Working Paper 10. Young Lives: A Case Study of Sample Design for Longitudinal Research
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“ How far are life chances determined at birth ? Preliminary evidence from rural Ethiopia ” February 2010
How early on in life are later outcomes determined? Literature on early child development shows that uninsured adverse shocks to nutrition can have persistent welfare effects. This is particularly so when we consider the impact on long-term welfare of shocks that take place at critical developmental stages of boys and girls in a low-income setting. Using an instrumental variables approach, we first obtain estimates of the impact of low birth-weight and seasonality on the nutritional status of a cohort of one-year old Ethiopian boys and girls Our results indicate that season of birth of the index children and their birth weight have significant (and arguably, separate) effects on nutritional attainment as measured by height-for-age (HAZ) z-scores. We then estimate the impact of the resulting nutritional deficiency on nutritional attainment at the age of five. In the second stage, we find that stunting persists into the next “period” of child development. We further analyse heterogeneity in catch-up patterns of cumulative nutritional status between the ages of one and five years. We find that low height for age is less persistent for children from wealthier householdsindicating that severe shocks are more difficult to recover from for children in the poorest households. 1 Both University of Oxford. Address for correspondence ingo.outes-leon @economics.ox.ac.uk and cathporter.oxford@gmail.com. We are grateful to Young Lives for funding for this paper and access to the dataset. Thanks also to Inka Barnett, Stefan Dercon and Alan Sanchez for useful comments. Errors and omissions are of course
Twelve-year follow-up of respondents in a sample survey in Peninsular Malaysia.
"This note reports the experience of an attempt to find and re-interview in late 1988 and early 1989, as part of the Second Malaysian Family Life Survey (MFLS-2), the female respondents to the 1976-77 Malaysian Family Life Survey (MFLS-1) and a sample of their adult children aged 18 or older.... We discuss the field methods used to track the panel members and their adult children, report follow-up rates and analyze the selectivity of attrition from the panel, using data from the MFLS-1 on characteristics of both the missing and the re-interviewed respondents and their families. We then discuss the degree to which these results might be generalized to other such attempts at re-contacting survey respondents."