the persistence of female labor supply empirical evidence and implications previous research has shown that female hours of work are very persistent over women s lifetimes that women tend to be either workers or nonworkers this paper uses psid data from 1967 to 1987 to examine changes in persistence over time the overall finding is that there is little change in persistence because as women entered the labor force in greater numbers they tended to become continuous workers replacing continuous nonworkers among older women spells of reduced hours are now less prolonged holding constant a fixed effect among young women the persistence of hours has increased slightly over time and patterns of employment now appear to develop prior to marriage and continue into the married years

entrepreneurship versus joblessness explaining the rise in self employment a large share of the workforce throughout the developing world is self employed and this proportion has increased in recent decades assessments of this development vary with pull factors such as high returns to capital contrasted with push factors such as barriers to more desirable salaried jobs using a long panel dataset from ghana we empirically investigate the changing structure of earnings in self employment relative to salaried work our analysis allows workers to sort into self employment for different reasons including expected earnings differentials and endogenous capital accumulation whilst highlighting constraints that workers may face we estimate a correlated random coefficient model using iv gmm taking into account the endogeneity of sector choice and capital accumulation we find that returns to productive characteristics in self employment have increased significantly between 2004 and 2011 whilst self employment has attracted increasingly skilled workers this points against the negative view of self employment as an occupation of last resort

impact of off farm income on food security and nutrition in nigeria abstract while the poverty implications of off farm income have been analyzed in different developing countries much less is known about the impact of off farm income on household food security and nutrition here this research gap is addressed by using farm survey data from nigeria econometric analyses are employed to examine the mechanisms through which off farm income affects household calorie and micronutrient supply dietary quality and child anthropometry we find that off farm income has a positive net effect on food security and nutrition the prevalence of child stunting underweight and wasting is lower in households with off farm income than in households without using a structural model we also show that off farm income contributes to higher food production and farm income by easing capital constraints thus improving household welfare in multiple ways

interrupted work careers depreciation and restoration of human capital the quantitative effects and even the existence of a human capital depreciation phenomenon have been a subject of controversy in the recent literature prior work however was largely cross sectional and the longitudinal dimension if any was retrospective using longitudinal panel data on married women in nls we have now established that real wages at reentry are indeed lower than at the point of labor force withdrawal and the decline in wages is greater the longer the interruption another striking finding is a relatively rapid growth in wages after the return to work this rapid growth appears to reflect the restoration or repair of previously eroded human capital the phenomenon of depreciation and restoration is also visible in data for immigrants to the united states however while immigrants eventually catch up with and often surpass natives returnees from the nonmarket do not fully restore their earnings potential

do decoupled payments affect investment financing constraints evidence from irish agriculture abstract this paper empirically tests whether decoupled subsidies decrease investment financing constraints faced by farms using a panel dataset from ireland over the period 2005 2010 we test whether the cap decoupled subsidy payments reduce credit constraints by altering the risk profile of farm earnings we test for financing constraints in a neoclassical q model using investment cash flow sensitivities our econometric methodology controls for censoring heterogeneity and endogeneity we find that decoupled subsidies do reduce credit constraints the effect is greater for farms that face higher constraints dairy farmers and younger farms this evidence suggests that over and above the effect on production indicated in previous research decoupling affects farm investment through financial channels

agricultural support policies in imperfectly competitive markets why market power matters in policy design most agricultural policy analysis assumes that markets are perfectly competitive despite increasing evidence to the contrary we demonstrate that the interaction of market power and government intervention may lead to outcomes that are counter to key results of policy analysis for perfectly competitive markets we show that market power may reduce or eliminate entirely the net welfare benefits from removing two traditional support mechanisms price floors and deficiency payments and may increase considerably the government s cost of implementing either of them accordingly optimally designed price support measures may improve welfare in the presence of downstream oligopoly and or oligopsony power copyright 2011 oxford university press

impact of first birth career interruption on earnings evidence from administrative data abstractthis article makes use of unique administrative data to expand the understanding of the role women s intermittency decisions play in the determination of her wages we demonstrate that treating intermittency as exogenous significantly overstates its impact the intermittency penalty also increases in the education level of the woman the penalty for women with a high school degree with an average amount of intermittency during 6 years after giving birth to her first child is roughly half the penalty for college graduates we also demonstrate the value of making use of an index to capture multiple dimension of the intermittency experience and illustrate the importance of firm dynamics in the determination of a woman s wage

no fault divorce laws and the labor supply of women with and without children we use a difference in difference in difference estimator to compare changes in labor force participation weeks and hours of work associated with no fault divorce laws allowing for differential responses for married women with and without children although other research has found that the labor supply of women in general does not respond to no fault divorce laws we find that no fault divorce laws are associated with increases in the labor supply of married mothers relative to married nonmothers even after controlling for changes in female labor supply in states without no fault divorce laws and for property division rules associated with the laws

labor market participation of chinese agricultural households empirical evidence from zhejiang province abstract this work is devoted to the analysis of the different labor market participation regimes of chinese farm households over the reform process in the 1980s and 1990s using household data over the period 1986 2002 from the province zhejiang we apply a multinomial logit model to empirically examine household farm and regional characteristics affecting the probability that farmers participate in one of four alternative labor market regimes as generally accepted off farm participation is the dominant form of farm households labor market participation but rural households show additionally a significant impact on rural employment mainly linked with non agricultural household business results suggest that labor market decisions are significantly related to several family farm and village characteristics in particular we find education to be a key determinant of participation furthermore results point to a higher probability of female household members to take up off farm work

measurement of monopoly behavior an application to the cigarette industry a simple scheme is proposed to measure monopoly pricing behavior the coefficient of the tax rate term in a price equation identifies the ratio of price to marginal cost no direct measurement of costs is required so a major problem for other empirical studies of monopoly is avoided empirical results for cross section time series data support rejection of atomistic competition but also provide evidence against the operation of an effective cartel in the cigarette industry the model represents an alternative interpretation of related results in a recent paper by barzel application of the methodology to other markets is feasible

decoupled farm payments and the role of base acreage and yield updating under uncertainty we analyze the coupling effect of expectations about base acreage and yield updating in future farm policy on production decisions in the presence of price yield and policy uncertainty for a risk averse farmer producing a single crop the farmer receives market revenue and government payments using stochastic dynamic programming optimum decisions under present value calculations positively link current acreage and fertilizer decisions to future government payments through expected updates of base acreage and yield in the future regime moving from a zero probability of updating to a probability of one increases optimum acreage and yield by 6 25 and 0 134 respectively copyright 2010 oxford university press

wealth weather risk and the composition and profitability of agricultural investments despite the growing evidence that farmers in low income environments are risk averse there has been little empirical evidence on the importance of risk in shaping the actual allocation of production resources among farmers differentiated by wealth the authors use panel data on investments in rural india to examine how the composition of productive and nonproductive asset holdings varies across farmers with different levels of total wealth and across farmers facing different degrees of weather risk income variability is a prominent feature of the experience of rural agents in low income countries the authors report evidence based on measures of rainfall variability that the agricultural investment portfolio behavior of farmers in such settings reflects risk aversion due evidently to limitations on consumption soothing mechanisms such as crop insurance or credit markets the authors results suggest that uninsured weather risk is a significant cause of lower efficiency and lower average incomes a one standard deviation decrease in weather risk measured by the standard deviation of the timing of the rainy season would raise average profits by up to 35 percent among farmers in the lowest wealth quartile moreover rainfall variability induces a more unequal distribution of average incomes for a given distribution of wealth wealthier farmers are willing to absorb significant risk without giving up profits to reduce production risk smaller farmers have to invest their limited wealth in ways that reduce their exposure to risk at the cost of lower profit rates the authors found that at high levels of rainfall variability differences in rates of profit per unit of agricultural assets were similar across classes of wealth but over the sample range of rainfall variability these rates of profit were always higher for the poorer farmers than for the wealthier ones suggesting that the disadvantages of small farmers in risk diffusion are more than offset by their labor cost advantage

the effect of microinsurance on economic activities evidence from a randomized field experiment we report results from a large randomized field to study how access to formal microinsurance affects production and economic develop ment we induce exogenous variation in insurance coverage at the village level by randomly assigning performance incentives to the village animal husbandry worker who is responsible for signing farmers up for the insur ance we find that promoting greater adoption of insurance significantly increases farmers sow production and this effect seems to persist in the longer run moreover the increase in sow production in response to the sow insurance does not seem to be the result of the substitution of other livestock

the parity penalty in life course perspective motherhood and occupational status in 13 european countries research documents a wage penalty for mothers compared to childless women we demonstrate there is also an occupational status penalty to motherhood interrogating supply and demand side explanations of the motherhood penalty from the life course perspective we formulate and test original hypotheses about the short term and long run career implications of parity specific births we analyze longitudinal data from the european community and household panel for 13 european countries and eight time points between 1994 and 2001 our fixed effects models show that status losses for a first birth are not just short term but accumulate over the career the timing of a birth in a woman s life course matters only for older women who experience a significant penalty to third births although the personal strategies that women use to minimize the career costs of motherhood e g having only one child prove ineffective our cross national evidence shows that public policies are linked to the motherhood penalty in

the sensitivity of an empirical model of married women s hours of work to economic and statistical assumptions this study undertakes a systematic analysis of several theoretic and statistical assumption s used in many empirical models of female labor supply using a singl e data set psid 1975 labor supply data the author is able to replic ate most of the range of estimated income and substitution effects fo und in previous studies in this field he undertakes extensive specif ication tests and finds that most of this range should be rejected du e to statistical and model misspecifications the two most important assumptions appear to be the tobit assumption used to control for sel f selection into the labor force and exogeneity assumptions on the wi fe s wage rate and her labor market experience copyright 1987 by the econometric society

risk taking with additive and multiplicative background risks abstract we examine the effects of background risks on optimal portfolio choice examples of background risks include uncertain labor income uncertainty about the terminal value of fixed assets such as housing and uncertainty about future tax liabilities while some of these risks are additive and have been amply studied others are multiplicative in nature and have received far less attention the simultaneous effect of both additive and multiplicative risks has hitherto not received attention and can explain some paradoxical choice behavior we rationalize such behavior and show how background risks might lead to seemingly u shaped relative risk aversion for a representative investor

how much do decoupled payments affect production an instrumental variable approach with panel data how much decoupled payments such as direct payments in the u s affect agricultural production remains an open empirical question with implications for policy using data from multiple years of the census of agriculture we exploit a provision of the 2002 farm act that departed from previous policy by making oilseeds eligible for direct payments thus increasing payments to areas that historically produced more oilseeds our instrumental variable estimates in contrast to ols estimates suggest that changes in payments over the period 2002 to 2007 had little effect on aggregate production at the zip code level copyright 2012 oxford university press

predicting female labor supply this study examines the empirical associations between female labor supply and child status and marital status using 1970 and 1980 u s census data and 1971 and 1981 canadian census data when the data are used in a purely cross sectional manner without controlling for previous labor supply we find as others have that female labor supply is negatively related to the number of children a woman has had however this relationship changes when we condition on weeks of work in the previous year this study makes use of longitudinal information in the canadian and u s census data that has been largely ignored the paper also explores certain econometric issues raised by the nature of the empirical results

the production effects of agricultural income support policies under uncertainty this analysis decomposes the production impacts of income support programs into wealth insurance and coupling effects under the usual assumptions about preferences the wealth and insurance effects of many support programs increase optimal input levels even for supposedly decoupled programs if the program is coupled in the usual sense then all three effects often act in the same direction it is concluded that studies of trade and domestic policy reform in stochastic environments should consider insurance and wealth effects the derivative conditions required to obtain results are also subjected to scrutiny simulations for an iowa corn producer confirm the comparative statics

the work employment distinction among new mothers cps data for 1979 to 1988 are used to examine the determinants of employment actual work and maternity leave for women in the year following childbirth women with better market skills higher expected wages older more education are more likely than other new mothers to have a job and to work among employed women paid leave is also positively related to market skills work responds to childbirth more than employment does with the greatest differences in the first three months following childbirth therefore most women working when their child was one year old had returned to work within three months of childbirth

disentangling the consequences of direct payment schemes in agriculture on fixed costs exit decisions and output this paper goes beyond orthodox considerations of direct payment effects on agricultural output by highlighting the role of subsidies in affecting individual producers ability to cover fixed costs and in distorting the volume of aggregate production and net trade by implicitly discouraging exits the theoretical model considers both taxpayer and consumer financed decoupled direct payment schemes and compares them to a coupled production subsidy in terms of possible producer responses to direct payments the paper proposes an analytical framework of production decision making in the presence of a stochastic distribution of fixed costs across representative farms the paper shows that decoupled payments in theory can have a larger effect on output than coupled payments the model explicitly recognizes three consequences of domestic support a induce exit or entry b bias production incentives to domestic markets and c cross subsidize export in global markets an empirical model of the u s wheat sector is developed to illustrate the relative potential impacts of coupled versus decoupled payments on output through the effects on a farmer s ability to cover fixed costs and hence exit decisions

output price subsidies in a stochastic world this article studies the comparative statics of output subsidies for firms with monotonic preferences over costs and returns that face price and production uncertainty the modeling of deficiency payments support price schemes and stochastic supply shifts in a state space framework is discussed it is shown how these notions can be used via a simple application of shephard s lemma to analyze input demand shifts once comparative static results for supply are available a range of comparative static results for supply are then developed and discussed

the impact of coupled and decoupled government subsidies on off farm labor participation of u s farm operators with the 1996 farm act the united states introduced payments that were designed to be decoupled labor allocation choices are likely to be affected by receipt of payments and income from off farm jobs has been the major source of income for most farm households for sometime this article examines whether the 1996 change has affected the off farm labor participation of farm households we conclude that the observed increase in off farm participation of farm operators who received payments was not the result of the 1996 policy change government payments whether coupled or decoupled have a negative effect on off farm labor participation

do counter cyclical payments in the 2002 us farm act create incentives to produce analytical results in the literature suggest that counter cyclical payments create risk related incentives to produce even if they are decoupled under certainty hennessy d a 1998 the production effects of agricultural income support polices under uncertainty am j agric econ 80 46 57 this paper develops a framework to assess the risk related incentives to produce created by commodity programmes like the loan deficiency payments ldps and the counter cyclical payments ccps in the 2002 us farm act because ccps are paid based on fixed production quantities they have a weaker risk reducing impact than ldps the latter have a direct impact through the variance of the producer price distributions while the impact of ccps is due only to the covariance between the ccp and the producer price distributions the methodology developed by chavas j p holt m t 1990 acreage decisions under risk the case of corn and soybeans am j agric econ 72 3 529 538 is applied to calculate the appropriate variance covariance matrix of the truncated producer price distributions under the 2002 farm act risk premia are computed showing that the risk related incentives created by ccps are significant and do not disappear for levels of production above the base production on which ccps are paid

another look at decoupling additional evidence on the production effects of direct payments an important shift in u s agricultural policy occurred with the 1996 federal agriculture improvement and reform fair act although the actual intent and effects of the act remain a topic of debate many observers believed that the 1996 legislation signaled a transition toward a new policy environment characterized by diminished government involvement in agricultural markets perhaps the biggest change in policy under the act pertained to the use of fixed decoupled payments called production flexibility contract or agricultural market transition act amta payments under the terms of the fair act amta payments were intended to decline each year until the fair act expired in 2002 however periods of low prices and localized yield shortfalls during the late 1990s led congress to pass supplemental ad hoc payments to farmers these payments known as market loss assistance were also decoupled since they were paid on the basis of historical base acreage and thus carried no current production requirements these payments were however tied to market prices in that they were a response to poor market conditions

women in the labor market and in the family t here are two themes in this paper the first an exercise in revisionist history argues that the conventional wisdom of an absence of any substantial labor market progress for women is mistaken instead throughout this century women s wages have been steadily rising relative to those of men a progress likely to accelerate in the next few decades our second theme contends that this labor market progress is not enough alongside their labor market advances the relative economic plight of many women is worsening the downside news is the increasing feminization of poverty a reflection of the growing instability of the american family

supply response to countercyclical payments and base acre updating under uncertainty an experimental study we design an experiment to simulate how people make agricultural production decisions under three policy scenarios each incorporating direct payments dps a price uncertainty without countercyclical payments ccps b price uncertainty with ccps and c price uncertainty ccps and uncertainty regarding base acreage updating results are the ccp program and perceived possibility of future base updating created incentives for subjects to invest more in program base crops despite payments being decoupled from current production decisions those choosing to reduce revenue risk by increasing plantings of base crops may face reduced incomes suggesting the efficiency of crop markets may be diminished

agricultural decisions after relaxing credit and risk constraints the investment decisions of small scale farmers in developing countries are conditioned by their financial environment binding credit market constraints and incomplete insurance can limit investment in activities with high expected profits we conducted several experiments in northern ghana in which farmers were randomly assigned to receive cash grants grants of or opportunities to purchase rainfall index insurance or a combination of the two demand for index insurance is strong and insurance leads to significantly larger agricultural investment and riskier production choices in agriculture the binding constraint to farmer investment is uninsured risk when provided with insurance against the primary catastrophic risk they face farmers are able to find resources to increase expenditure on their farms demand for insurance in subsequent years is strongly increasing with the farmer s own receipt of insurance payouts with the receipt of payouts by others in the farmer s social network and with recent poor rain in the village both investment patterns and the demand for index insurance are consistent with the presence of important basis risk associated with the index insurance imperfect trust that promised

international differences in the family gap in pay the role of labor market institutions using the microdata for 35 countries over the period 1985 to 1994 and 1994 to 2002 we find that labour market institutions are traditionally associated with more compressed wage structures and a higher family gap our results indicate that these policies reduce the price effect of having children but aggravate the human capital loss due to motherhood we also find evidence that policies that help women to continue in the same job after childbirth decrease the family gap of all the countries we study mothers in southern europe suffer the biggest family gap and our analysis indicates that this is due to the bad combination of labour market policies in these countries our results are robust to specification changes and indicate that the main reason for mothers to lag behind other women in terms of earnings is the loss of accumulated job market experience caused by career breaks around childbirth

empirical regularities across cultures the effect of children on womans work not conditioning on previous employment we find large differences in the apparent effects of children on married womens labor supply among american born white women and three ethnically distinct groups of newly arrived immigrants to the united states when we account for labor supply in the previous year differences in current employment rates narrow dramatically and similar child status work relations emerge both for women who worked and for those who did not work in the previous year number of children is not associated with the propensity to start or to continue working and with the exception of a baby effect for women who worked previously the age of the youngest child has little effect on the propensity to start or to continue working information about work experience prior to the previous year yields additional valuable information for predicting current labor supply excerpt

the economic consequences of parental leave mandates lessons from europe this study investigates the economic consequences of rights to paid parental leave in nine european countries over the 1969 through 1993 period since women use virtually all parental leave in most nations men constitute a reasonable comparison group and most of the analysis examines how changes in paid leave affect the gap between female and male labor market outcomes the employment to populations ratios of women in their prime childbearing years are also compared with those of corresponding aged men and older females parental leave is associated with increases in women s employment but with reductions in their relative wages at extended durations