Hope Corman

Impact of Child Disability on the Family

Families with disabled children represent a sizeable share of all American households. Living with a disabled child can have profound effects on the entire family, which in turn can affect the health and well-being of the child who is disabled. Much needs to be learned about how children’s health affects their parents, siblings, and other family members and about how family characteristics and resources modify those associations. Numerous programs and organizations provide resources for disabled children and their families, but the system is extremely fragmented and difficult to navigate. This commentary reviews what is known about the effects of child disability on the family, provides an overview of the complex needs of and multitude of resources available to families of disabled children, and concludes with suggested directions for practice, research, and public policy.

Was the economic crisis of 2008 good for Icelanders? Impact on health behaviors

This study uses the 2008 economic crisis in Iceland to identify the effects of a macroeconomic downturn on a range of health behaviors. We use longitudinal survey data that include pre- and post-reports from the same individuals on a range of health-compromising and health-promoting behaviors. We find that the crisis led to large and significant reductions in health-compromising behaviors (such as smoking, drinking alcohol or soft drinks, and eating sweets) and certain health-promoting behaviors (consumption of fruits and vegetables), but to increases in other health-promoting behaviors (consumption of fish oil and recommended sleep). The magnitudes of effects for smoking are somewhat larger than what has been found in past research in other contexts, while those for alcohol, fruits, and vegetables are in line with estimates from other studies. Changes in work hours, real income, financial assets, mortgage debt, and mental health, together, explain the effects of the crisis on some behaviors (such as consumption of sweets and fast food), while the effects of the crisis on most other behaviors appear to have operated largely through price increases.

The impact of low birthweight on special education costs.

We investigate the relationship between low birthweight, enrollment in special education and special education costs in the U.S. We use a sample of approximately 8,000 children aged 6 to 15 who are in school, calculating the probability of attending special education, holding constant individual, family and regional variables. Children who weighed less than 2,500 grams at birth are almost fifty percent more likely to be enrolled in any type of special education than children who were of normal weight at birth. This results in an incremental cost of special education of

Birth Outcome Production Function in the United States

370.8 million (1989-1990) per year due to low birthweight.

Crime, Deterrence and the Business Cycle in New York City: A VAR Approach

This paper contains the first infant health production functions that simultaneously consider the effects of a variety of inputs on race-specific neonatal mortality rates. These inputs include the use of prenatal care, neonatal intensive care, abortion, federally subsidized organized family planning clinics, maternal and infant care projects, community health centers, and the WIC program. We place major emphasis on two-stage least squares estimation. Our results underscore the qualitative and quantitative importance of abortion, prenatal care, neonatal intensive care, and the WIC program in black and white birth outcomes.

The Effects of Child Health on Marital Status and Family Structure

A bstract-We apply a VAR (vector autoregressive) technique to estimate the interrelationships between unemployment, arrests, police, demographics, and property-related felony crimes in New York City from 1970 to 1984. Despite the limitations of using a VAR, the technique provides a useful alternative to more standard models in analyzing what causes crime. The study concludes that arrests provide a strong deterrent to crimes. But, the reverse effect of crime on arrests, is extremely small. We find a brief and relatively weak effect of changes in unemployment rates on crime. Changes in demographics are associated with relatively stronger changes in crime rates

Postsecondary Education Enrollment Responses by Recent High School Graduates and Older Adults.

The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence on the effect of child health on marital stability and family structure in an economic framework. We use the 1988 National Health Interview Survey’s Child Health Supplement, with a sample of about 9,000 families, to test whether having an unhealthy child decreases the mother’s chance of being married and whether it increases her chance of living in an extended family. Using two different measures of child health, we find that having an unhealthy child decreases the mother’s likelihood of being married. Our results imply that children in poor health are more likely to face obstacles beyond their illness because they also are more likely to suffer the consequences of poverty and the poor schooling outcomes that result from being raised in a female-headed household. The only mitigating factor is that unhealthy white children are more likely than their healthy counterparts to be living in an extended family.

Infant health production functions: what a difference the data make

Most studies of the demand for postsecondary education focus on college enrollment decisions of recent high school graduates. This study expands the typical analysis in two ways. First, the demand for postsecondary education is tested for two age cohorts, recent high school graduates and older adults, using one data set-the Department of Educations Survey on Adult Education. Second, two postsecondary school alternatives-college or occupational school-are considered. Results from a polytomous logit model indicate that older adults are responsive to many of the same economic variables that affect schooling decisions of recent high school graduates. Also, there is evidence that colleges and postsecondary occupational schools are closer substitutes than had previously been realized.

Effects of Welfare Reform on Illicit Drug Use of Adult Women

We examine the extent to which infant health production functions are sensitive to model specification and measurement error. We focus on the importance of typically unobserved but theoretically important variables (typically unobserved variables, TUVs), other non-standard covariates (NSCs), input reporting, and characterization of infant health. The TUVs represent wantedness, taste for risky behavior, and maternal health endowment. The NSCs include father characteristics. We estimate the effects of prenatal drug use, prenatal cigarette smoking, and first trimester prenatal care on birth weight, low birth weight, and a measure of abnormal infant health conditions. We compare estimates using self-reported inputs versus input measures that combine information from medical records and self-reports. We find that TUVs and NSCs are significantly associated with both inputs and outcomes, but that excluding them from infant health production functions does not appreciably affect the input estimates. However, using self-reported inputs leads to overestimated effects of inputs, particularly prenatal care, on outcomes, and using a direct measure of infant health does not always yield input estimates similar to those when using birth weight outcomes. The findings have implications for research, data collection, and public health policy.

Lifecycle Effects of a Recession on Health Behaviors: Boom, Bust, and Recovery in Iceland

Exploiting changes in welfare policy across states and over time and comparing relevant population subgroups within an econometric difference-in-differences framework, we estimate the effects of welfare reform on adult womens illicit drug use from 1992 to 2002, the period during which welfare reform unfolded in the U.S. The analyses are based on all available and appropriate national datasets, each offering unique strengths and measuring a different drug-related outcome. We investigate self-reported illicit drug use (from the National Household Surveys on Drug Abuse and National Surveys on Drug Use and Health), drug-related prison admissions (from the National Corrections Reporting Program), drug-related arrests (from Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports), and drug-related emergency department episodes (from the Drug Abuse Warning Network). We find robust evidence that welfare reform led to a 10-21% decline in illicit drug use among women at risk of relying on welfare, as well as associated declines in drug-related arrests (6-7%), drug-related hospital emergency department episodes (7-11%), and possibly drug-related prison admissions (11-19%). The findings indicate that an appropriately designed system with sufficient job opportunities for those are able to work can result in both increases in employment and decreases in drug use.