TY - JOUR
T1 - Social affiliation and the demand for health services
T2 - Caste and child health in South India
AU - Luke, Nancy
AU - Munshi, Kaivan
N1 - Funding Information:
This project could not have been completed without the encouragement and support that we received from Homi Khusrokhan. We thank the management, staff, and workers of Tata Tea, Munnar, for their assistance and gracious hospitality during our extended stays in the tea estates. Binitha Thampi supervised the data collection and, together with Leena Abraham, assisted us in the design of the survey. We are grateful to Sameer Kumta and Sorab Sidhwa for their assistance with the illness classification, and to Andrew Foster for many helpful discussions. Esther Duflo, two anonymous referees, and the participants at the 2005 Bellagio Conference and the 2006 Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics provided very useful comments. Chun-Fang Chiang, Alaka Holla, and Jonathan Stricks provided excellent research assistance. Sarah Williams and Naresh Kumar assisted us with the geo-mapping. Research support from the Mellon Foundation at the University of Pennsylvania, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and NICHD grant R01-HD046940 is gratefully acknowledged. We are responsible for any errors that may remain.
PY - 2007/7
Y1 - 2007/7
N2 - This paper assesses the role of social affiliation, measured by caste, in shaping investments in child health. The special setting that we have chosen for the analysis - tea estates in the South Indian High Range - allows us to control nonparametrically for differences in income, access to health services, and patterns of morbidity across low caste and high caste households. In this controlled setting, low caste households spend more on their children's health than high caste households, reversing the pattern we would expect to find elsewhere in India. Moreover, health expenditures do not vary by gender within either caste group, in contrast once again with the male preference documented throughout the country. A simple explanation, based on differences in the returns to human capital across castes in the tea estates, is proposed to explain these striking results.
AB - This paper assesses the role of social affiliation, measured by caste, in shaping investments in child health. The special setting that we have chosen for the analysis - tea estates in the South Indian High Range - allows us to control nonparametrically for differences in income, access to health services, and patterns of morbidity across low caste and high caste households. In this controlled setting, low caste households spend more on their children's health than high caste households, reversing the pattern we would expect to find elsewhere in India. Moreover, health expenditures do not vary by gender within either caste group, in contrast once again with the male preference documented throughout the country. A simple explanation, based on differences in the returns to human capital across castes in the tea estates, is proposed to explain these striking results.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2006.07.005
DO - 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2006.07.005
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:33947218338
SN - 0304-3878
VL - 83
SP - 256
EP - 279
JO - Journal of Development Economics
JF - Journal of Development Economics
IS - 2
ER -
