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CHE Fellowships joint seminar

Tuesday 23 July 2019, 2.30PM to 4.00pm

Speaker(s): Giancarlo Buitrago and Ankur Pandya

Giving peace a chance: The causal effect of the Colombian peace process on perinatal mortality

Speakers: Giancarlo Buitrago

Abstract: There is limited causal empirical evidence on the magnitude of effects of armed conflicts on health, largely due to the impossibility of randomising individual exposure to conflict violence. This limitation is compounded for the study of conflict impacts on pregnancy outcomes, as studies to date have been constrained to the analysis of selected samples of live-born infants. We contribute to this evidence base by exploiting a natural experiment created by specific features of the experience of conflict and peace process in Colombia. In 2012, the Colombian government initiated talks in Havana with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the largest rebel group in the country, in order to bring an end to almost six decades of civil conflict. The cycle of talks with the FARC concluded in 2016 with the signing of the final peace accord. We use periods of ceasefire declared by the FARC during the Havana talks as an exogenous treatment to identify the effects of “peace” on pregnancy outcomes, through a regression discontinuity design. Using rich micro-data from social security records containing information on all pregnancies in Colombia during the period 2013-2017, matched to longitudinal vital statistics and daily information on conflict violence episodes at the municipality level, we find that the risk of stillbirth, perinatal mortality, and death at any point between 20 weeks of pregnancy until first year of age, decreased markedly for the children of women exposed to ceasefires during their pregnancy. These results are robust to a number of alternative estimation approaches. Additional analyses suggest larger reductions in those mortality risks when exposure to “peace” occurred mainly in the first trimester of pregnancy. 

A framework for responding to widely used health-improving but cost-ineffective health care

Speaker: Ankur Pandya

Abstract: There are ongoing efforts in the US and UK to: 1) encourage the use of cost-effective ("high-value") health services that are not fully implemented; and 2) discourage or prohibit the use of harmful ("no-value") health services. Health policy developers and researchers have given less attention to health-improving services that are not cost-effective ("low-value" care). In this talk, I will outline a series of responses to this third type of health care, including: policies aimed at lowering prices, policies aimed at lowering quantity, estimating the value of additional cost-effectiveness research, and ethical considerations.​

Location: The Professor Alan Maynard Auditorium A/RC/014

Presentation video by Giancarlo Buitrago, can been seen below:

Who to contact

For more information on these seminars, contact:

Adrian Villasenor
Adrian Villasenor-Lopez
Dacheng Huo
Dacheng Huo

If you are not a member of University of York staff and are interested in attending the seminar, please contact Adrian Villasenor-Lopez or Dacheng Huo so that we can ensure we have sufficient space

CHE Seminar Programme

  • Friday 2 December
    Sean D. Sullivan, University of Washington

Map showing Location Details (PDF , 297kb)