Abstract
This thesis contains three chapters on social and economic determinants of health. The first chapter investigates the causal effects of education on mental health. To address the endogeneity issues of education, the study uses Instrumental Variable strategy where actual years of education are instrumented by cohort-specific compulsory schooling years and its interaction with various childhood condition dummies. The estimates on the causal effects are sensitive to the choice of additional instruments. While majority of estimates suggest that there are no or only limited causal protective effects of education on mental health, the possibility of negative effects remains. The strong positive association between education and mental health could be explained by unobservable individual characteristics that affect education and mental health in the same direction.
The second chapter studies whether more generous maternity leave protection in duration and payment can help decrease the incidence rates of pregnancy loss or termination (induced abortion, miscarriage and stillbirth) in low- and middle-income countries. Using a quasi-Difference-in-Differences approach, the study provides some evidence that increasing the generosity of maternity leave has the potential to reduce, in particular, the probability of induced abortion or miscarriage. The effects are stronger for Asian mothers who are working, mothers who have higher educational attainment and prestigious occupations, and mothers who were aged below 21 or above 30 at the realization of pregnancy outcomes.
The last chapter explores how early life exposure to adverse shocks negatively affects the anthropometric outcomes of the second generation in Sub-Saharan African countries. The study reveals compelling evidence that mother’s experience of negative rainfall shocks, particularly excessive drought, from in-utero to early adolescence significantly increases the probability that their offsprings suffer from impaired growth during early childhood. The effects are mainly driven by households residing in the rural areas and children who are located at the lower end of anthropometric distribution. There is also evidence that mothers’ early life experience of negative rainfall shocks led to disadvantages in a variety of welfare outcomes persisting into marital households, which potentially contribute to next generation’s underperformance in early life growth measures.