Tanya Byker, Assistant Professor of Economics

Tanya Byker

Topic: Impacts of environmental degradation: Forest loss, malaria, and child outcomes in Nigeria

Abstract:

We investigate how environmental degradation at the very beginning of child’s life impacts childhood health. In particular, we examine the effect of forest loss around the time of birth on infant mortality and the early childhood health and nutrition of children in Nigeria. We geolink a new high-resolution data set of global forest loss (Hansen et al. 2013) to child-level data from the Nigeria Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 2008 and 2013 and, given that location of forest loss is potentially nonrandom and that confounding economic trends may be associated with health outcomes, we employ several estimation strategies. We include geographic fixed effects, time-region trends, and several spatially dis-aggregated, time-variant and time-invariant controls from remote sensing data, to isolate the health effects using only within-LGA variation and, in some specifications, we use mother fixed effects to control for all time-invariant characteristics at a household level. We find that forest loss is associated with an increase in infant mortality – one standard deviation of forest loss is associated with a seven to nine percent increase in the likelihood of death within the first month of life. In a separate analysis, we show that forest loss is associated with an increase in malaria incidence and, given that we have a panel of forest loss, we determine that the greatest malaria impact occurs in the year after forest loss. Combining these findings on the timing of forest loss and malaria incidence with our results on infant mortality suggests that the mechanism linking forest loss to infant death is maternal exposure to malaria when the child in utero. We also find evidence that forest loss leads to lower height-for-age among surviving children.

 

Biography:

Tanya Byker joined the Economics faculty as an assistant professor in the fall of 2014. She teaches courses in regression, and the economics of gender.

Professor Byker graduated from Swarthmore College and received her PhD from the University of Michigan.  Her research falls under the categories of labor and development economics and focuses on the interrelated choices individuals make about education, work and parenthood.  She has studied how birth-related career interruptions in the US vary by mother’s education, and the ways that parental leave laws impact those labor-supply decisions. In a developing country context, she has studied how access to family planning impacts fertility and longer-term outcomes such as schooling and employment in Peru and South Africa.