Publication: Use of Modern Medical Care for Pregnancy and Childbirth Care : Does Female Schooling Matter?
Date
2008-05
ISSN
Published
2008-05
Author(s)
Abstract
Controversy exists over whether the
estimated effects of schooling on health care use reflect
the influence of unobserved factors. Existing estimates may
overstate the schooling effect because of the failure to
control for unobserved variables or may be downwardly biased
due to measurement error. This paper contributes to the
resolution of this debate by adopting an instrumental
variable approach to estimate the impact of female schooling
on maternal health care use. A school construction program
in Indonesia in the 1970s is used to construct an
instrumental variable for education. The choice between use
and non-use of maternal health services is estimated as a
function of schooling and other variables. Data from the
Indonesia Family Life Survey are used for this paper.
Standard regression models estimated in the paper indicate
that each additional year of schooling does indeed have a
significant, positive effect on maternal health care use.
Instrumental variable estimates of the schooling effect are
larger. The results suggest that schooling has a positive
impact on maternal health care use even after eliminating
the effect of unobserved variables and measurement error.
This paper moves beyond previous work on the impact of
education on health care use by adopting an IV approach to
address the problem of endogeneity and measurement error. IV
methods have been used widely in the labour economics
literature to examine the impact of schooling on wages and
other labour market outcomes but rarely to estimate the
effect of schooling on health outcomes.
Citation
“Somanathan, Aparnaa. 2008. Use of Modern Medical Care for Pregnancy and Childbirth Care : Does Female Schooling Matter?. Policy Research Working Paper No. 4625. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/4d39dec8-0dce-50da-b7cb-08b2da97c03f License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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