“IMPACTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION: FOREST LOSS,       
MALARIA, AND CHILD OUTCOMES IN NIGERIA"
 

About the Seminar

We investigate how environmental degradation at the very beginning of child’s life impacts childhood health. In particular, we examine the effect of forest loss around the time of birth on infant mortality and the early childhood health and nutrition of children in rural Nigeria. We geolink a new high-resolution data set of global forest loss (Hansen et al. 2013) to child-level data from the Nigeria Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 2008 and 2013 and, given that location of forest loss is potentially nonrandom and that confounding economic trends correlated with forest lost may be associated with health outcomes, we employ several estimation strategies.

We include geographic fixed effects, time-region trends, and several spatially dis-aggregated, time-variant and time-invariant controls from remote sensing data, to isolate the health effects using only within-LGA variation and, in some specifications, we use mother fixed effects to control for all time-invariant characteristics at a household level. We find that forest loss is associated with an increase in infant mortality – one standard deviation of forest loss is associated with a nine to 14 percent increase in the likelihood of death within the first month of life.

In a separate analysis, we show that forest loss is associated with an increase in malaria incidence and, given that we have a panel of forest loss, we determine that the greatest malaria impact occurs in the year after forest loss. Combining these findings on the timing of forest loss and malaria incidence with our results on infant mortality, we conclude that the mechanism linking forest loss to infant death is maternal exposure to malaria when the child in utero. 



About the Presenter

Tanya Byker is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Middlebury College. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2014 and B.A. with honors in Economics and Philosophy from Swarthmore College. 
Her research focuses on the interrelated choices individuals make about education, work and parenthood.

In Peru and South Africa, she has studied how access to family planning  impacts fertility and longer-term outcomes such as schooling and employment. She has studied how birth-related career interruptions in the US vary by mother’s education and the ways that parental leave laws impact labor-supply decisions. Recently, she has started to pursue work at the intersection of environmental and health economics exploring the relationship between environmental degradation and child and maternal health.

She was a recipient of the Hewlett Foundation/IIE Dissertation Fellowship in population, Reproductive Health and Economic Development (2012-2014) and spent a semester at SALDRU in 2013 doing research with her dissertation advisor David Lam. That initial research resulted in a recently published paper co-authored with Nicola Branson, “Causes and Consequences of Teen Childbearing: Evidence from a Reproductive Health Intervention in South Africa.”

 
Authors:
Julia Berazneva and Tanya S. Byker


Date: Wednesday, 26 September 2018
Lunch: 12h30 - 13h00, Staff Lounge, 4th Floor, School of Economics, Middle Campus
Seminar: 13h00 - 14h00, Seminar Room, 4th Floor, School of Economics, Middle Campus