TY  - JOUR
AU  - Gamper-Rabindran,Shanti
AU  - Khan,Shakeeb
AU  - Timmins,Christopher
TI  - The Impact of Piped Water Provision on Infant Mortality in Brazil:  A Quantile Panel Data Approach
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14365
PY  - 2008
Y2  - October 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14365
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14365.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Shanti Gamper-Rabindran
Graduate School of Public and Intl Affairs
University of Pittsburgh
E-Mail: shanti@gspia.pitt.edu

Shakeeb Khan
Department of Economics
Duke University
213 Social Sciences
Durham, NC 27708
E-Mail: shakeeb.khan@duke.edu

Christopher Timmins
Department of Economics
Duke University
209 Social Sciences Building
P.O. Box 90097
Durham, NC 27708-0097
Tel: 919/660-1809
Fax: 919/684-8974
E-Mail: christopher.timmins@duke.edu
AB  - We examine the impact of piped water on the under-1 infant mortality rate (IMR) in Brazil using a novel econometric procedure for the estimation of quantile treatment effects with panel data.  The provision of piped water in Brazil is highly correlated with other observable and unobservable determinants of IMR -- the latter leading to an important source of bias.  Instruments for piped water provision are not readily available, and fixed effects to control for time invariant correlated unobservables are invalid in the simple quantile regression framework.  Using the quantile panel data procedure in Chen and Khan (2007), our estimates indicate that the provision of piped water reduces infant mortality by significantly more at the higher conditional quantiles of the IMR distribution than at the lower conditional quantiles (except for cases of extreme underdevelopment).  These results imply that targeting piped water intervention toward areas in the upper quantiles of the conditional IMR distribution, when accompanied by other basic public health inputs, can achieve significantly greater reductions in infant mortality.
ER  -