In this dissertation I analyze patterns of maternal-infant health in developing contexts.
My first chapter uses child hemoglobin as a bio-marker for maternal malnutrition in Senegal during the 2008 food price crisis. In early 2008, world rice prices skyrocketed, causing people around the world to plunge into poverty. Senegal, in particular, depends heavily on imported foodstuffs. I find that the crisis had a large, negative impact on child anemia in urban Senegal, most likely reflecting a deterioration of maternal nutrition caused by rising food prices.
In the second and third chapters, we introduce a novel indicator of maternal-infant health: childhood sex ratios. Because infant females have lower rates of mortality than infant males, the sex ratio of the surviving population reflects the level of infant mortality. Childhood sex ratios are widely available from census data, meaning we can use them to shed new light on historical populations who lack traditional sources of data on infant mortality, like birth and death records.
We apply this new method to the 19th-century US, where the lack of vital statistics has left uncertainty over even approximate levels of infant mortality. We find that the level of infant mortality in the pre-industrial US was much lower than previously thought, but that racial health disparities were much greater.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/ae9t-5e23 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | McDevitt-Irwin, Jesse Reid |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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