This thesis consists of three essays in applied microeconomics: First, heat
and school absence: evidence from a survey of Indian children. Second, heatwaves
and short-term morbidity in India. Third, intra-family marriage and
pregnancy outcomes.
Chapter 1. India is the second most populous country on earth with young
people representing a significant number of the population resulting in data
that indicates such figures at 38 per cent. With such high numbers, major
consideration must be given into developing informed and targeted policies to
ensure positive educational outcomes for young people. This paper contributes
to existing literature by investigating the impact of high temperatures on
students’ rates of absenteeism, relying on the short-term exogenous variation
in daily maximum temperatures. The paper highlights the heterogeneity of
the effect of temperature by climate zone. To create data, we link information
on children’s school absences from the India Human Development Survey
(IHDS-II) in combination with meteorological data from the ERA-Interim
archive taken from a thirty day period prior to individual interview dates. Our
findings suggest that high temperatures have a substantial negative impact
on students’ attendance in rural areas. However, limited evidence of such
an effect is found in urban areas. Our results therefore indicate a need to
implement future in-depth studies.
Chapter 2. Within this chapter, we investigate the impact of prolonged
heat exposure on individuals short-term morbidity rates over a thirty day period prior to the interview date. We work with a broad dataset and use an
econometric model that utilizes plausibly exogenous variation in high weather
temperatures. We implement the percentile-based approach and three different
heatwave metrics as a innovative way of defining and capturing the impact
of heatwaves on health outcomes. Our results show that heatwave intensity of
the eighty-fifth percentile over the duration of three consecutive days of extensive
heat has a significant adverse effect on individuals short-term morbidity.
More so, our findings indicate a disparity between genders in relation to the
impact of heatwaves. Finally, it can be suggested that individuals having to
travel an extensive distance in order to access water are most affected by high
temperatures.
Chapter 3. Millions of people worldwide are married to their blood relatives,
yet the resulting impact on offspring health continues to be debated.
Within this paper, we provide evidence around this debate by studying the
birth outcomes from a large, representative sample of Indian women in varying
marital circumstances. We explore the impact of intra-family marriage
on negative pregnancy outcomes including stillbirth, miscarriage, and child
death after birth. We utilize an ordinary least squares model (OLS), which
controls for a wide range of financial and family factors. The results show
that being a woman related to her husband by blood increases the probability
of experiencing negative pregnancy outcomes by 2.8 percentage points. Our
finding is robust using the instrumental variable approach (IV). The instrumental
variable represents the ambient level of violence against women, which
positively affects the probability of consanguineous marriage. The IV approach
leads to a slightly smaller adverse impact of 2.2 percentage points. In addition,
the OLS results provide suggestive evidence that intra-family marriage
has no heterogeneous impact across religion types.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/43707 |
| Date | 17 June 2022 |
| Creators | Al-Azzam, Mohammad Sameer Ali |
| Contributors | Heyes, Anthony |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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