IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/yor/hectdg/13-03.html

The Relationship Between Low Birthweight and Socioeconomic Status in Ireland

Author

Listed:
  • Madden, D.

Abstract

There is now fairly substantial evidence of a socioeconomic gradient in low birthweight for developed countries. The standard summary statistic for this gradient is the concentration index. Using data from the recently published Growing Up in Ireland survey, this paper calculates this index for low birthweight arising from preterm and intrauterine-growth-retardation. It also carries out a decomposition of this index for the different sources of low birthweight and finds that income inequality appears to be less important for the case of preterm births, while fathers education and local environmental conditions appear to be more relevant for IUGR. The application of the standard Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition also indicates that the socioeconomic gradient for all sources of birthweight appear to arise owing to different characteristics of rich and poor, and not because the return to characteristics differ between rich and poor.

Suggested Citation

  • Madden, D., 2013. "The Relationship Between Low Birthweight and Socioeconomic Status in Ireland," Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers 13/03, HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York.
    • Handle: RePEc:yor:hectdg:13/03
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.york.ac.uk/media/economics/documents/herc/wp/13_03.pdf
    File Function: Main text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. McGovern, Mark E., 2014. "Comparing the relationship between stature and later life health in six low and middle income countries," The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, Elsevier, vol. 4(C), pages 128-148.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General
    • I14 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Inequality

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:yor:hectdg:13/03. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jane Rawlings (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deyoruk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.