Prof. Joseph Cummins

Department of Economics, UCR

Abstract: Early life growth faltering due to nutritional deficiencies and disease environment currently affects the health, productivity and lifespan of hundreds of millions of adults worldwide, with another 150 million children currently experiencing stunted growth.  In this talk, I survey methods for estimating the effects of various individual- and ecological-level determinants of child growth faltering using individual-level data from repeated cross-sections of the Demographic and Health Surveys.  I argue that the statistical models and outcome measures currently employed in the health and social science literatures often produce misleading, inappropriate, and/or highly biased estimates.  Simultaneously, by aggregating results for children of various ages, these estimates tend to average over the exact dynamics of child growth that are the focus of many contemporary social science theories. I propose an empirical framework and a set of regression-based statistical models where the child growth profile itself becomes the outcome of interest.