Paul Andrés Rodríguez-Lesmes

Sanitation and child health in India

Our study contributes to the understanding of key drivers of stunted growth, a factor widely recognized as major impediment to human capital development. Specifically, we examine the effects of sanitation coverage and usage on child height for age in a semi-urban setting in Northern India. We use instrumental variables to control for endogeneity of sanitation usage coverage. We find that sanitation coverage plays a significant and positive role in height growth during the first years of life. JEL I12

Are Public Libraries Improving Quality of Education?: When the Provision of Public Goods is not Enough

This paper analyzes the relation between public, education-related infrastructure and the quality of education in schools. The analysis uses a case study of the establishment of two large, high-quality public libraries in low-income areas in Bogota, Colombia. It assesses the impact of these libraries on the quality of education by comparing national test scores (SABER 11) for schools close to and far from the libraries before (2000–02) and after (2003–08) the libraries were opened. The paper introduces a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition on difference-in-differences estimates to assess whether variation of traditional determinants of mathematics, verbal, and science test scores explains the estimates. The analysis finds differences that are not statistically different from zero that could be attributed to the establishment of the libraries. These results are robust to alternative specifications, a synthetic control approach, and an alternative measure of distance.

Could the NHS Frighten People into Healthy Habits? Smoking, Subjective Mortality Expectations and Health Information

This paper estimates the potential long-run impact on unhealthy habits of programs of early detection of chronic conditions as hypertension in England. This is done by estimating the parameters of a structural model on smoking, hypertension diagnosis and mortality. In order to deal with selection on screening I employ a feature of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), a nation wide representative survey of the population aged over 50: the recommendation by a professional nurse, trained by the survey organizers, to visit a GP for a screening procedure depending on current readings of blood pressure. Selection into smoking due to live expectancy or health is addressed by employing unobserved heterogeneity and subjective survival probabilities. These mortality beliefs, which depend on a latent health process, are allowed to be a function of both actual and future smoking choices. Exploratory results show that five interventions every 2 years would reduce, at its peak in the seventh year, smoking prevalence by 0.22 pp. While these numbers provide an idea of the magnitude of the effects that can be obtained, they do not provide conclusive evidence.

Cartoons and Economics: General Analysis Based on Colombian Economic Cartoons

May cartoons be considered as a viable and credible source for the study of economics? There is hardly any research on the subject, even though there is a quite significant amount of cartoons with economic content. This suggests that economics (and economists) have not paid enough attention and do not incorporate in their analysis a relevant primary source. The present paper aims to explore the value of using cartoons as a complementary primary source in economic analysis. We present a way of analyzing economic history through cartoons; first, reviewing cartoons which describe particular historical circumstances and second, examining cartoons that represent generic economic situations and are not necessarily linked to a historical period. We chose 17 cartoons, from different cartoonist, especially Colombian cartoonists that may give us an idea of economic matters and economic history.