Early Childbirth, Health Inputs and Child Mortality: Recent Evidence from Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between early childbearing, parental use of health inputs and child mortality in Bangladesh. In order to account for the potential endogeneity of the age at birth and use of health inputs, (hospital delivery and child vaccination) in the child mortality regression, we jointly estimate mother’s age at childbirth, hospital delivery, child vaccination and child mortality taking into account of unobserved mother level heterogeneity. There is evidence of significant self-selection in the use of health inputs especially among young mothers and that the failure to account for self- selection results in biased estimates. These estimates suggest that women having early childbirth tend to use health inputs differently from all other women. After correcting for this possible selectivity bias, the adverse effects of early childbirth turns out to be less pronounced while the favourable effects of use of health inputs on child survival still remains significant in our sample.Family formation, Adolescent childbearing, Hospital Delivery, Child vaccination, Child mortality, Unobserved Heterogeneity, Correlated estimates.