PSC In The News
Bailey and Dynarski cited in piece on why quality education should be a "civil and moral right"
Kalousova and Burgard find credit card debt increases likelihood of foregoing medical care
Highlights
Arline Geronimus wins Excellence in Research Award from School of Public Health
Yu Xie to give DBASSE's David Lecture April 30, 2013 on "Is American Science in Decline?"
U-M grad programs do well in latest USN&WR "Best" rankings
Sheldon Danziger named president of Russell Sage Foundation
Back in September
Follow us Social Inequality and Infant Mortality in China and India
Sarah Burgard and Shige Song (Department of Sociology, Population Studies Center and Epidemiology, University of Michigan;COSPONSOR WITH SURVEY RESEARCH CENTER)
03-15-2010, at noon in room 6050 ISR-Thompson.
Improving health in early life and reducing social inequalities in health are major policy goals worldwide, and various medical interventions have been introduced to try to reach those goals. However, assessments of the value of medical care during pregnancy and delivery for promoting infant survival have met with mixed and sometimes unexpected findings. We examine how the endogeneity of parents’ decisions to obtain care can influence the observed association between medical pregnancy care use and infant mortality. Using data on women’s recent births in China and India in the 1990s, we jointly estimate models of infant survival, the use of prenatal care, and the use of medical delivery assistance. These multilevel multiprocess models can accommodate correlations between the risk that a woman’s infant will not survive and her decisions about using medical pregnancy care, and show a stronger protective influence of these services on survival than conventional models. Our analyses and findings are framed with a discussion of their implications for understanding persistent social disparities in health.