Abhishek Chakravarty

Department of Economics

University College London

Research

Publications

Chakravarty, Abhishek (2010) "Supply Shocks and Gender Bias in Child Health Investments: Evidence from the ICDS Programme in India," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy: Vol. 10 : Iss. 1 (Topics), Article 88. (download)

This paper examines whether a permanent increase in the supply of immunisations reduces or intensifies the gender bias in immunisation against female children in India. It also investigates the effect of duration of exposure to the supply shock on gender bias. The variation in the implementation of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme across both regions and time is exploited for the analysis. Estimations use data from the 2005-06 Measure DHS survey in India. We find that the increased supply of vaccinations due to the programme initially increases the gender inequality in immunisation but that this increase disappears over time. Our results indicate that the programme has saved approximately 1.72-1.84 million children, of which about 70% are boys.

Research Papers

JOB MARKET PAPER

Dams and Infant Mortality in Africa (download)

This paper investigates the impact of dams on infant mortality using 32 waves of DHS data that have GPS locations of households. This allows us to estimate the impact of dams on households that both downstream and within their immediate vicinity. We use a sample of over 400,000 children in 17 countries in Africa. In contrast to earlier research on the impact of dams on agricultural productivity and poverty, we examine child-level outcomes and measure the impacts of dams on downstream households that are both close to and very far from the dam. For non-migrant households we find the following. First, children born in households that reside immediately downstream to a dam experience a significant reduction of 3.84-4.60% in infant mortality. This is because the benefits of irrigation services of the dam are large for downstream households geographically close to the dam. Second, for children born in households that reside further downstream, infant mortality significantly increases by 2.18-2.36%. This is because dams reduce water levels downriver, and households cannot access compensating irrigation services from dams, or benefit from the reduced volatility of water flow that dams provide. Children born in the vicinity of the dam experience increased infant mortality of at least 2.27%, with evidence linking the increase to increased malaria incidence and reduced agricultural productivity near the dam reservoir.

Gender Bias in Breastfeeding and Missing Girls in Africa: The Role of Fertility Choice (download)

This paper investigates whether there is gender bias in the duration that children are breastfed in Africa. Given evidence that breastfeeding is negatively related to future fertility, we further investigate whether any part of the gender bias is due to son preference in fertility choice. We use identical methodology to Jayachandran and Kuziemko (2010), and compare our results on Africa to their findings on India. We present separate results for North and Sub-Saharan Africa to account for differing regional levels of gender discrimination, and use a sample of over 100,000 children from 32 waves of DHS surveys across 17 countries. We find that boys are breastfed for 0.657 months longer than girls in North African countries, which is nearly twice male advantage of 0.391 months found for India. For Sub-Saharan African countries, the male breastfeeding advantage is much smaller at 0.059 months. We also find evidence analogous to Jayachandran and Kuziemko (2010) linking son-biased fertility choice to breastfeeding duration, with children being breastfed longer as birth order increases, as mothers approach or exceed their ideal total fertility, and if mothers already have a male child. Having older male siblings reduces the male advantage in breastfeeding in North Africa, but not in Sub-Saharan Africa. We estimate that annually approximately 43,000-45,000 girls in Sub-Saharan Africa are missing due to gender discrimination in breastfeeding.

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