Andrew Foster (Brown University) will present, Coresidence and the Intergenerational Transmission of Inequality.

Analysis of the long term effects of social and public health programs using household survey data requires an understanding of patterns of household recombination–that is the processes by which households divide and fuse over time. In this paper we examine, in particular, the effects on educational mobility of a well-known maternal and child health and family planning program in Matlab Bangladesh. Using a novel resampling procedure that relies on longitudinally collected demographic surveillance data, we correct for biases that arise from household recombination that occurred subsequent to a baseline census but prior to the collection of the first round of detailed economic data. Our results suggest that the program resulted in a small increase in consumption per capita, decreases in family sizes, small changes in household recombination, and increases in child schooling except among the lowest education households. We also show that approximate corrections for these biases using more limited data are reasonably effective.

BIO: Andrew Foster is a Professor of Economics at Brown University and a member of the Population Studies and Training Center. He is an empirical microeconomist working in the areas of population, development, and environmental economics. He has particular interest in sources of economic and social mobility in low income rural areas. His recent work has focused on the implications of household dissolution and recombination for evaluating long-term effects of access to health and family planning services. In India, along with collaborators from Yale University and the Institute for Rural Management in Anand, Foster is examining barriers to long-term growth and labor force transition in rural India. He also has worked on the consequences of voluntary environmental certification in Mexico and on nursing home segregation in the U.S.