Fitzsimons, E;
Malde, B;
Mesnard, A;
Vera-Hernández, M;
(2016)
Nutrition, information and household behavior: Experimental evidence from Malawi.
Journal of Development Economics
, 122
pp. 113-126.
10.1016/j.jdeveco.2016.05.002.
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Abstract
© 2015 The Authors.Incorrect knowledge of the health production function may lead to inefficient household choices and thereby to the production of suboptimal levels of health. This paper studies the effects of a randomized intervention in rural Malawi that, over a six-month period, provided mothers of young infants with information on child nutrition without supplying any monetary or in-kind resources. A simple model first investigates theoretically how nutrition and other household choices including labor supply may change in response to the improved nutrition knowledge observed in the intervention areas. We then show empirically that the intervention improved child nutrition, household food consumption and consequently health. We find evidence that labor supply increased, which might have contributed to partially fund the increase in food consumption. This paper is the first to study whether non-health choices, particularly parental labor supply, might be affected by parents' knowledge of the child health production function.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Nutrition, information and household behavior: Experimental evidence from Malawi |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2016.05.002 |
| Publisher version: | http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2016.05.002 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2016 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) |
| Keywords: | Infant health; Health information; Labor supply; Cluster randomized control trial |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Economics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1499769 |
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