If fertility reflects the choice of households, results of their choice (duration between successive births and health of the children) cannot be considered to be determined randomly. Most existing studies of child health, however, tend to overlook the effects of fertility selection on child health. This paper argues that not accounting for this selection issue yields biased estimates and it is...

Altogether 164 poor families who had children of normal and subnormal weight and height were studied in Bogota, Colombia. Physical growth was found to be positively associated with expenditure on food, sanitary conditions in the home, mother's age, birth interval between surviving children, level of parental newspaper reading, aspirations for children, and socioeconomic status. Physical growth ...

This paper examines the causal effects of a major change in the German parental leave benefit scheme on fertility. I use the unanticipated reform in 2007 to assess how a move from a means-tested to an earnings-related benefit affects higher-order births. By using the German Mikrozensus 2010, I find that the reform significantly affected the timing of higher-order births in the first three years...

BACKGROUND Increased contraceptive use has been associated with a decrease in high parity births, births that occur close together in time, and births to very young or to older women. These types of births are also associated with high risk of under-five mortality. Previous studies have looked at the change in the level of contraception use and the average change in these types of high-risk bir...

background: due to complex causal framework of neonatal mortality, improvement of this health indicator is quite gradual and it's decreasing trend is not as great as other health indicators such as infant and under 5 mortality rates.this study was conducted to evaluate neonatal mortality risk factors based on nested case-control design. methods:  the study population was 6900 neonates who were ...

Birth Spacing, Fertility and Neonatal Mortality in India: Dynamics, Frailty and Fecundity A dynamic panel data model of neonatal mortality and birth spacing is analyzed, accounting for causal effects of birth spacing on subsequent mortality and of mortality on the length of the next birth interval, while controlling for unobserved heterogeneity in mortality (frailty) and birth spacing (fecundit...

Short birth intervals can have adverse consequences for maternal and infant outcomes. Optimal birth spacing is often presumed to be achieved through the practice of family planning and use of contraceptives, yet most of the available research does not address explicitly the contribution of contraceptive-method use to birth spacing or maternal and infant survival. We conducted a systematic liter...

Primary health workers( behvarzes) have the responsibility of birth control education in rural areas. To evaluate the practice of behvarzes in their own birth spacing, a questionnaire was prepared by the investigators and it was completed by married behvarzes. The results were as follows: of 437 behvarzes  50.8℅ were females and 84(19.2℅) were couples. Mean age of behvarzes was 29.4 and the mea...