The principal objective of the proposed project is to explore the interrelationships among the demographic behavior of parents, child health and cognitive development, parental socioeconomic characteristics, and public programs. Estimates will be obtained of (a) the effects of the pre- and postnatal behaviors of parents on the health and cognitive development of infants and children and (b) of how unanticipated health outcomes, differences among children in healthiness and abilities, public health and other governmental programs, parental socioeconomic status and parents' information about health processes interact to influence their fertility and other health-related decisions. The data base to be used for the analysis is the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experiences of Youth, rounds 1 through 8. This data base provides information, as of 1986, on approximately 3000 mothers and their 5500 children, including information on prenatal care, birthweight, infant feeding practices, and maternal prenatal health practices, and contains a complete demographic history. The project will make particular use of the supplemental survey of children in the eighth round of the panel survey, which provides a variety of detailed measures of child health, cognitive development and the quality of the child's household environment. The survey data will be merged with community-level variables corresponding to local-area programs and prices that influence parental decisions, and, ultimately child health. The models and estimation procedures will take into account heterogeneity within and across households in health predispositions, and dynamic decision-making by parents that is responsive to unanticipated birth and health outcomes. The analyses will exploit the unique features of the new data base--the availability of longitudinal information on both parents and all of their children (siblings) and the availability during the course of the project of updated information on demographic and health outcomes. These data thus permit assessments of both the robustness of alternative estimation procedures that have been used in prior work to quantify the child health effects of parental behavior and the ability of the estimated models to predict child health and other demographic outcomes.
| Evans, Alan C; Brain Development Cooperative Group (2006) The NIH MRI study of normal brain development. Neuroimage 30:184-202 |
