Program on Children.

• Position: Bureau News

The NBER's Program on Children, directed by Jonathan Gruber of MIT, met in Cambridge on April 3. Members and guests discussed these papers:

Anna Aizer, Princeton University, "Got Health? Advertising, Medicaid, and Child Health"

Karen Norberg, NBER, "Dads and Cads: Parental Cohabitation and the Human Sex Ratio at Birth"

Douglas Almond, NBER, and Kenneth Chay, NBER and University of California, Berkeley, "The Long-Run and Intergenerational Impact of Poor Infant Health: Evidence from Cohorts Born During the Civil Rights Era"

David Figlio, NBER and University of Florida, "Testing, Crime, and Punishment"

Thomas S. Dee, NBER and Swarthmore College, "Are There Civic Returns to Education?"

Abhijit Banerjee, Shawn Cole, and Leigh Linden, MIT; and Esther Duflo, NBER and MIT, "Improving the Quality of Education in India: Evidence from Three Randomized Experiments"

Of the ten million uninsured children in 1996, nearly half were eligible for the public health insurance program, Medicaid, but not enrolled. Little is known about the reasons low-income families fail to use public programs or the consequences of failing to use them. Using detailed information on Medicaid outreach, enrollment, and hospitalization rates in California, Aizer finds that information and administrative costs are significant deterrents to program take-up. Controlling for selection into Medicaid, enrolling children early in Medicaid leads to a more efficient allocation of health care resources by promoting primary ambulatory care over more expensive hospital-based care resulting in fewer avoidable hospitalizations, she finds.

Modern theory on sex allocation predicts that parents may be able to vary the sex of their offspring according to the prospects for two-parent care. Using data pooled from four publicly available longitudinal studies, Norberg finds that parents who were living with an opposite-sex spouse or partner before the child's conception or birth were significantly more likely to have a male child than parents who were living apart. This effect is observable even when the comparisons are made between siblings, and even when those comparisons are made before the children's conceptions. This "partnership status effect" may be the result of modern reproductive exposures, but a paternal investment effect would fit closely with the predictions of adaptive sex allocation theory.

Almond and Chay use the substantial improvements in health among the cohorts of black infants born...