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You are What Your Parents Expect: Height and Local Reference Points
Fan Wang1, Esteban Puentes2, Jere Behrman3
1Department of Economics, University of Houston, Houston, Texas, USA.
Journal of Econometrics
|September 27, 2024
Summary
Parental preferences for child height significantly impact child stunting. Reference height, influenced by community norms, explains most of the protein intervention
Area of Science:
- Child health and nutrition
- Developmental economics
- Behavioral economics
Background:
- Child stunting affects 150 million children globally, impacting cognitive and economic outcomes.
- Understanding determinants of growth retardation is crucial for effective public policy.
- Parental preferences and community norms play a role in child health outcomes.
Purpose of the Study:
- To model parental nutritional and health choices with reference-dependent preferences.
- To analyze how parental targets for child height are influenced by community reference points.
- To decompose the effects of a protein-supplementation intervention on child height.
Main Methods:
- Developed a model of nutritional choices and health incorporating reference-dependent preferences.
- Used height as the targeted health outcome for children.
- Explored exogenous variation in reference height from a Guatemalan protein-supplementation experiment.
- Estimated model parameters using empirical data.
Main Results:
- Reference height is an equilibrium outcome determined by previous cohorts' choices.
- Changes in reference points accounted for 65% of the height difference in children.
- This effect was observed in the sixth annual cohort after the intervention's start.
Conclusions:
- Parental concern for child height relative to a reference population is a significant factor in child growth.
- Interventions aimed at improving child health must consider the influence of social reference points.
- Understanding reference-dependent preferences can refine public health policies for child nutrition.
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