhs are the religious group with the highest level of gender inequality among their children. One other interesting conclusion of this chapter is that even if we find evidence of selection bias in the data in the case of vaccination, correcting for this bias does not change markedly our qualitative results. In other words, even after accounting for the fact that some girls may have been eliminated before we can collect data on them, our qualitative results do not change. Chapter six also tries to explain gender inequality in child mortality and its proximate determinants but, this time, using a design-based approach, that is, by taking into account the complex survey design used by the NFHS. We conclude that a design-based approach is more suitable for studying gender inequality in child mortality and its proximate determinants than the more widely used model-based approach. The reason is simply that it is impossible, in the context of survey data, to control for all factors affecting children‘s health and access to health care. We also demonstrate that the inclusion of state level and individual level variables in the same regression can lead to misleading results. In addition to illustrating the misspecification problem potentially widespread in the literature, and the hierarchical structure of the research question, this chapter also reports some interesting results concerning gender inequality among children and religion. The data show that the impact of being Muslims or Christians is the same for boys and girls in terms of survival, nutritional outcomes and access to health care, ceteris paribus. In the case of Sikhs, gender inequality appears in terms of children being underweight, with girls achieving poorer nutritional outcomes than boys, ceteris paribus. With new technologies allowing parents to know the gender of their unborn child early during pregnancy, parents do not need to rely any more on post-birth solutions to eliminate any undesired child. Stated differently, it has never been easier for parents to implement their preference for sons. Chapter seven, therefore, looks at the stated son preference of both men and women. We conclude that economic motives significantly influence the preference of women who have never married but this is not the case for never married men. This chapter focuses mainly on never married men and women due to a potential endogeneity problem, that is, a two way relationship between the sex ratio of children and stated son preference. Using instrumental variable techniques, we conclude that this concern is not warranted. However, it is also clear that the determinants of stated son preference vary with marital status. Our results show, notably, that economic motives become important for men once married, while belief on the acceptability of domestic violence become important for women once married. In terms of religion, we conclude that Christians have the lowest son preference, followed by Hindus and Muslims. The results also show that the Sikhs are the religious group with the highest level of son preference in India among currently married men. This thesis shows that religion is a factor in predicting whether a child lives or dies. A way forward would be to involve religious leaders in fighting the problem. The different initiatives taken by the Sikh community, for example, by publishing the Sikh Reht Maryada, are steps in the right direction

Son Targeting Fertility Behavior in Albania

The collapse of communism led to highly skewed sex-ratios in Albania, which had a long patriarchal tradition before the advent of communism. While the use of sex-selective abortions in the region is well-known, little is known about other forms taken by revealed son preference, such as differential stopping behavior and birth spacing. Using data from the Demographic Health Surveys in 2008-2009 and 2017-2018, we find evidence of a higher proportion of boys being born at the last parity, indicating that parents practice differential stopping behaviour. Using Cox Proportional Hazard model and logit; we also show that in son-less households parents shorten the birth intervals significantly, endangering mothers' and children's health. We conclude that differential stopping behaviour and short birth spacing are prevalent in all regions and across the socio-economic spectrum

Mothers-in-law and son preference in India

In India, the mothers-in-law are often portrayed as the most powerful entity in the household in Indian popular culture and media. Similarly, in the literature, the influence of the Indian mothers-in-law is often taken for granted. However, most of the empirical evidence relies on qualitative data or on small samples. Looking at stated son preference and using the third nationally representative National Family and Health Survey dataset, we show that mothers-in-law do indeed have an influence on their daughter-in-law, everything else constant. Given the stronger son preference among mothers-in-law, this contributes to the high imbalance in the male to female sex-ratio observed among children in India

The tyranny of distance and the gravity of resources

To what extent does geography remain an important determinant of comparative advantage and factor incomes in resource markets? We estimate gravity models for resources and find that some minerals and fuels, particularly Iron Ore and Gas, do have very high elasticities of trade with respect to distance. To assess the implications of this we then consider a simple counterfactual where location advantages are eliminated. We find that for a few countries, including Australia and New Zealand, distance barriers have a large impact of their market share