Estimating the Determinants of Child Health When Fertility and Mortality Are Selective
指出多数研究忽略生育决策对儿童健康样本选择的影响，通过随机效应模型控制选择性偏差，发现14个撒哈拉以南非洲国家的生育选择显著影响儿童死亡率估计，但多数参数变化不大。
Most studies of the effects of education and health infrastructure on child health have not taken fertility decisions into account. They assume that the composition of the population of children classified by health is unrelated to prior fertility decisions. The author however estimates the determinants of child mortality and child health allowing for the possibility that samples of children are choice-based reflecting prior selective fertility and mortality behavior. Parameter identification is the most serious practical problem in controlling for fertility and mortality selection. If parents care about the health outcomes of potential births then any exogenous variable which affects health also affects the fertility decision. The author adopts a new approach to the problem by imposing a random-effects structure upon the error correlation matrix for the set of fertility mortality and health behaviors. Fertility selection is found to be statistically significant in the estimation of the determinants of mortality in all 14 sub-Saharan Demographic and Health Survey data sets studied and fertility and mortality selection is found to be significant in the determination of child height in Zambia. Nonetheless most parameters are only slightly changed when selection is accounted for.