ESSAYS ON PARENTS’ SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS, CHILD HEALTH OUTCOMES AND SMOKING BEHAVIOURS

This thesis comprises a collection of three distinct essays on the relationship between parents’ socioeconomic, child health outcomes and smoking behaviours. Chapter 2 investigates the extent to which misclassification errors in self-reported smoking affects estimates of the impact of parental income on smoking in adolescents aged 11-15 years old. Smoking participation is modelled using self-reported smoking and cotinine-validated smoking as binary dependent variables in two separate probit models. A comparison of the marginal effects estimated from both models suggest that self-reported smoking is misreported leading to biased estimates of the impact of parental income on adolescent smoking. Estimates from the cotinine-validated smoking model are robust to different specifications of the model that account for exposure to second-hand smoke. Income-related inequality in smoking (the concentration index) is also underestimated due to variations in the extent of misclassification errors across income quantiles. Chapter 3 uses three decomposition methods to decompose differences in the distribution of saliva cotinine between children/adolescents from high and low socioeconomic backgrounds. The decomposition methods applied are a mean-based (Oaxaca-Blinder) decomposition method and two decomposition methods that allow the decomposition of differences in quantiles (the quantile regression and recentered influence function regression decomposition methods). Group differences in the distribution of characteristics (composition effect) accounts for a larger proportion of the total difference in log cotinine compared to group differences in the impact of these characteristics on smoking (structural effect). The composition effect attributable to smoking within the home explains more of socioeconomic differences at lower quantiles, which are indicative of passive smoking compared to higher quantiles, which are indicative of active smoking. On the other hand, the composition effect of household income and parental smoking explains more of the socioeconomic differences in active smoking compared to passive smoking. Chapter 4 uses the Vietnam Young Lives Survey to investigate the impact of small-scale weather shocks on child nutritional status as well as the mechanism through which weather shocks affect child nutritional status. The results shows that small-scale weather shocks negatively affect child nutritional status and total household per capita consumption and expenditure (PCCE) but not food PCCE. Disaggregating total food PCCE into consumption of high-nutrient and energy-rich food shows that households protect food consumption by decreasing consumption of high-nutrient food and increasing consumption of affordable but low quality food. This suggests that the impact of small-scale weather shocks on child health is mediated through a reduction in the quality of dietary intake. Finally, chapter 4 shows evidence of a differential impact of weather shocks in children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. However, contrary to other studies, the impact of weather shocks is observed to be greater amongst children from wealthier households compared to children from poorer households.