what determines female autonomy evidence from bangladesh abstract this paper examines the determinants of female autonomy within households in a developing country in particular we investigate the relative contributions of earned versus unearned income in enhancing women s autonomy and the role of employment outside of their husband s farm in a simple theoretical model it is demonstrated that earned income could be more important than unearned income in empowering women using data from rural bangladesh empirical estimations confirm this prediction and also reveal the surprising fact that it is not employment per se but employment outside their husbands farms that contributes to women s autonomy the data also point to the importance of choosing the correct threat point in theoretical analyses of female autonomy

the cost of a licensing system regulation an example from canadian prairie agriculture agricultural legislation and the resultant regulation that usually ensues can often change redirect or even stop the adoption of yieldincreasing technologies that have the potential to generate substantial economic rents this paper offers an example from the canadian wheat sector of how a variety licensing regulation had totally stopped the adoption of a yield increasing technology that had the potential to increase the economic rents flowing to western canadian farmers by 15 25 percent this regulation further prevented high internal rates of return greater than 50 percent from being generated by research into this new technology

an experiment on risky choice amongst households a host of experiments have examined theories of risky choice using individuals however many important economic decisions are taken within multi adult households this paper reports on the first economic experiment designed to test theories of household choice we use established couples and face them individually and jointly with decisions involving monetary payoffs we find that joint choices typically are more risk averse than those made by individuals meanwhile choices made by couples exhibit the same kinds of departures from expected utility theory e g the common ratio and common consequence effects as are regularly recorded with individuals

women s access to labor market opportunities control of household resources and domestic violence evidence from bangladesh summary while there are many positive societal implications of increased female labor force participation working may increase a woman s risk of domestic violence using data i collected from bangladesh i document a positive correlation between work and domestic violence but only among women with low education or young age at marriage these results suggest that women with low bargaining power face increased risk of domestic violence upon entering the labor force as their husbands seek to counteract their increased bargaining power consequently policies that increase women s baseline bargaining power will decrease the risk that they face domestic violence upon beginning work

interactions between incentive instruments contracts and quality in processing tomatoes contracting and other forms of vertical coordination are important parts of the supply chains for many agricultural products often the buyer cares about multiple product attributes affected by a grower s actions using data that are insulated from common methodological problems we test whether or not price incentives for two processing tomato quality attributes exhibit complementarity in improving delivered quality price incentives for the two attributes are substitutes for the provision of one and complements for the other this finding has consequences for the profit maximizing choice of incentive instruments for processors and contributes to the literature regarding tests for complementarities

the cost of empowerment multiple sources of women s debt in rural india abstractpoor women borrow from multiple sources this study examines whether the source of debt matters for women s role in household financial decisions drawing on a household survey from rural tamil nadu we categorise women s loans along the lines of accessibility and formality into planned loans and instant loans we find that instant loans support women s bargaining power in various types of household financial decisions whereas planned loans have no impact this surprising result is better understood when the nature of instant loans is examined these are frequently usurious involve coercive enforcement methods and are considered socially debasing hence women who use them perform a convenient role for their households and in return gain some negotiating power

an analytical framework for joint vs separate decisions by couples in choice experiments the case of coastal water quality in tobago this paper offers an analytical framework for analyzing joint and separate decisions by couples in the context of choice experiments for nonmarket valuation it reports results from an attribute based stated preference study in which members of couples are asked to conduct a choice experiment first individually and then jointly the choice context was the selection of which beach to visit while on vacation in tobago available alternatives differed in attributes related to coastal water and beach quality such as level of coastal development and fish abundance tests of preference equality are reported and structured so as to identify the intra couple decision making patterns under taste heterogeneity with both finite and continuous mixed logit results from the latter suggest that women s preferences are found to be predominant in the joint choice experiment results suggest caution in using individual choice rather than joint couple choice when valuing quality changes impacting on couple activities such as water and beach quality in tobago and call for further research on the topic

gender biases in bank lending lessons from microcredit in france the evidence on gender discrimination in lending remains controversial to capture gender biases in banks loan allocations we observe the impact on the applicants of a microfinance institution mfi and exploit the natural experiment of a regulatory change imposing a strict eur 10 000 loan ceiling on microcredit descriptive statistics indicate that the presence of the ceiling is associated both with bank mfi co financing and with harsher treatment of female borrowers to investigate causal links we develop an econometric approach that addresses the concerns of selection biases multicollinearity and endogeneity our empirical findings suggest that the change in the mfi s gender related attitude was triggered by banks through co financing hence we speculate that co financing pushes ceiling constrained mfis to import whatever biases in loan granting that the banks are prone to overall this paper stresses that apparently benign regulations such as loan ceilings can significantly harm the women s empowerment efforts made by mfis

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

group and individual risk preferences a lottery choice experiment with self employed and salaried workers abstract this paper focuses on decision making under risk comparing group and individual risk preferences in a lottery choice experiment in the individual treatment subjects make choices individually in the group treatment each subject placed in a group made lottery choice via voting in the choice treatment subjects choose whether to be on their own or in a group the originality of this research lies in the fact that we introduced variability in socio demographic characteristics by recruiting salaried and self employed workers our main findings indicate that groups are more likely than individuals to choose safe lotteries our results also show that individuals risk attitude is correlated with both the type and the sector of employment

microcredit an answer to the gender problem in funding microfinance institutions mfis target people excluded from the traditional banking system by providing start up capital to these under financed individuals they enable a greater number of women to start their own business particularly in sectors where initial capital requirements are high our study follows a portfolio of 3 640 microcredit applicants in france over the 2000 2006 time period identifying mfi client profiles and bringing to light gender differences in borrowers compared to a wider sample of entrepreneurs this study shows that the male female gap found amongst company creators is also maintained amongst the clienteles of mfis empirical results also suggest that gender is a decisive factor regarding the amount of credit provided to borrowers when comparing with other factors in the borrower and firm profile thus to a certain extent mfis are found to reinforce gender inequalities in france

risk aversion and expected utility theory a calibration theorem within the expected utility framework the only explanation for risk aversion is that the utility function for wealth is concave a person has lower marginal utility for additional wealth when she is wealthy than when she is poor this paper provides a theorem showing that expected utility theory is an utterly implausible explanation for appreciable risk aversion over modest stakes within expected utility theory for any concave utility function even very little risk aversion over modest stakes implies an absurd degree of risk aversion over large stakes illustrative calibrations are provided

mortgage choice as a natural field experiment on choice under risk data on approximately 280 000 borrowers from the uk survey of mortgage lenders are used to model choices between variable and fixed rate mortgages the choice is assumed to depend on three factors risk attitude interest rate expectations and individual discount rate the ordered probit model is used for estimation while taking account of a number of econometric issues including missing counterfactuals selectivity and endogeneity a large number of strong effects are found including higher income borrowers are less risk averse and have a lower discount rate and risk aversion rises with the amount borrowed providing evidence of increasing relative risk aversion

start up capital does gender matter female and male entrepreneurs differ in the way they finance their businesses this difference can be attributed to the type of business and the type of management and experience of the entrepreneur indirect effect female start ups may also experience specific barriers when trying to acquire start up capital these may be based upon discriminatory effects direct effect whether gender has an impact on size and composition of start up capital and in what way is the subject of the present paper the indirect effect is represented by the way women differ from men in terms of type of business and management and experience the direct effect cannot be attributed to these differences and is called the gender effect we use of a panel of 2000 dutch starting entrepreneurs of whom approximately 500 are female to test for these direct and indirect effects the panel refers to the year 1994 we find that female entrepreneurs have a smaller amount of start up capital but that they do not differ significantly with respect to the type of capital on average the proportion of equity and debt capital bank loans in the businesses of female entrepreneurs is the same as in those of their male counterparts

sex differences in access to a small enterprise development fund in peru abstract in an attempt to ensure that the direct benefits of an urban small enterprise project were reaching women the industrial bank of peru undertook a study of the constraints to women s access to a major credit program it had initiated in the squatter settlements pueblos jo venes of lima the study found that the low proportion of women among the program s borrowers was not due to more women being rejected when they applied for loans but to the fact that few women applied high collateral requirements and complicated application procedures deterred women from applying those women who did apply received smaller loans than men and were concentrated in garment manufacture services and commerce taking these factors into account the authors make recommendations for ways to enhance women s participation in the credit scheme and similar small enterprise programs in the developing countries

reforms with a female face gender liberalization and economic policy in andhra pradesh india summary the state of andhra pradesh india provides a case study of a liberalization program with an emphasis on women s empowerment based on the state budget data and fieldwork data from two villages this paper investigates the content of this policy regime to argue that women s empowerment policies were ultimately constrained by the policy context of liberalization the state lowered shares of expenditure upon social reproduction and the substantive content of women s empowerment policy was reduced to a thrift and micro credit program fieldwork data indicate the latter lacks administrative support and relies upon the expenditure of time and resources by participants themselves re emphasizing class and caste inequalities among women and undermining the broader project of empowerment

household decision making in rural china using experiments to estimate the influences of spouses abstract many economic decisions are made jointly within households running an experiment on intertemporal choice we investigate the relative influence of spouses on joint household decisions we let each spouse first decide individually and then jointly with the other spouse we propose the use of a random parameter probit model to measure the relative influence of spouses on joint decisions we find that joint choices are in between husbands and wives choices with respect to impatience indicating that both spouses have an influence on joint decisions however we estimate that in 99 of households husbands have a stronger influence than wives

price discrimination in the context of vertical differentiation an application to canadian wheat exports this study examines the ability of the canadian wheat board cwb to price discriminate in bread wheat exports this study models wheat as a vertically differentiated intermediate good and modifies the model of vertical differentiation by mussa and rosen to the realities of wheat import demand the conceptual model isolates the bases of price discrimination and demonstrates that the cwb s ability to exploit cost differences in pricing depends on the extent of the differentiation between canadian and u s wheat this model is implemented using monthly confidential price data provided by the cwb for exports to japan the united kingdom and two markets aggregating remaining exports through canada s west and east coasts for 1982 1994 the data indicate that the cwb charges different prices to different countries for wheat of the same grade and protein content results from the model indicate that the price difference between any two markets is not completely explained by elements of perfect competition however the evidence is mixed regarding the ability of the cwb to utilize all the instruments available to price discriminate thus the cwb s pricing strategy may be more complex and dynamic than the prescription for static producer surplus maximization derived in this study

rural women s access to credit market imperfections and intrahousehold dynamics summary credit rationing studies carried out at the household level and based on responses from male heads of households present an incomplete and biased assessment of who is likely to be constrained why they are constrained and what is the extent of the constraints they ignore possibly conflictive intrahousehold dynamics and assume that imperfections in rural financial markets are gender neutral this paper addresses both issues theoretically and empirically the semi cooperative household model developed for this analysis formalizes the conditions under which spouses and particularly women s individual access to credit can be affected by their own position in the financial market as well as by intrahousehold dynamics these notions are then explored empirically using husbands and wives individual perceptions of their access to credit in rural paraguay the most significant empirical findings of the paper are that i compared to men women are more likely to be credit constrained ii women s rationing status responds to a different set of factors than men s and iii husbands may choose not to intermediate capital to their wives even when they are able to do so results from this exercise provide empirically sound support for the assumptions underlying women targeted credit programs

intra household experiments a survey experiments with family groups are rare but since many decisions are taken at the household level or occur within the household it is an important area to investigate this paper provides a survey of the recent experimental work on intra household decision making i discuss some of the challenges involved in doing experiments with couples and families and consider major areas that remain yet to be explored while general themes from the research are still emerging four results repeatedly occur 1 the absence of efficiency in intra household decisions 2 joint decisions that are not a convex combination of individual decisions 3 individual behaviour is affected by opportunities for hiding actions from spouses and 4 deviations from standard models of microeconomics in line with those seen in the anomalies literature of individual decision making

asking for individual or household willingness to pay for environmental goods implication for aggregate welfare measures the aggregate welfare measure for a change in the provision of a public good derived from a contingent valuation cv survey will be higher if the same elicited mean willingness to pay wtp is added up over individuals rather than households a trivial fact however once respondents are part of multi person households it becomes almost impossible to elicit an uncontaminated wtp measure that with some degree of confidence can be aggregated over one or the other response unit the literature is mostly silent about which response unit to use in wtp questions and in some cv studies it is even unclear which type has actually been applied we test for differences between individual and household wtp in a novel web administered split sample cv survey asking wtp for preserving biodiversity in old growth forests in norway two samples are asked both types of questions but in reverse order followed by a question with an item battery trying to reveal why wtp may differ we find in a test between samples that the wtp respondents state on behalf of their households is not significantly different from their individual wtp however within the same sample household wtp is significantly higher than individual wtp in particular if respondents are asked to state individual before household wtp our results suggest that using individual wtp as the response unit may overestimate aggregate wtp thus the choice of response format needs to be explicitly and carefully addressed in cv questionnaire design and further research in order to avoid the risk of unprofitable projects passing the benefit cost test

introduction to the special issue things we do and don t understand about the household and the environment environmental economics has been slow to incorporate the full and complex nature of the household into its analytical structures and to reflect empirical evidence on household decision making this paper provides an overview of some of the main unanswered questions

a fresh look at the rotten kid theorem and other household mysteries gary becker s rotten kid theorem asserts that if all family members receive gifts of money income from a benevolent household member then even if the household head does not precommit to an incentive plan for family members it will be in the interest of selfish family members to maximize total family income i show by examples that the rotten kid theorem is not true without assuming transferable utility i find a simple condition on utility functions that is necessary and sufficient for there to be the kind of transferable utility needed for a rotten kid theorem while restrictive these conditions still allow one to apply the strong conclusions of the rotten kid theorem in an interesting class of examples

efficient intra household allocations a general characterization and empirical tests the neoclassical theory of demand applies to individuals yet in empirical work it is usually taken as valid for households with many members this paper explores what the theory of individuals implies for households that have more than one member we make minimal assumptions about how the individual members of the household resolve conflicts all we assume is that however decisions are made outcomes are efficient we refer to this as the collective setting we show that in the collective setting household demands must satisfy a symmetry and rank condition on the slutsky matrix we also present some further results on the effects on demands of variables that do not modify preferences but that do affect how decisions are made we apply our theory to a series of surveys of household expenditures from canada the tests of the usual symmetry conditions are rejected for two person households but not for one person households we also show that income pooling is rejected for two person households we then test for our collective setting conditions on the couples data none of the collective setting restrictions are rejected we conclude that the collective setting is a plausible and tractable next step to take in the analysis of household behavior

household willingness to pay equals individual willingness to pay if and only if the household income pools abstract i show household and individual willingness to pay are equal if and only if household choices satisfy income pooling providing a test of whether the individual respondent speaks for the household an assumption implicit in much stated preference practice

the influence of individuals in forming collective household preferences for water quality preference for water quality and its nonmarket valuation can be used to inform the development of pricing policies and long term supply strategies tap water quality is a household concern the objective status quo of water provision varies between households and not between individuals within households while charges are levied on households not individuals individual preferences differ from collective preferences in households where there are two adults we examine the preferences of each separately and then as a couple in collective decisions we show the level of influence each has in developing the collective decision process we use discrete choice experiments to model preference heterogeneity across three experiments on women men and on both we propose a random utility model which decomposes the error structure in the utility of alternatives so as to identify the individual influence in collective decisions this approach to choice data analysis is new to environmental economics

risk preference differentials of small groups and individuals the risk prefer ences of thr ee person group s a nd individuals are compar ed using a non sequential repeated measures lottery exp eriment w ith 20 per player win pe rcentages varying from 10 to 90 analysis based on independent samples of certainty equivalent ratios certainty equivalent expected value elicited using a maximum willingness to pay mechanism for fifty two individuals and sixteen groups reveals that 1 certainty equi valent ratios cers va ry significantly a cross lottery win percentages 2 cer dispersion tends to decline as the lottery win percentage increases and is significantly smaller for groups than individuals in seven of the nine lotteries 3 for the highest risk lotteries the average cers submitted by groups are significantly smaller more risk averse than the average cers submitted by individuals 4 for the lowest risk lotteries the average cers submitted by groups are approximately risk neutral cer 1 and somewhat larger than the average cers submitted by individuals

econometric analysis of grading standards the ordered fractional approach we present a method for estimating the quality of production when quality is measured by discrete grades and is thus both ordinal and fractional monte carlo experiments indicate that our method estimates average partial effects of quality determinants more accurately than linear estimators and provides estimates with low bias even with weak instruments an application of the model to wheat production in japan demonstrates the importance of disease control in determining wheat grade weather variable coefficients suggest that climate change could actually improve wheat quality in japan thereby allowing farmers to reduce fungicide use and other inputs as well as switch varieties

developments in non expected utility theory the hunt for a descriptive theory of choice under risk this article reviews recent developments in the economic theory of individual decision making under risk since the 1950s it has been known that individual choices violate the standard model of expected utility in predictable ways considerable research effort has now been devoted to the project of developing a superior descriptive model following an overview of non expected utility theories which distinguishes between conventional and non conventional approaches the paper seeks to assess these alternative models in terms of empirical success using laboratory and field data and theoretical usefulness the closing sections reflect on some new directions emerging in this literature

a control function approach to endogeneity in consumer choice models abstract endogeneity arises for numerous reasons in models of consumer choice it leads to inconsistency with standard estimation methods that maintain independence between the model s error and the included variables the authors describe a control function approach for handling endogeneity in choice models observed variables and economic theory are used to derive controls for the dependence between the endogenous variable and the demand error the theory points to the relationships that contain information on the unobserved demand factor such as the pricing equation and the advertising equation the authors approach is an alternative to berry levinsohn and pakes s 1995 product market controls for unobserved quality the authors apply both methods to examine households choices among television options including basic and premium cable packages in which unobserved attributes such as quality of programming are expected to be correlated with price without correcting for endogeneity aggregate d

quality matters more than quantity asymmetric temperature effects on crop yield and quality grade climate change affects agriculture by altering not only output quantity but also crop quality we quantify the economic impacts of climate change on agriculture through changes in both quantity and quality where quality is measured by crop grades our model controls for methodological issues regarding sample selection aggregation phenology and nonlinearity the empirical application to japanese rice production indicates that temperature effects are asymmetric quantity is especially vulnerable to cold whereas quality is vulnerable to extremely high temperature using these results we simulate the effect of global warming and we find that warming a 3 c increase increases farm revenues by improving yield but decreases revenues as a result of deteriorating quality the net effect is negative suggesting that quality matters more than quantity the negative effect however can be mitigated by shifting cultivation periods and or regions overall our results suggest that the estimated impacts of climate change and adaptation strategies could be severely misleading unless quality is considered

accounting for preference and scale heterogeneity in establishing whether it matters who is interviewed to reveal household automobile purchase preferences the choice of automobile purchases in households often involves participation of more than one household member each of which exerts some degree of influence on the final choice outcome the influence of more than one agent has been recognised for many years and yet the majority of automobile choice studies develop choice models as if a single agent is involved in the preference revelation process what is not clear is whether it makes any substantive difference in preference revelation according to who is interviewed in a household using a generalised mixed logit framework that accounts for preference and scale heterogeneity we estimate a series of models to investigate whether there are significant differences between the preferences of each individual in a household when assessed in isolation from other household members as well as their joint preferences when expressing their preferences through a group choice task the context is choosing amongst petrol diesel and hybrid fuelled vehicles associated with specific levels of fuel efficiency and engine capacity when faced with a mix of vehicle prices fuel prices fixed annual registration fees annual emission surcharges and vehicle kilometre emission surcharges using a stated choice experiment we find that sampling a single individual as a representative of the household s preferences is less appropriate than utilising preference information from the relevant group of decision makers in the household

the political economy of fertilizer subsidy programs in africa evidence from zambia fertilizer subsidy programs have re emerged as popular policy tools in sub saharan africa despite a burgeoning body of literature on program impacts the political economy of the programs remains poorly understood in particular there is a dearth of empirical evidence to support or refute the conventional wisdoms that governments systematically target subsidized inputs to certain areas based on past voting patterns and that fertilizer subsidies win votes this article discusses the theoretical links between government targeting of subsidized fertilizer and voter behavior then uses panel data from zambia to empirically test these conventional wisdoms results suggest that zambia s movement for multi party democracy governments targeted more subsidized fertilizer to households in areas where it had strong support in the previous presidential election however contrary to conventional wisdom marginal changes in the scale or coverage of the fertilizer subsidy program had no statistically significant effect on the share or number of votes won by incumbent presidents

subjectivity in credit allocation to micro entrepreneurs evidence from brazil this paper estimates the impact of loan officer subjectivity on microcredit granting by exploiting an exceptionally detailed database from a brazilian microfinance institution the loan officers collect field data meet with applicants and make recommendations to the credit committee which has the final say on both loan approval and loan size ls the loan officer s subjectivity is captured through gender bias our estimations indeed show subjective gender gap in ls this gap is almost exclusively attributable to loan officers we interpret this finding as evidence that despite monitoring and wage incentivization microcredit officers let their subjective preferences interfere with loan granting we conclude by suggesting alternative means to curb subjectivity in credit allocation to micro entrepreneurs

microfinance and gender issues challenges and the road ahead this special collection examines the claim that microfinance promotes gender equality the focus is on three areas of the debate first the question of how successful microfinance has been in empowering women second whether and how negative gender discrimination operates within the sector third how power relations within and beyond the household shape the context and outcomes of microfinance initiatives the papers in this collection demonstrate the divergence of circumstances and emphasise the need to go beyond the past searches for a simple narrative regarding the impact of microfinance rather as the sector evolves and is incorporated into the mainstream financial system the challenge ahead for researchers is to marshal the evidence on gendered dynamics to ensure that the gains made are built on through deeper understanding of why impact outcomes and processes differ and use this to inform new initiatives to further gender equality

the less you discount the more it shows you really care interpersonal discounting in households abstract household members make monetary tradeoffs across time classical economics treats these decisions as if one rational individual makes them this assumption masks important other regarding concerns between spouses we designed an artefactual field experiment and collected data from 94 pairs of cohabiting couples to capture the complex nature of intra household time preferences estimation results show that 1 the interpersonal discount rate the rate used to tradeoff intertemporal payoffs between one s own payoff and the spouse s payoff is significantly different from the individual discount rate and 2 the interpersonal discount rate may provide an alternative way for people to express their other regarding preferences towards their spouses