Substantial declines in early childhood mortality have taken place in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Kenya's infant mortality rate fell by 7.6 percent per year between 2003 and 2008, the fastest rate of decline among the 20 countries in the region for which recent Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data are available. The average rate of decline across all 20 countries was 3.6 percent p...

This paper examines health disparities in biomarkers among a representative sample of Indians aged 45 and older, using data from the pilot round of the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI). Hemoglobin level, a marker for anemia, is lower for respondents with no schooling (0.7 g/dL less in the adjusted model) compared to those with some formal education. There are also substantial state and ...

Generalized Selection Bias and The Decomposition of Wage Differentials The major contribution of this paper is ending a new and flexible way to measure the effects of selection on log-wages. In this context, we offer a general approach to performing decomposition analysis when selection effects are present. We call the difference between unconditional and conditional expectations of the log-wag...

The black-white wealth gap is large, and regressions of wealth on income and demographics can explain only a fraction of it. A standard Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition finds that the average black household, with $45,467 in net wealth, would have $67,975 (i.e. 49.5% more) if it were white but other characteristics were unchanged. Many explanations for this gap have been proposed, but few have been...

BACKGROUND The paper argues that several Sub-Saharan African countries have recorded marked improvements in the use of reproductive health services. However, the literature has hardly highlighted such progress and the factors responsible for them. The current study uses Ghana as a case to examine progress in the consumption of reproductive health services over the last two decades and the facto...

A Note on Decompositions in Fixed Effects Models in the Presence of Time-Invariant Characteristics Though theoretically appealing and very popular amongst labour economists, the interpretation of the unexplained part of the Oaxaca (1973) decomposition as discrimination rather than an omitted variable problem in cross-section data has often been criticised. In this note it is shown that this pro...

The share of contingent employment has increased significantly in the last two decades. Not much is known about the impact of this shift on disparities in access to health insurance and other benefits. I examined disparities in access to any type of health insurance, employersponsored health insurance and workers’ compensation (WC) benefits between contingent and non-contingent workers in U.S. ...

Using newly collected data from the RAND American Life Panel, we examine potential explanations for the gender gap in financial literacy, including the role of marriage and who within a couple makes the financial decisions. Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition reveals the majority of the gender gap in financial literacy is not explained by differences in the characteristics of men and women-but rather ...

This paper investigates gender differences in smoking behavior using data from the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP). We develop a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method for count data models, which allows to isolate the part of the gender differential in the number of cigarettes daily smoked that can be explained by differences in observable characteristics from the part attributable to differen...