Past Seminars and Events

Perinatal Health among 1 Million Chinese-Americans

Publish Time:2019-01-17

Date & Time:January 21, 2019  03:00 - 04:30p.m.

Venue:SEM320 Meeting Room

Speaker:Douglas Almond(Professor of Columbia University

Inviter:Hanming Fang


Abstract:  

  

“Missing girls” suggest a net preference for sons in China and among Chinese immigrants to the West. We consider health at delivery of surviving girls born in the US and find higher rates of low birth weight, congenital anomalies, maternal hypertension, and lower APGAR scores among Chinese Americans (relative to the non-Chinese gender gap). Hospitals spend more on Chinese-American girls, keep them longer following delivery, and perform more medical procedures than expected. Nevertheless, stillbirth and death on the first day of life are more common and Chinese daughters are less likely to be brought back to the hospital following delivery. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to find that son preference may compromise health at birth.


Speaker Biography

Prof. Douglas Almond 's primary research areas are health and applied microeconomics, with a particular interest in infant health and the environment. As a professor (tenured in SIPA and Department of Economics) in Columbia University, he is also a visiting professor of Uppsala University (Sweden), and senior scholar of opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Almond previously served as a staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration and studied the health effects of air pollution in China as a Fulbright scholar.

In 2011 Professor Douglas Almond won Garfield Economic Impact Award (with Doyle, Kowalski and Williams) and HCUP Outstanding Article of the Year Award (with Doyle, Kowalski and Williams). In 2005-2006 he was Fulbright Scholars and spent a year in the China Center for Economic Research of Peking University. In 2002 he was awarded the U.C. Berkeley Department of Economics Award for Public Policy Research.