Replication of a research claim from Case & Paxson (2011) in Demography.

The claim selected from Case & Paxson (2011) is that the quality of maternal and child health care has deteriorated in regions with high recent HIV prevalence relative to regions with low recent HIV prevalence. This reflects the following statement from the paper's abstract: "Regions of countries that have light AIDS burdens have witnessed small or no declines in health care, using the measures noted above, while those regions shouldering the heaviest burdens have seen the largest erosion in non-HIV-related health services for pregnant women and children." The authors test the selected claim using multiple waves of Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for 14 sub-Saharan African countries. The authors examine antenatal care, birth deliveries, and rates of immunization for children born between 1988 and 2005. The test of the claim is based on an OLS regression of the receipt of antenatal care on the focal independent variable - HIV Prevalence in Year of Birth. The analysis also controls for year-of-birth fixed effects and mother and child characteristics, incluhding the mother’s education in years, the mother’s age at the birth in years, the child’s age in months, an indicator for the child’s sex, and an indicator of whether the family lived in an urban area. The focal test result concerns the location of the estimated coefficient in the “HIV Prevalence in Year of Birth” term found in Table 3 under the heading “Had Antenatal Care”. When the authors include country-region fixed effects so that identification comes from change in HIV prevalence within a region over time, they find that higher HIV prevalence is associated with a significantly lower probability of reporting antenatal care, b = -1.734, SE[corrected for clustering at the region level] = .331.