This study provides causal effect of education on health behaviors in Turkey which is a middle income developing country. Health Survey of the Turkish Statistical Institute for the years 2008, 2010 and 2012 are used. The health behaviors considered are smoking, alcohol consumption, fruit and vegetable consumption, exercising and one health outcome namely, the body mass index (BMI). We examine the causal effect of education on these health behaviors and the BMI Instrumental variable approach is used in order to address the endogeneity of education to health behaviors. Educational expansion of the early 1960s is used as the source of exogenous variation in years of schooling. Our main findings are as follows. Education does not significantly affect the probability of smoking or exercising. The higher the education level the higher the probability of alcohol consumption and the probability of fruit and vegetable consumption. Higher levels of education lead to higher BMI levels. This study provides a baseline for further research on the various aspects of health behaviors in Turkey.
This is the first study which provides empirical analysis of the variation in health behaviors for adult men and women in Turkey which is a developing country. The health behaviors considered are smoking, drinking, fruit and vegetable consumption, exercise and body mass index (BMI). We find that in Turkey education is the most important factor that affects the health behaviors. The results indicate that smoking is positively associated with education at all levels with a decreasing effect with the level of education unlike in the developed countries. This result indicates that smoking is a serious public health problem in Turkey at all levels of education. Further, alcohol consumption and schooling are positively related and it increases by the level of education. Higher educated individuals clearly eat more fruits, vegetables and exercise more and their BMI levels are in the normal range compared to less educated and illiterate. We also highlight the importance of demographic factors, labor market status and household income. We use Health Survey of Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT) for years 2008, 2010 and 2012. This study will provide a baseline for further studies on the various aspects of health behaviors in Turkey.
We analyze married women's labor-supply responses to their husbands' job loss (added-worker effect) and worsening of unemployment conditions (discouraged-worker effect). We construct six two-year pseudopanels based on the previous year's labor market outcomes using nationally representative Turkish Household Labor Force Surveys from 2005 to 2010. We find that women whose husbands involuntarily transition from employment to unemployment are more likely to participate in the labor force. We pool the six-year pseudopanels and examine the effects of aggregate employment conditions on wives' transition to the labor force. A worsening of unemployment conditions has a small discouraging effect on wives' laborsupply responses.KEY WORDS: added worker effect, female labor force participation, Turkey Models of family labor supply show that unemployment of one spouse should increase the labor-supply response of the other spouse (Ashenfelter 1980). 1 This has been called the added-worker effect (AWE), where a married woman responds to the unemployment of her husband by increasing her labor supply. Empirical analyses of private arrangements in response to unemployment shocks have potential to inform policy debates on the design of public unemployment insurance programs. 2 Lundberg (1985) argues that while additional labor-force participants may appear in families whose employed members have experienced job loss, a general worsening of employment opportunities may result in discouraged workers who drop out of the labor force or refrain from entering it in anticipation of a costly job search, lower wages, or poor working conditions. This is called the discouraged-worker effect (DWE). Understanding the DWE is important in the design of labor market programs during recessionary periods.Analysis of female labor supply response to idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks will also have implications for gender equality in the labor market. Greater equality between men and women is associated with poverty reduction, higher schooling rates for children, higher gross domestic product, and better governance (Klasen 2002;Mourao 2013;King and Mason 2001). Female labor-force participation rate (FLFPR), as an instrument for increased rights and better economic conditions for women, can play an important role in achieving these development goals. FLFPR in Turkey, a middleincome emerging country, is 32 percent, significantly lower than the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Developement (OECD) average of 62 percent but above the Middle East and North African (MENA) average of 25 percent.We contribute to the literature on the labor-force participation (LFP) of women in three important ways. First, there is little analysis of the AWE within the context of an emerging economy with limited publicly provided unemployment insurance. We contribute to this sparse literature by examining the existence of the AWE in Turkey using the nationally representative yearly cross-sectional Turkish Household Labor Force Survey (HLFS) data for the 2005-10 period....
This study investigates the factors that may influence the obesity in Turkey which is a developing country by implementing Quantile Regression (QR) methodology. The control factors that we consider are education, labor market outcomes, household income, age, gender, region and marital status. The analysis is conducted by using the 2008, 2010 and 2012 waves of the Turkish Health Survey (THS) prepared by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT). The obesity indicator in our study is the individual's Body Mass Index (BMI). QR regression results provide robust evidence that additional years of schooling has negative effect on individual's BMI and this effect significantly raises across different quantiles of BMI. QR results also indicate that males tend to have higher BMI at lower quantiles of BMI, whereas females have higher BMI at the top quantiles. This implies that females have higher tendency to be obese in Turkey. Our findings also imply that the positive effect of age on individual's BMI levels raises across the quantiles at a decreasing rate. In addition, the effect of living in urban or rural areas do not significantly differ at the highest quantile distributions of BMI. Our results also reveal that the negative effect of being single on BMI increases gradually in absolute value across the quantiles of BMI implying that single individuals have less tendency to be obese or overweight compared to the married or widowed/divorced individuals. Moreover, the negative effect of being in labor force on individual's BMI increases across the quantiles of BMI implying that an individual is more likely to be obese if he/she is out of labor force. Finally, the impact of household income on BMI is positive and significant all quantiles.
This study investigates the factors that may influence the individual's Body Mass Index (BMI) in the developing country of Turkey by implementing Quantile Regression (QR) methodology. The analysis is conducted by using the 2008, 2010 and 2012 waves of the Turkish Health Survey (THS) prepared by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TURK-STAT). QR regression results provide robust evidence that additional years of schooling are negatively correlated with an individual's BMI and this relationship is significantly raised across different quantiles of BMI. We also find a strong negative relationship between being in the labor force and an individual's BMI, and this relationship increases across the quantiles of BMI implying that an individual is more likely to be obese if he/ she is out of labor force. Our results suggest that other socioeconomic and demographic indicators such as gender, age, marital status and household income are also important factors to explain the variation in an individual's BMI.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of health behaviors and obesity with an emphasis on education in Turkey. We use Health Survey of Turkish Statistical Institute for the years 2008, 2010 and 2012. The health behaviors considered are smoking, alcohol consumption, fruit and vegetable consumption, and exercise. We consider both the years of schooling and the different levels of education in order to better understand the association between education and health. We find that education is the most important factor associated with the health behaviors and obesity. Smoking is positively associated with education at all levels with a decreasing effect with the level of education unlike in the developed countries. Alcohol consumption is positively related with education and this association increases with the level of education. Higher educated individuals clearly eat more fruits, vegetables and exercise more and they are less likely to be obese compared to the less educated and the illiterate. We also highlight the importance of demographic factors, labor market status and household income in determining health behaviors and obesity.
This study investigated whether woman’s education, labour market status and the status within the household have any impact on their birth control behaviour in Turkey. Empirical analyses were implemented using the 2013 Demographic and Health Survey dataset, which includes information on women’s socioeconomic status and their current choice of contraceptives: whether they used any method, and if so, what method they used. Using a bivariate probit model with selection to control for any possible selection bias, the results suggest that whether a woman uses any birth control method, and whether the woman chooses modern methods over traditional methods, are primarily explained by education level and urban/rural residence, and that the determinants of contraceptive use vary across college-educated and non-college-educated women. The results also indicate that non-employed women are less likely to use any birth control method compared with women with regular, full-time jobs. However the effect was statistically insignificant.
In this study we examine the association between parents' socioeconomic status (SES) and childhood health in Turkey, a middle income, developing country using the 2013 round of Demographic Health Survey (DHS) data set. In our investigation, we focus on children from 7 to 59 months old and as a measure of health status, we use the height-for-age z-score, which is the measure of stunting and wasting. In order to overcome the biases with respect to age and gender, we calculate the child's standardized height measure. Using classical regression techniques, after controlling for the child's birth order, birth weight, mother's height, mother's breastfeeding, nutrition status and pre-school attendance, the impact of parent's SES on child's health measures is assessed, and parents' SES indicators include region of residence, number of household members, father's presence, parents' education and work status, and household wealth index based on the household's asset holdings. Our results indicate that while mother's education and occupation type are among the leading factors that affect the child's health status, urban residence appears to be the dominant factor which positively affects child's health: SES of families proxied by living conditions and infrastructure factors such as sanitation, access to clean water, availability of electricity, which are under the control of local governments, as well as access to health care services must be improved for better child health. JEL Classification codes: C20; I15; J13
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