Economics Department, Central Michigan University, Mt Pleasant, MI, USA.
Health Econ. 2012 Mar;21(3):301-15. doi: 10.1002/hec.1715. Epub 2011 Feb 4.
This is a first effort to quantify the contribution of different factors in explaining racial difference in low birthweight rate (LBW). Mother's health, child characteristics, prenatal care, socioeconomic status (SES), and the socioeconomic and healthcare environment of mother's community are important inputs into the birthweight production function, and a vast literature has delved into obtaining causal estimates of their effect on infant health. What is unknown is how much of the racial gap in LBW is explained by all these inputs together. We apply a nonlinear extension of the Oaxaca-Blinder method proposed by Fairlie to decompose this gap into the portion explained by differences in observed characteristics and the portion that remains unexplained. Data are obtained from several sources in order to capture as many observables as possible, although the primary data source is the Natality Detail Files. Results show that of the 6.8 percentage point racial gap in LBW, only 0.9-1.9 points are explained by white-black differences in endowments across those measures, and of those endowments, most of the gap in LBW is explained by the differences in SES. The unexplained difference is attributed to racial differences in the returns to or the marginal product of investments in infant health.
这是首次尝试量化不同因素对解释低出生体重率（LBW）种族差异的贡献。母亲的健康、儿童特征、产前护理、社会经济地位（SES）以及母亲所在社区的社会经济和医疗保健环境是出生体重生产函数的重要投入，大量文献深入探讨了这些因素对婴儿健康的因果影响的估计。目前尚不清楚所有这些投入共同解释了 LBW 种族差距的多少。我们应用了 Fairlie 提出的 Oaxaca-Blinder 方法的非线性扩展，将这一差距分解为由观察到的特征差异解释的部分和未解释的部分。为了尽可能多地捕捉到可观察变量，我们从多个来源获取数据，尽管主要的数据来源是出生率详细文件。结果表明，在 LBW 的 6.8 个百分点的种族差距中，只有 0.9-1.9 个百分点可以通过这些指标上的白人和黑人之间的禀赋差异来解释，而在这些禀赋中，LBW 的大部分差距是由 SES 差异造成的。未解释的差异归因于投资于婴儿健康的回报或边际产品的种族差异。
