Table 5.

Decomposition results: Fraction of 2005–2010 height change explained by improving sanitation.

	difference between 2005 and 2010 mean heights
decomposition method	before sanitation	after sanitation	percent explained
regression, OLS	0.132	0.0162	88%
regression, fixed effects	0.123	0.0167	86%
Blinder-Oaxaca	0.129	0.0107	92%
reweighted mean	0.129	−0.0121	109%

Regression results are reinterpreted from Table 2. “Before sanitation” is the simple average difference; “after sanitation” is the unexplained difference after accounting for the improvement in open defecation. “Blinder-Oaxaca” is a two-way decomposition with equal weight on within-sample slopes. “Reweighted Mean” constructs a counterfactual mean 2005 height by reweighting the 2005 sample to match the sanitation distribution of the 2010 sample; the after difference is negative because the counterfactual 2005 height is slightly greater than the real 2010 height.