This project will provide new evidence on the inter-relationships between health and economic prosperity at the micro-level, drawing on extremely rich longitudinal data from Indonesia. The data contain multiple indicators of both health status and economic outcomes of individuals over time. Health indicators include nutritional status, physical assessments and self-reports of both general and specific health problems. Indicators of economic status span labor force participation, type of work, hours worked, hourly earnings, wealth and consumption. Causality between health and economic status likely runs in both directions: isolating the causal effect of health on labor market outcomes lies at the heart of this study. Particular attention will be paid to the dynamics underlying the effect of health on labor outcomes; older adults are more likely to experience transitions in health and economic status and so will be emphasized. Indonesia is in the throes of a dramatic economic crisis; the immediate and medium term effects of the crisis on health and labor outcomes will be explored. These analyses will draw on the Indonesia Family Life Survey, (IFLS), a longitudinal survey of individuals, households and communities who have been interviewed up to four times between 1993 and 2000. The combination of the temporal variation associated with the economic shock, the tremendous diversity of Indonesia and the longitudinal dimension of IFLS provides a unique opportunity to identify the effect of health on economic status. Recognizing that analyses based on these statistical models involve assumptions about unobserved heterogeneity, this evidence will be complemented with results from a treatment-control intervention, the Iron Supplementation and Work Evaluation (ISWE), which will be conducted in Central Java. ISWE will be designed and fielded to pin down the causal effect of iron deficiency on an array of labor market behaviors and outcomes. Taking the results from IFLS and ISWE in combination, it will be possible to draw conclusions with considerably more confidence than would otherwise be the case. The research and data collection will be conducted as part of a collaboration of researchers at RAND and two centers at the University of Gadjah Macla (UGM), the Population Studies Center and the Community Health and Nutrition-Research Laboratory.
| LaFave, Daniel; Thomas, Duncan (2017) Height and cognition at work: Labor market productivity in a low income setting. Econ Hum Biol 25:52-64 |
| LaFave, Daniel; Thomas, Duncan (2016) Farms, Families, and Markets: New Evidence on Completeness of Markets in Agricultural Settings. Econometrica 84:1917-1960 |
| Thomas, Duncan; Witoelar, Firman; Frankenberg, Elizabeth et al. (2012) Cutting the costs of attrition: Results from the Indonesia Family Life Survey. J Dev Econ 98:108-123 |
| Frankenberg, Elizabeth; Jones, Nathan R (2004) Self-rated health and mortality: does the relationship extend to a low income setting? J Health Soc Behav 45:441-52 |
