Comments to “The effects of Ecuador’s economic crisis on child health and cognitive development”

by Melissa Hidrobo

Eduardo Rodríguez-Oreggia

EGAP ITESM CEM

• This paper presents preliminar findings on how the 1998-2000 crisis had an impact on children’s health, measured by standardized height, and cognitive outcomes, measured with a test for children 36 months and older.

• Uses a survey collected on health status and cognitive ability of children less than 6 years old, with a baseline survey in 2003-2004 and a follow-up in 2005-2006.

• Uses local variations to shocks, so length of shocks are different.

• Children who were exposed longer were 0.7 sd shorter and has 3.36 points tvip lower.

• However some improvement can be made to the analysis.

• Improve description of the data. We do not know much about the set of variables included in the survey, besides Table 5 with some means and SD.

• No mention of attrittion that could affect the results:- Mention that 7% did not answer the follow-up.- This could affect your results since those in more

affected areas could be those in hh that were not able to cope “easily” as the others and have worse results.

- Besides, the baseline is in 2003-2004, and the crisis sparked previously a mass of migration to other areas and countries, especially to Spain.

• Can add some info about those who are not in the follow up: use the baseline to identify them and compare means for all characteristics with those who stay in the different regions.

• In the paper always mentioned use of maternal FE, but in th table there are hh FE. Since using father lives at hme and it is kept wih FE: a. there are more than one family in the hh; b. father migrated between both surveys, which may be a coping mechanism.

• Could also add a more flexible specification, exploiting different exposures to shocks as exogenous in different regions, then adding more characteristics and interacting. In this case, you can also add here some local characteristics on health infraestructure and the retrospective data of the hh and interact. Although not possible to include mother FE.

• Finally, could explore relation between height and cognitive ability, as in case and Paxson (2008)