Infant Survival in India: Frailty and State-Dependence ♣

This paper estimates state-dependence in infant mortality, motivated by the observation that childhood deaths cluster within families. Previous research has attributed sibling death clustering to inter-family heterogeneity (frailty). The natural sequencing of siblings and the availability of data on the first-born child of each mother are exploited to address the classical problems that arise in identification of endogenous effects given endowment heterogeneity. Separating causality from correlation in this area has important implications for policy and for theoretical research on the inter-relations of family behaviour, mortality and fertility. The analysis is conducted using data for the 15 major states of India. Remarkably, large scarring effects are identified in 14 of the 15 states