Health inputs are generally endogenous to health outcomes, and prices of health inputs are the most common instrumental variable for identifying estimates of the causal effects of health inputs.
This paper examines the biasing effects of selection on the efficacy of health inputs.
This pattern persists when we compare height between siblings, and also holds for health inputs such as vaccinations.
For designing programs to improve children's health, it is important to identify, for example, whether these disparities arise from differences in pre-natal health inputs and behaviors (nutrition, alcohol and tobacco use during pregnancy), or differential health inputs following birth.
In some of them, failure to take due account for adverse selection process leads to underestimates the beneficial effect of health inputs.
Successful approaches include those that improve geographic access to health interventions in poor communities, subsidised health care and health inputs, and social marketing.
I first lay out a simple economic model of the demand for child health inputs, and discuss whether the evidence is consistent with that model.
Next, two main causes of market failure in the market for child health inputs — lack of information and externalities — are analyzed.
Since there are no randomized trials of standard prenatal care and hospital delivery, it is difficult to assess the impact of such health inputs on survival chances without accounting for selection processes in the utilization of health facilities.
The concept of health human capital guides the statistical study of (1) health production functions, (2) derived demands for medical and behavioral health inputs, and (3) determinants of health and productivity outcomes.
Notably, the health inputs depend on endogenous household economic status, ( {Y}_{ict} ).
