Advancement to Candidacy Presentation: “Heating Price and Infant Health” by Shuhei Kaneko

Speaker

Shuhei Kaneko, PhD Student, UC Santa Barbara

Biography

Shuhei Kaneko is a PhD student in Economics at UC Santa Barbara. Prior to joining UCSB, he earned his undergraduate and MA degrees in Economics at Waseda University, Japan.

His research focuses broadly on health and labor economics, and he is interested in applied econometric methods in general. His primary interest is in the determinants of infant/child health and its long-term effects.

Event Details

Shuhei will be presenting his Advancement to Candidacy paper, “Heating Price and Infant Health”. To access the Advancement paper, you must have an active UCSB NetID and password.

Abstract and JEL Codes

This paper shows how the price of home heating can affect adverse birth outcomes when mothers are exposed to cold temperatures. To this end, I leverage geographical variation in the type of energy used for home heating, temporal variation in natural gas prices triggered by the fracking boom, and variation in exposure to cold temperatures. Using the universe of births in the US for 2001-2015, I find robust evidence that higher home-heating prices increase the risk of very preterm birth when pregnant women are exposed to cold temperatures. As a possible mechanism for this result, I examine the role of the “heat-and-eat” trade-off. When heating prices rise, households may use less heating. However, if the price elasticity of heating demand is less than one, energy spending will increase, reducing the budget for other goods. Consistent with this hypothesis, I find that an increase in energy expenses leads to a reduction in food expenditures. The heterogeneity analyses reveal that the detrimental effect of higher heating prices is stronger in poorer counties and among non-Hispanic black, less-educated, and younger mothers. Back-of-the-envelope calculations imply the substantial reduction in natural gas prices in the late 2000s prevented approximately 2,200 very preterm births per year.

JEL Classification: I12, I18, Q54 
Keywords: Heating price; Natural gas; Newborn health; Birth weight; Preterm birth