The linked survival prospects of siblings: Evidence for the Indian states

Abstract

This paper reports an analysis of micro-data for India that shows a high correlation in infant mortality among siblings. In 13 of 15 states, we identify a causal effect of infant death on the risk of infant death of the subsequent sibling (a scarring effect), after controlling for mother-level heterogeneity. The scarring effects are large, the only other covariate with a similarly large effect being mother's (secondary or higher) education. The two states in which evidence of scarring is weak are Punjab, the richest, and Kerala, the socially most progressive. The size of the scarring effect depends upon the sex of the previous child in three states, in a direction consistent with son-preference. Evidence of scarring implies that policies targeted at reducing infant mortality will have social multiplier effects by helping avoid the death of subsequent siblings. Comparison of other covariate effects across the states offers some interesting new insights.

Keywords:

• clustering
• siblings
• infant mortality
• state dependence
• scarring
• unobserved heterogeneity
• dynamic random-effects logit
• sex
• gender
• India

Notes

1. Wiji Arulampalam is Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. Sonia Bhalotra is Reader in Economics, Department of Economics, University of Bristol, 8 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TN, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

2. We acknowledge financial support from the ESRC under Research Grant RES-000-22-0651 and would like to thank ORC Macro International for providing us with the data. We are grateful to Arthur van Soest, Mike Veall, and three anonymous referees for many helpful comments. The paper has benefited from presentation at the Universities of Toronto, McMaster, Tilburg, Essex, and Southampton, the ESRC Econometric Study Group Meeting, and at an international workshop we organized at the University of Bristol on Child Health in Developing Countries. We are grateful to DFID-UK for funding the workshop. An earlier version of this paper was circulated under the title ‘Persistence in Infant Mortality: Evidence for the Indian States’.