Modelling Heaped Duration Data: An Application to Neonatal Mortality

38 Pages Posted: 4 Oct 2014

See all articles by Wiji Arulampalam

Wiji Arulampalam

University of Warwick - Department of Economics; IZA Institute of Labor Economics

Valentina Corradi

University of Surrey - School of Economics

Daniel Gutknecht

Goethe University Frankfurt

Abstract

In 2005, the Indian Government launched a conditional cash-incentive program to encourage institutional delivery. This paper studies the effects of the program on neonatal mortality using district-level household survey data. We model mortality using survival analysis, paying special attention to the substantial heaping present in the data. The main objective of this paper is to provide a set of sufficient conditions for identification and consistent estimation of the baseline hazard accounting for heaping and unobserved heterogeneity. Our identification strategy requires neither administrative data nor multiple measurements, but a correctly reported duration and the presence of some flat segments in the baseline hazard which includes this correctly reported duration point. We establish the asymptotic properties of the maximum likelihood estimator and provide a simple procedure to test whether the policy had (uniformly) reduced mortality. While our empirical findings do not confirm the latter, they do indicate that accounting for heaping matters for the estimation of the baseline hazard.

Keywords: discrete time duration model, heaping, measurement error, neonatal mortality, parameters on the boundary

JEL Classification: C12, C21, C24, C41

Suggested Citation

Arulampalam, Wiji and Corradi, Valentina and Gutknecht, Daniel, Modelling Heaped Duration Data: An Application to Neonatal Mortality. IZA Discussion Paper No. 8493, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2505355 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2505355

Wiji Arulampalam (Contact Author)

University of Warwick - Department of Economics ( email )

Coventry CV4 7AL
United Kingdom
01203 523471 (Phone)
01203 523032 (Fax)

IZA Institute of Labor Economics

P.O. Box 7240
Bonn, D-53072
Germany

Valentina Corradi

University of Surrey - School of Economics ( email )

Guildford
Guildford, Surrey GU2 5XH
United Kingdom

Daniel Gutknecht

Goethe University Frankfurt ( email )

Frankfurt am Main, 60629
Germany

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