Modeling Heaped Duration Data: An Application to Neonatal Mortality

35 Pages Posted: 4 Sep 2014 Last revised: 7 Jun 2022

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

Date Written: April 12, 2016

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 substantial heaping, a form of measurement error, 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 (discretized) baseline hazard accounting for heaping and unobserved heterogeneity. Our identification strategy requires neither administrative data nor multiple measurements, but a correctly reported duration point and the presence of some flat segment(s) in the baseline hazard. We establish the asymptotic properties of the maximum likelihood estimator and derive a set of specification tests that allow, among other things, to test for the presence of heaping and to compare different heaping mechanisms. Our empirical findings do not suggest a significant reduction of mortality in treated districts. However, they do indicate that accounting for heaping matters for the estimation of the hazard parameters.

Keywords: Discrete Time Duration Model, Heaping, Measurement Error, Parameters on the Boundary, Neonatal Mortality

JEL Classification: C12, C21, C24, C41

Suggested Citation

Arulampalam, Wiji and Corradi, Valentina and Gutknecht, Daniel, Modeling Heaped Duration Data: An Application to Neonatal Mortality (April 12, 2016). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2490933 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2490933

Wiji Arulampalam

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 (Contact Author)

Goethe University Frankfurt ( email )

Frankfurt am Main, 60629
Germany

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