out of the wallet and into the purse using micro data to test income pooling this paper uses an exogenous change in the intrahousehold distribution of income provided by a change in united kingdom family allowance policy to test the income pooling hypothesis implied by unitary household models expenditure shares are estimated for a wide range of goods using household level data shifts in expenditure shares suggest that children and mothers benefited at the expense of fathers when this policy change shifted income within households from men to women similar shifts are not found among married couple households with no children this paper refutes income pooling and confirms and extends results in lundberg pollak and wales 1997

pension plan characteristics and framing effects in employee savings behavior abstract defined contribution pensions in many postsecondary institutions are funded by a combination of an employer premium and a mandatory employee premium individuals can also contribute to a supplemental savings account holding constant total compensation standard reasoning suggests that supplemental savings should depend negatively on the sum of the employer and employee pension contributions contrarily we find that the supplementary savings of professors are significantly more sensitive to employee contributions than to employer contributions this asymmetry is consistent with different marginal propensities to save out of the salary and pension components of compensation nevertheless impacts on lifetime utility are relatively modest

complementarities of innovation activities an empirical analysis of the german manufacturing sector abstract innovation strategies in manufacturing often involve internal rd it is based on data from the german part of the community innovation survey cis 3 the results provide evidence for significant complementarities between internal r d and r d cooperation but cast doubt on the complementarity of internal and contracted r d since a productivity effect on firms patenting probability or sales with new products cannot be found

reconsidering the labeling effect for child benefits evidence from a transition economy i consider expenditure on food alcohol and tobacco and clothing in households with children in slovenia at the start of its transition to a market economy i exploit the unique structure of its child benefit program in order to look for evidence that labeling a cash transfer a child benefit influences how that cash transfer is spent contrary to much of the recent literature on the non fungibility of income i do not find evidence supporting a labeling effect

how can safety nets contribute to economic growth the paper provides an up to date and selective review of the literature on how social safety nets contribute to growth the evidence is carefully chosen to show how safety nets have the potential to overcome constraints on growth linked to market failures and is organized into 4 distinct pathways i encouraging asset accumulation by changing incentives and by addressing imperfections in financial markets caused by constraints in obtaining credit and from information asymmetries overcoming such failures helps households to invest into their human capital or productive assets ii failures in insurance markets especially in low income setting safety nets are assisting in managing risk both ex post and ex ante iii safety nets are overcoming failure to create assets and other local economy complementary factors to household level investments iv safety nets are shown to relax political constraints on policy safety nets have a dual objective of directly alleviating poverty through transfers to the poor and of triggering higher growth for the poor however the trade off between the dual objectives of equity and growth is not eliminated by the potential for productive safety nets this remains critical for designing social policies

cooperation and the efficiency of regional r d activities this paper investigates the relationship between the cooperative behaviour of manufacturing establishments in a region and the efficiency of their r d activities using data for 11 european regions some significant differences in the attitude towards r d cooperation as well as with regard to the efficiency of r d activities between the regions can be found however these two issues appear to a large degree to be empirically unrelated therefore the role of r d cooperation in regional innovation systems remains unclear copyright 2004 oxford university press

measuring the knowledge base of an economy in terms of triple helix relations among technology organization and territory can the knowledge base of an economy be measured in this study we combine the perspective of regional economics on the interrelationships among technology organization and territory with the triple helix model and offer the mutual information in three dimensions as an indicator of the configuration when this probabilistic entropy is negative the configuration reduces the uncertainty that prevails at the systems level data about more than a million dutch companies are used for testing the indicator the data contain postal codes geography sector codes proxy for technology and firm sizes in terms of number of employees proxy for organization the configurations are mapped at three levels national nuts 1 provincial nuts 2 and regional nuts 3 the levels are cross tabled with the knowledge intensive sectors and services the results suggest that medium tech sectors contribute to the knowledge base of an economy more than high tech ones knowledge intensive services have an uncoupling effect but less so at the high tech end of these services

do husbands and wives pool their resources evidence from the united kingdom child benefit common preference models of family behavior imply income pooling a restriction on family demand functions such that only the sum of husband s income and wife s income affects the allocation of goods and time testing the pooling hypothesis is difficult because most family income sources are not exogenous to the allocations being analyzed in this paper we present an alternative test based on a natural experiment a policy change in the united kingdom that transferred a substantial child allowance to wives in the late 1970s using family expenditure survey data we find strong evidence that a shift toward greater expenditures on women s clothing and children s clothing relative to men s clothing coincided with this income redistribution

social capital innovation and growth evidence from europe this paper investigates the interplay between social capital innovation and economic growth in the european union we identify innovation as an important mechanism that transforms social capital into economic growth in an empirical investigation of 102 european regions in the period 1990 2002 we show that higher innovation performance is conducive to economic growth and that social capital affects growth indirectly by fostering innovation our estimates suggest that there is only a limited role for a direct effect of social capital on economic growth

do migrants really save more understanding the impact of remittances on savings in rural china abstract this article studies the impact of remittances on the savings behaviour of rural households in china using a primary survey undertaken by the authors in 2006 allowing for endogeneity and left censoring of remittances we find that the marginal propensity to save out of remittances is well below half of that out of other sources of incomes moreover we find no evidence of any direct effect of remittances on either capital input or gross output of farm production these findings are robust with respect to alternative definition of savings and are in line with recent studies which conclude that remittances are largely used for consumption purposes by rural chinese households

expenditure response to increases in in kind transfers evidence from the supplemental nutrition assistance program recent studies on food stamp participant households marginal propensity to spend out of food stamps versus income have had contradictory results experimental studies have found household behavior aligns with standard economic theory where households marginal propensity to spend on food out of food stamps is equivalent to cash income observational studies nd that households have a larger marginal propensity to spend out of food stamps than cash income in this study we re examine this question by estimating how an unprecedentedly large increase in food stamp benets due to the implementation of the american recovery and reinvestment act aects food at home expenditure we nd that the policy change caused households to increase food at home expenditure as well as increase households share of total expenditure allocated toward food at home expenditure we compare these results to a time period without a meaningful food stamp policy change and nd our results are unique to the arra implementation time period

does an intra household flypaper effect exist evidence from the educational fee reduction reform in rural china abstract we test for evidence of an intra household flypaper effect by evaluating the impact of an educational fee reduction reform in rural china on different categories of household expenditure including spending on individual children using pre and post reform data this study exploits cohort comparisons variation in the extent of school fee reductions across different villages and variation in the subsidies received by children enrolled in different grades within the same family to identify the impact of the reform the results show that educational fee reductions are matched by increased voluntary educational spending on the same children who receive the fee reductions providing strong evidence of an intra household flypaper effect

the effects of benefit timing and income fungibility on food purchasing decisions among supplemental nutrition assistance program households the supplemental nutrition assistance program snap is the largest nutritional safety net in the united states prior research has found that participants have higher consumption shortly after receiving their benefits followed by lower consumption towards the end of the benefit month known as the snap benefit cycle this consumption pattern has been found to have negative effects on beneficiaries we hypothesize two behavioral responses of snap participants may work in tandem to drive much of the cycle 1 short run impatience a higher preference to consume today and 2 fungibility of income the degree of substitutability between a snap dollar and a cash dollar using data from the national food acquisition and purchase survey foodaps a newly developed nationally representative survey of daily food acquisitions by snap households we find evidence of both behavioral responses however the degree of short run impatience and fungibility of income is found to differ significantly across poverty levels and use of grocery lists to plan food purchases snap households could gain from food purchase planning education

does money matter the effects of cash transfers on child development in rural ecuador abstract a large body of research indicates that child development is sensitive to early life environments so that poor children are at higher risk for poor cognitive and behavioral outcomes these developmental outcomes are important determinants of success in adulthood yet remarkably little is known about whether poverty alleviation programs improve children s developmental outcomes we examine how a government run cash transfer program for poor mothers in rural ecuador influenced the development of young children random assignment at the parish level is used to identify program effects our data include a set of measures of cognitive ability that are not typically included in experimental or quasi experimental studies of the impact of cash transfers on child well being as well as a set of physical health measures that may be related to developmental outcomes the cash transfer program had positive although modest effects on the physical cognitive and socioemotional development of the poorest c

who benefits from child benefit governments over much of the developed world make significant financial transfers to parents with dependent children for example in the united states the recently introduced child tax credit ctc which goes to almost all children costs almost 1 billion each week or about 0 4 of gnp the united kingdom has even more generous transfers and spends an average of about 30 a week on each of about 8 million children about 1 of gnp the typical rationale given for these transfers is that they are good for our children and here we investigate the effect of such transfers on household spending patterns in the united kingdom such transfers known as child benefit cb have been simple lump sum universal payments for a continuous period of more than 20 years we do indeed find that cb is spent differently from other income paradoxically it appears to be spent disproportionately on adult assignable goods in fact we estimate that as much as half of a marginal dollar of cb is spent on alcohol we resolve this puzzle by showing that the effect is confined to unanticipated variation in cb so we infer that parents are sufficiently altruistic toward their children that they completely insure them against shocks

children s resources in collective households identification estimation and an application to child poverty in malawi children s resources matter but they are hard to identify because consumption is typically mea sured at the household level modern collective household models permit some identication of indi vidual household member resources but these models typically either ignore children or treat them as attributes of adults we propose a collective household model in which children are people with their own utility functions possibly assigned to them by parents extending the frameworks of browning chiappori and lewbel 2007 and lewbel and pendakur 2008 we show identication of children s resource shares within households we invoke semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences and use data on the household level consumption of assignable private goods to achieve identication of each individual s resource share within the household we show this without being able to observe consumption by individual household members of goods that are partly or wholly shared goods within the household further we obtain identication using only engel curves and so do not require ob served price variation in the data we estimate our model using data from malawi andnd that as the number of children in a household grows women s resource shares fall and children s resource shares rise and men s resource shares are basically unchanged we alsond evidence of gender bias against girls and observe that the resource shares of mothers and children are increasing in the education level of the mother finally we use our estimates to construct poverty indices at the person level andnd that per capita poverty indices understate the incidence of child poverty in malawi

getting a healthy start the effectiveness of targeted benefits for improving dietary choices there is growing policy interest in encouraging better dietary choices we study a nationallyimplemented policy the uk healthy start scheme that introduced vouchers for fruit vegetables and milk we show thatthe policy has increased spending on fruit and vegetables and has been more effective than an equivalent value cash benefit we also show that the policy improved the nutrient composition of households shopping baskets with no offsetting changes in spending on other foodstuffs

measuring the knowledge base of regional innovation systems in germany in terms of a triple helix dynamics the interaction among the three sub dynamics of economic exchange technological innovation and institutional control can be captured with a generalized triple helix model we propose to use the information contained in the configuration among the three sub dynamics as an indicator of the synergy in a configuration this measure indicates the reduction of the uncertainty which prevails at the level of an innovation system on the basis of data at the district level in germany the conclusions of a previous study about the netherlands are tested medium tech manufacturing is the main driver of the knowledge based configuration in a regional economy while knowledge intensive services tend to uncouple the economy from the regional configuration at the level of regions nuts 2 germany s knowledge based economy is no longer structured in terms of the previous east west divide of the country while this divide has prevailed at the level of the states nuts 1 that constitute the federal republic however the effects of high and medium tech are not specific for the western or eastern parts of the country the configuration of medium tech manufacturing can be considered a better indicator of the knowledge based economy than that of high tech manufacturing

the effects of male and female labor supply on commodity demands we examine the effects of male and female labor supply on household demands and present a simple and robust test for the separability of commodity demands from labor supply using data on individual households from six years of the uk fes we estimate a demand system for seven goods which includes hours and participation dummies as conditioning variables allowance is made for the possible endogeneity of these conditioning labor supply variables we find that separability is rejected furthermore we present evidence that ignoring the effects of labor supply leads to bias in the parameter estimates

farm level pathways to improved nutritional status global national and local policies and programs for agricultural development arerecurrently justified based on their alleged role in improving food and nutrition security however strikingly little evidence is available to prove that a direct household level linkbetween agricultural production and improved nutrition exists the objective of thisspecial issue is to systematically and empirically test using data from africa and southasia whether a relationship between household agricultural production and nutrition canbe found overall the studies in this special issue support the hypothesis that householdagricultural production has direct and important linkages with dietary patterns andnutrition

is there an intrahousehold flypaper effect evidence from a school feeding programme are public transfers targeted toward children neutralised by the household as the theory of altruism implies or is there an intrahousehold flypaper effect whereby such transfers stick to the child this paper studies the impact of a school feeding programme on child caloric intake in the philippines using a quasi experimental methodology the empirical results confirm an intrahousehold flypaper effect indeed they indicate virtually no intrahousehold reallocation of calories in response to the feeding programme in poorer households however children s gains from the programme appear to be taxed more heavily

expenditure decisions of divorced mothers and income composition in this paper we analyze the relationship between the income sources of custodial divorced parents and their expenditure patterns we use data from the consumer expenditure survey to directly investigate the issue of whether or not divorced mothers receiving child support income spend larger amounts on child goods than those not receiving child support holding total household income constant by comparing the estimated coefficients on child support income and other income in an endogenous engel curve specification we argue that we can classify child goods as being public or private and say something about the expenditure patterns of noncustodial fathers under a nash equilibrium model of parental expenditures on public child goods and some plausible assumptions regarding the manner in which child support transfer decisions are made by noncustodial fathers our empirical results indicate that income composition does affect the expenditure patterns of divorced mothers and that consumption externalities exist even among divorced parents

the labeling effect of a child benefit system child benefit systems exist in many countries while they show a lot of differences in terms of eligibility rules amounts involved and implementation tax deduction tax credit or direct benefit the common motivation for their existence is to increase children s welfare in the dutch child benefit system the case i focus on in this paperone of the parents usually the mother is entitled to an untaxed child benefit amount which only depends on the child s age and the number of children in the household thus child support does not depend on household income marital status or labor market status as a result child benefit is exogenous to the household given the presence of children this is in contrast with the situation in many other countries including germany france the united kingdom and the united states where government provided child support is partly means tested see jonathan bradshaw et al 1993 in the netherlands child benefit is generally a nonnegligible addition to the household income the median share of child benefit in the total net income of households with children is 8 percent on the national level expenditures on child benefits amount to 1 2 percent of gnp the use of the child benefit is completely at the discretion of the parent there are no legal requirements that a certain amount be spent on particular goods or services nor does the government provide any guidelines regarding expenditure on children a policy question that arises is to what extent children benefit from child benefits standard microeconomic demand theory allows no role for effects of the composition of income given the fungibility of income sources it is only the sum of income components that is relevant in explaining expenditure patterns thus within that framework the answer would be that the marginal propensity to consume child goods from one guilder of child benefits is no different than from one guilder of any other income source in the more general class of gametheoretic models of household behavior however the composition of household income will generally affect expenditure patterns see e g shelly j lundberg and robert a pollak 1993 and martin browning et al 1994 if fathers and mothers have different preferences and mothers have control over child benefits the effect of child benefits on expenditures will differ from the effect of other income sources lundberg et al 1997 provide empirical evidence showing that a transfer of control over child benefits from fathers to mothers in the united kingdom due to a change in legislation resulted in a significant increase in expenditures on child clothing daniela del boca and christopher j flinn 1994 have analyzed the effect of income composition on expenditure decisions of divorced mothers they find that the coefficients associated with child support and alimony income differ from those for other income in engel curves for expenditures on childspecific goods their results can be explained in terms of a noncooperative nash model in which the child support transfer decisions of the noncustodial father and the expenditure decisions of the mother are determined simultaneously in contrast to del boca and flinn s analysis in which child support is a decision variable the present paper focuses on the possible differential effect of government provided child support which is truly exogenous in this paper i analyze the effects of child benefits on expenditures by running regressions in which child benefit enters as a separate explanatory variable the enipirical analysis is based on a time series of 17 cross section consumer expenditure surveys in the netherlands covering the period 1978 through 1994 it is important to note that in a single cross section it department of economics university of groningen p o b 800 9700 av groningen the netherlands e mail p kooreman eco rug nl i am indebted to two anonymous referees for constructive comments helpful comments were also provided by rob alessie maarten allers chris bojke werner de bondt bert schoonbeek and tom wansbeek i thank vincent linderhof for organizing the data financial support was provided by the dutch organization for scientific research nwo homes project grant

the effects of relative and referent thinking on tourism product design abstract this study adopts three field experiments to analyze the influence of relative and referent thinking in online tourism auctions of bed and breakfast b b accommodations on consumer bidding behavior in study one the starting bid price equals or is lower than the reference price relative and referent thinking are applied to evaluate the products to see whether consumers prefer monetary or non monetary sales promotions and if they are willing to pay a higher end price in study two moderate extreme deviation appears between the start bidding price and reference price non monetary monetary sales promotions are favored and so higher end price would be paid in study three consumers tended to pay a higher end price due to the symbolic meaning of luxury b b for example greater wealth and social status and did not have a preference for monetary sales promotions the findings could help future researchers when designing tourist products for online auction strategies

separate spheres bargaining and the marriage market this paper introduces the separate spheres bargaining model a new model of distribution within marriage it differs from divorce threat bargaining models e g manser brown mcelroy horney in that the threat point is not divorce but a noncooperative equilibrium within marriage this noncooperative equilibrium reflects traditional gender roles the predictions of our model thus differ from those of divorce threat bargaining models in the separate spheres model cash transfer payments to the mother and payments to the father can but need not imply different equilibrium distributions in existing marriages in the long run the distributional effects of transfer policies may be substantially altered by changes in the marriage market equilibrium

income and outcomes a structural model of intrahousehold allocation there is evidence from several sources that one cannot treat many person households as a single decision maker if this is the case then factors such as the relative incomes of the household members may affect the final allocation decisions made by the household we develop a method of identifying how incomes affect outcomes given conventional family expenditure data the basic assumption we make is that household decision processes lead to efficient outcomes we apply our method to a sample of canadian couples with no children we find that the final allocations of expenditures on each partner depend significantly on their relative incomes and ages and on the level of lifetime wealth

the effect of universal child benefits on labour supply using a difference in differences estimator i find the canadian universal child care benefit has significant negative income effects on the labour supply of married individuals the likelihood of lower educated mothers to participate in the labour force is reduced 3 2 percentage points when receiving the benefit median hours worked per week among lower educated mothers is reduced by 1 9 hours the effects on higher educated mothers are substantial with median hours worked among higher educated mothers reduced by nearly one hour per week for men the evidence suggests small but significant income effects on labour supply consistent with the literature on labour supply elasticities