Islamic Law and Investments in Children : Evidence from the Sharia introduction in Nigeria

Islamic law lays down detailed rules regulating children's upbringing. This study examines the effect of such rules on investments in children by analysing the introduction of Sharia law in northern Nigeria. Difference-in-differences and triple-differences estimates across time, administrative areas and religions show increases in the duration of breastfeeding and child survival. Geospatial discontinuities further show effects for Muslims but not Christians living close to the border. Evidence also shows that these effects concur with a rise in women's birth rates. Moreover, findings suggest increases in gender gaps; young boys benefit more than girls and adult women's intra-household bargaining power decreases

Maternal Autonomy and the Education of the Subsequent Generation: Evidence from Three Contrasting States in India

This paper makes a significant contribution on both conceptual and methodological fronts, in the analysis of the effect of maternal autonomy on school enrolment age of children in India. The school entry age is modelled using a discrete time duration model where maternal autonomy is entered as a latent characteristic, and allowed to be associated with various parental and household characteristics which also conditionally affect school entry age. The model identification is achieved by using proxy measures collected in the third round of the National Family Health Survey of India, on information relating to the economic, decision-making, physical and emotional autonomy of a woman. We concentrate on three very different states in India – Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Uttar Pradesh. Our results indicate that female autonomy is not associated with socio-economic characteristics of the woman or her family in Kerala (except maternal education), while it is strongly correlated to these characteristics in both Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Secondly, while female autonomy is significant in influencing the school starting age in UP, it is less important in AP and not significant at all in Kerala.latent factor models, structural equation models, female autonomy, school enrolment decisions, India, National Family Health Survey

Maternal Autonomy and the Education of the Subsequent Generation : Evidence from three contrasting states in India

This paper makes a significant contribution on both conceptual and methodological fronts, in the analysis of the effect of maternal autonomy on school enrolment age of children in India. The school entry age is modelled using a discrete time duration model where maternal autonomy is entered as a latent characteristic, and allowed to be associated with various parental and household characteristics which also conditionally affect school entry age. The model identification is achieved by using proxy measures collected in the third round of the National Family Health Survey of India, on information relating to the economic, decision-making, physical and emotional autonomy of a woman. We concentrate on three very different states in India – Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Uttar Pradesh. Our results indicate that female autonomy is not associated with socio-economic characteristics of the woman or her family in Kerala (except maternal education), while it is strongly correlated to these characteristics in both Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Secondly, while female autonomy is significant in influencing the school starting age in UP, it is less important in AP and not significant at all in Kerala.

Tailored retrieval of health information from the web for facilitating communication and empowerment of elderly people

A patient, nowadays, acquires health information from the Web mainly through a “human-to-machine” communication process with a generic search engine. This, in turn, affects, positively or negatively, his/her empowerment level and the “human-to-human” communication process that occurs between a patient and a healthcare professional such as a doctor. A generic communication process can be modelled by considering its syntactic-technical, semantic-meaning, and pragmatic-effectiveness levels and an efficacious communication occurs when all the communication levels are fully addressed. In the case of retrieval of health information from the Web, although a generic search engine is able to work at the syntactic-technical level, the semantic and pragmatic aspects are left to the user and this can be challenging, especially for elderly people. This work presents a custom search engine, FACILE, that works at the three communication levels and allows to overcome the challenges confronted during the search process. A patient can specify his/her information requirements in a simple way and FACILE will retrieve the “right” amount of Web content in a language that he/she can easily understand. This facilitates the comprehension of the found information and positively affects the empowerment process and communication with healthcare professionals

Female and child welfare in India : an empirical analysis

The welfare of women and children is essential to a country’s development. Children’s welfare represents an important determinant of a country’s future. Women often play a key role in the household and their agency can be essential for the well being of all family members. And yet, women and children are often the most vulnerable individuals in society. Policy makers have increasingly come to recognise this and consequently changes to the welfare of women and children have been laid at the very heart of the transformational promises enclosed in the Millennium Declaration of the United Nations and have been implemented in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – eight development targets agreed upon by all United Nation member states and all major international organisations. Children are critical for all eight aspects and four goals focus exclusively on women or children. These comprise primary education, gender equality, child survival and maternal health. Indeed, in the 2010 Review Summit the member states have expressed major new commitments to improving women’s and children’s health. The correlation between achieving an improvement in female and child welfare and fulfilling the MDGs never becomes clearer than when considering India. India’s progress is considered by many as pivotal to achieving the MDGs. A reason for this is the country’s size. With 1,171 million inhabitants it is the world second most populous country. Furthermore, in the recent past India has combined impressive economic growth and wealth creation with stagnation in key socio-economic indicators, particularly among disadvantaged groups of society. This thesis focuses on four aspects closely linked to the MDGs. The first is fertility. India takes an important place in the population growth debate. Its population is still second to China but estimates of the Population Reference Bureau suggest that it will have reached China’s population by 2025 and will have well overtaken it by 2050. Consequently, a thorough understanding of the determinants of high fertility in this country will be invaluable to policy makers. Female autonomy makes up the third MDG and constitutes the second point of interest. Societies throughout South Asia are characterised by a low status of women. According to the International Labour Office in India in particular discrimination against women is widespread. Evidence from Demographic Health Surveys suggests that women have little say on a number of household matters among which their own health care and two thirds of them work without pay. These matters in turn have devastating effects on the life of a woman’s children: The National Population Policy for example singled out the low status of women as a significant barrier to the achievements of population targets as well as of child health. Thus local and international policy makers have recognised the status of women as a policy priority. The third aspect is primary education, which is reflected in the second MDG. India has made impressive strides in improving its schooling record but there is still room for substantial improvement. Data from the UNICEF suggests that an estimated 42 million children aged 6 to 10 are not in school. Again, gender differences in schooling are still widespread throughout the country. Child survival is this thesis’ final factor of interest. India has the world’s largest under-five population of 127 million children and its under-five deaths account for 22% of the world’s mortality rates and figures from the United Nations suggest that India is off-track to achieving the target set in the MDGs by the year 2015. Reasons for these high rates of child mortality range from malnutrition to insufficient immunisation coverage. Yet some of the reasons may also lie in the proximity of India’s deep-rooted gender discrimination: survival rates are disproportionally skewed towards boys. The thesis has a strong empirical focus and all three chapters employ data from the third round of the National Family Health Survey for India (2005/2006), which is part of the Demographic and Health Survey Series conducted in about 70 low and middle income countries around the world

Fatigue analysis of adhesive joints with laser treated substrates

Abstract Recent literature works focused on the analysis of laser irradiation on the strength of adhesive joints under quasi-static loading conditions. It has been demonstrated that laser surface preparation allows to remove impurity and weak boundary layers from the mating substrates and, depending on the energy density, it is also able to modify surface morphology promoting mechanical interlocking. In previous works, the authors assessed the effect of Yb-fiber laser ablation over the quasi-static strength and toughness, of aluminum and stainless steel adhesively bonded joints. The experimental results demonstrated the ability of laser irradiation to improve the mechanical properties of the joints. The aim of this work is to extend the scope of previous investigations to fatigue loading. Double Cantilever Beam (DCB) samples with laser treated aluminum substrates have been bonded with a two component epoxy adhesive. For comparison standard degreasing and grit blasting have been also deployed for samples preparation. The results have been compared in terms of cycles to failure and the fracture surfaces have been analyzed by means of Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) in order to investigate the mechanism of failure

Terrorism, media coverage and education: evidence from al-Shabaab attacks in Kenya

We relate terrorist attacks to media signal coverage and schooling in Kenya to examine how terrorism alters the demand for education through perceived risks and returns. Exploiting variation in wireless signal coverage and attacks across space and time, we establish that media access reinforces negative effects of terrorism on schooling. Our results are robust to instrumenting both media signal and attacks. We also find that attacks raise self-reported fears for households with media access. Based on these insights, we estimate a simple structural model where heterogeneous households experiencing terrorism form beliefs about risks and returns to education. We allow these beliefs to be affected by media and find that households with media access significantly over-estimate fatality risks

Daughters, dowries, deliveries : the effect of marital payments on fertility choices in India

This paper investigates the effect of the differential pecuniary costs of sons and daughters on fertility decisions. The focus is on dowries in India, which increase the economic returns to sons and decrease the returns to daughters. The paper exploits an exogenous shift in the cost of girls relative to boys arising from a revision in anti-dowry law, which is shown to have decreased dowry transfers markedly. The reform is found to have attenuated the widely documented positive association between daughters and their parents’ fertility. The effect is particularly pronounced for more autonomous women and for individuals living in areas characterised by strong preferences for son

Facilitating access to health web pages with different language complexity levels

The number of people looking for health information on the Internet is constantly growing. When searching for health information, different types of users, such as patients, clinicians or medical researchers, have different needs and should easily find the information they are looking for based on their specific requirements. However, generic search engines do not make any distinction among the users and, often, overload them with the provided amount of information. On the other hand, specific search engines mostly work on medical literature and specialized web sites are often not free and contain focused information built by hand. This paper presents a method to facilitate the search of health information on the web so that users can easily and quickly find information based on their specific requirements. In particular, it allows different types of users to find health web pages with required language complexity levels. To this end, we first use the structured data contained in the web to classify health web pages based on different audience types such as, patients, clinicians and medical researchers. Next, we evaluate the language complexity levels of the different web pages. Finally, we propose a mapping between the language complexity levels and the different audience types that allows us to provide different types of users, e.g., experts and non-experts with tailored web pages in terms of language complexity

Characteristics and Subjective Evaluation of an Intelligent Empowering Agent for Health Person Empowerment

Empowerment is a process through which people acquire the necessary knowledge and self-awareness to understand their health conditions and treatment options, self-manage them, and make informed choices. Currently, few stand-alone applications for patient empowerment exist and people/patients often go on the Web to search for health information. Such information is mainly obtained through generic search engines and it is often overwhelming, too generic, and of poor quality. Intelligent Empowering Agents (IEA) can filter such information and assist the user in the understanding of health information about specific complaints or health in general. We have designed and developed a first prototype of an IEA that dialogues with the user in simple language, collects health information from the Web, and provides tailored, easily understood, and trusted information. It empowers users to create their own comprehensive and objective opinion on health matters that concern them. The paper describes the IEA main characteristics and presents the results of subjective tests carried out to assess the effectiveness of the IEA. Twenty-eight Master students in Digital Health filled an online survey presenting questions on usability, user experience and perceived value. Most respondents found the IEA easy to use and helpful. They also felt that it would improve communication with their doctors