Topics in health economics
type: CreativeWork
description: "The rate of cesarean sections (CS) has grown substantially over the last two decades, now accounting for roughly one third of all births. The economics literature has established that a significant part of this growth is the result of physician incentives rather than medical necessity. Increasingly, however, the medical literature is raising questions about possible correlations between increased CS use and negative health outcomes for children in later life. For example, CS changes the intestinal bacteria of the infant and possibly compromises their immune system. My paper, ""Cesarean Sections and Later Child Health Outcomes,"" provides the first causal evidence that CS has an effect on later child health outcomes. Using variation in medical malpractice premiums as an instrument for risk-adjusted MSA-level rates of CS, I find that CS significantly increases the total rate of hospitalizations and the rate of hospitalizations that present with asthma for children up to 18 years old. These findings suggest that CS may have negative externalities on the child born via CS, which has implications for the evaluation of the socially optimal use of the CS procedure. In ""Financial Distress, Maternal Stress, and Infant Health,"" I investigate the effect of financial stress caused by the mortgage crisis, a large and negative exogenous financial shock, on infant health. I use all births in counties with over 100,000 individuals, spanning the entire country, and link these with county-level mortgage delinquency rates. I find that increases in financial stress increase premature births. A 10 percentage point increase in the mortgage delinquency rate, which occurred in roughly 10% of counties considered over this time period, would lead to an increase in premature births of approximately 5%. This result is robust to multiple specifications using different measures of financial stress collected from independent sources. I find evidence that financial stress decreases birth weight…
abstract: "The rate of cesarean sections (CS) has grown substantially over the last two decades, now accounting for roughly one third of all births. The economics literature has established that a significant part of this growth is the result of physician incentives rather than medical necessity. Increasingly, however, the medical literature is raising questions about possible correlations between increased CS use and negative health outcomes for children in later life. For example, CS changes the intestinal bacteria of the infant and possibly compromises their immune system. My paper, ""Cesarean Sections and Later Child Health Outcomes,"" provides the first causal evidence that CS has an effect on later child health outcomes. Using variation in medical malpractice premiums as an instrument for risk-adjusted MSA-level rates of CS, I find that CS significantly increases the total rate of hospitalizations and the rate of hospitalizations that present with asthma for children up to 18 years old. These findings suggest that CS may have negative externalities on the child born via CS, which has implications for the evaluation of the socially optimal use of the CS procedure. In ""Financial Distress, Maternal Stress, and Infant Health,"" I investigate the effect of financial stress caused by the mortgage crisis, a large and negative exogenous financial shock, on infant health. I use all births in counties with over 100,000 individuals, spanning the entire country, and link these with county-level mortgage delinquency rates. I find that increases in financial stress increase premature births. A 10 percentage point increase in the mortgage delinquency rate, which occurred in roughly 10% of counties considered over this time period, would lead to an increase in premature births of approximately 5%. This result is robust to multiple specifications using different measures of financial stress collected from independent sources. I find evidence that financial stress decreases birth weight…
author: Jachetta, Christine Biermann
language: en
keywords: cesarean section, infant health
date published: 2016-11-10T17:50:13Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:26:35Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/92770