specific experience household structure and intergenerational transfers farm family land and labor arrangements in developing countries data from indian rural household survey was used to test th hypothesis that the coexistence in traditional rural societies of extended intergenerational families infrequent land sales and high reliance on family members as farm laborers is the result of the economic advantages which accrue from the knowledge gained by farming a particular ploy of land over a long period of time the land specific experience of elderly members of a intergenerational household who farmed the land as a child and then as an adult are expecially critical in adverse weather years most previous investigators attributed the existence of multigenerational households the use of family members rather than hired laboreds and the infrequency of land sales to deficiencies in the market i e labor market imperfections and an absence of capital insurance and asset markets in the present investigations these same characteristics are viewed as having an economic advantages a model for estimating the contribution of the experience of the elderly household members to agricultural profits was developed and applied to data from a 3 year panel study of 2900 indian rural farm households the data was collected between 1968 71 by the national council of applied economic research the survey collected information on farm profits farm inputs demographic characteristics and the effects of weather conditions on profits a major limitation of the study was a lack of information on the duration of land ownership age of household members was substituted as a proxy for duration of ownership findings were consistent withe the hypothesis in poor agricultural years gross returns for households which contained an elderly household member were greater than the gross returns for comparable households which did not contain an elderly member the economic advantages of specific knowledge embodied in the experienced elderly farmer were comparable to the economic advantages which accrued to households whose members were more educated the hypothesis cannot fully explain the existence of intergenerational families since there is a relatively large proportion of such families among nonfarm families in many countries including india findings suggest that intergenerational families may provide for more occupational diversity and thereby reduce income risks the specific experience hypothesis has policy implications if technological changes are introduced the value of specific experience may be lost and the frequency of intergenerational households may decline the hypothesis may also explain why farmers are reluctant to agree to land redistribution and consolidation schemes this reluctance may disappear after sufficient technological change has occurred

raising primary school enrolment in developing countries the relative importance of supply and demand abstract few policies are as universally accepted as raising primary school enrolment in developing countries but the policy levers for achieving this goal are not straightforward this paper merges household survey data with detailed school supply characteristics from official sources in order to estimate the relative impact of demand and supply side determinants of rural primary school enrolment in mozambique policy simulations based on a set of plausible interventions show that in rural mozambique building more schools or raising adult literacy will have a larger impact on primary school enrolment rates than interventions that raise household income when relative costs are considered adult literacy campaigns are nearly 10 times more cost effective than the income intervention and 1 5 to 2 5 times better than building more schools

child labor and agricultural shocks this paper examines the relationship between household income shocks and child labor in particular we investigate the extent to which transitory income shocks lead to increases in child labor and whether household asset holdings mitigate the effects of these shocks using data from a household panel survey in tanzania we find that both relationships are significant we investigate mechanisms that could account for these results including buffer stocks and borrowing

a switching regression model for wage determinants in the public and private sectors of a developing country governments in less developed countries face severe budgetary constraints given that public sector employment is a large part of modern sector employment the government wage bill h as come under increased scrutiny the central question is how do gove rnment wages compare with those in the private sector in this paper the authors develop and estimate a model to answer this question an important aspect of this model is the endogenous treatment of sector choice the estimation results full information maximum likelihood sound a strong warning against the use of ordinary least squares est imates that are based on sector specific samples data are from the i vory coast copyright 1988 by mit press

the causal effect of faculty unions on institutional decision making the author s goal in this article is to estimate the causal effect of unionization on institutional decision making using a national survey of presidents and faculty senate leaders to measure the level of shared governance at 341 public universities in 15 different areas to handle the endogeneity of faculty unionization an index of state employee collective bargaining rights is used as an instrument for unionization findings indicate that unionization greatly increases faculty influence over institutional decision making both in compensation and in areas outside of compensation abstract from author

school supply constraints and children s educational outcomes in rural ghana abstract studies of school attainment often fail to acknowledge the possibility that prices for all schooling levels affect the decision to attend any one schooling level in developing countries the assumption that schooling costs are constant throughout the education cycle is manifestly untrue this paper concentrates on the empirical implications of introducing schooling costs that increase with schooling level the results suggest that the cost of advanced levels of education influences decisions at the primary school level the relative magnitude of the cross price elasticities suggests that cross price effects should not be ignored when designing educational user fees

administrative procedures and political control of the bureaucracy administrative procedure the notice and comment process in the context of medicare physician payment reform a fundamental restructuring of the way in which the medicare program pays for physician services i find contrary to the deck stacking thesis that the health care financing administration hcfa was more responsive to physicians expecting reductions in fees than to the intended beneficiaries of the new payment system although these results do not necessarily imply that congress exerted little influence over hcfa decision making they suggest that certain administrative procedures do not operate as instruments of political control d elegation of policymaking authority from elected officials to unelected bureaucrats is a fact of contemporary american politics it does not however necessarily imply abdication as officeholders possess instruments that potentially limit bureaucratic discretion presidents for example fill many high level agency posts with appointees whose preferences closely resemble those of the chief executive members of congress regularly conduct oversight hearings which are proceedings designed to monitor and if necessary redirect agency activity the presence

the mix of social and private provision of goods and services abstract in some countries health insurance and education are supplied as social goods at near zero prices and funded from taxation this paper analyses a case where such provision competes with income supplements as a redistribution device and where taxes or transferable vouchers influence the take up of the social goods compared to alternatives available in a private market each consumer chooses to consume either social or private goods and a vertical market segmentation results from differential demand for quality

subordinate financialization and financial subsumption in south korea this paper analyzes the peculiarity of financialization in south korea after the 1997 asian financial crisis financialization research originally focused on the us experience and primarily underst

the family as an incomplete annuities market families can self insure against uncertain dates of death through implicit or explicit agreements with respect to consumption and interfamily transfers interfamily transfers need have nothing to do with altruistic feelings they may simply reflect risk sharing behavior of completely selfish family members although family annuity markets are incomplete even small families can substitute by more than 70 percent for perfect market annuities given adverse selection and transaction costs family risk pooling may be preferred to public market annuities in the absence of public annuities these risk sharing arrangements provide powerful incentives for marriage and family formation

adaptive signal processing hierarchy and budgetary control in federal regulation control over agency budgets is a critical tool of political influence in regulatory decision making yet the causal mechanism of budgetary control is unclear do budgetary manipulations influence agencies by imposing resource constraints or by transmitting powerful signals to the agency i advance and test a stochastic process model of adaptive signal processing by a hierarchical agency to address this question the principal findings of the paper are two first presidents and congressional committees achieve budgetary control over agencies not by manipulating aggregate resource constraints but by transmitting powerful signals through budget shifts second bureaucratic hierarchy increases the agency s response time in processing budgetary signals limiting the efficacy of the budget as a device of political control i also show that the magnitude of agency response to budgetary signals increased for executive branch agencies after 1970 due to executive oversight reforms i conclude by discussing the limits of budgetary manipulations as a device of political control and the response of elected authorities to adaptive signal processing by agencies

government intervention in production and incentives theory a review of recent contributions national science foundation the commissariat general du plan and the center for energy policy research at m i t

financialisation institutions and financing constraints in developing countries the paper uses a consistent firm level data from the world banks enterprise surveys to explore the impact of financialisation in the economy on firms access to finance in 138 developing countries access to finance reflects survey based firms perceptions of external financing constraints financialisation is proxied by consistent cross country measures of financial depth these proxies capture separately the role of bank based versus market based financing firm sector and country level information is jointly used for the analysis firm specific characteristics and economic and non economic national factors are included as controls the results show that the proxies of financialisation are broadly robust predictors of financing constraints of firms in developing countries however the magnitude of the financialisation effect varies between bank based and market based channels of financing as well as between low and high income countries and it is influenced by social institutional and religious factors

bureaucratic discretion or congressional control regulatory policymaking by the federal trade commission this paper extends stigler and peltzman s approach to regulation by incorporating a legislature the model yields comparative statics results and hence testable implications the paper then tests between two opposing approaches about regulatory agency behavior the first assumes agencies operate independently of the legislature and hence exercise discretion the second assumes that congress controls agency decisions the recent behavior of the federal trade commission provides the empirical setting substantial evidence is found for the specific predictions of the model including the hypothesis of systematic congressional influence over ftc decisions

borrowing constraints and progress through school evidence from peru this paper investigates the effect of borrowing constraints on the timing of human capital investment in a developing country by looking at how quickly children with different family backgrounds progress through the primary school system in peru the main findings are that children start withdrawing from school earlier as indicated by repetition of grades in households with lower income and durable good holdings and when children are more closely spaced behavior also differs as predicted between children from households that appear to be borrowing constrained and those that appear unconstrained copyright 1994 by mit press

returns to education a further international update and implications this paper updates evidence on the returns to investment in education by adding estimates for new countries and refining existing estimates to bring the total number of country cases to over 60 the new cross country evidence confirms and reinforces earlier patterns namely that returns are highest for primary education the general curricula the education of women and countries with the lowest per capita income the findings have important implications for directing future investment in education which for efficiency and equity purposes should concentrate on these priority areas

education demand and age at school enrollment in tanzania in tanzania actual school enrollment takes place 2 or 3 years later on average than the legal enrollment age in this paper we develop a micro economic model that allows us to disentangle various explanations for such delays we simultaneously estimate enrollment age and schooling duration by maximum likelihood techniques using data from the human resource development survey carried out in tanzania in 1992 93 a particularly interesting result of our econometric analysis is that boys and girls follow fundamentally different patterns of schooling our model suggests that this could be due to different return from pre school training in the family s economic activities or it could be related to the wish to have girls ready to be married as early as possible

an endogenous model of public school expenditures and private school enrollment abstract this paper examines the link between private school enrollment rates and public school expenditures using a panel of new york state school districts models are estimated in which public school spending and private school enrollment rates are endogenously determined the results indicate the presence of endogeneity increases in private school enrollment are not shown to cause decreases in public school per pupil expenditure private school enrollment rates are found to respond to changes in public school expenditure and are sensitive to changes in tuition

the selection of public utility commissioners a re examination of the importance of institutional setting the result of a great many studies is that it makes no difference to the rate level whether the public utility commission is appointed or elected nevertheless the typical response to an inquiry regarding the effect of appointment versus election is that a difference in resulting rate structure should exist in this paper we have reconciled these views and more carefully examined the issue of whether institutional setting does matter in the setting of regulated electricity prices we suggest that one should not necessarily expect elected pucs to behave differently than appointed ones instead different behavior should be expected from pucs that are closer to their constituents than those more isolated irrespective of whether the puc is elected or appointed the results of an empirical examination based on a large sample of utilities operating during the period of 1981 83 support this view the more narrowly defined is the consumer voter group everything else the same the lower is the rate set by the puc

who benefits more from higher household consumption the intra household allocation of nutrients in china abstract previous studies find that human capital investments in boys are less income elastic than investments in girls attributing this result to favoritism toward boys i show theoretically that it is plausible for more productive or favored household members to have higher income elasticities i then investigate this question empirically utilizing panel data on individual nutrient intake from the china health and nutrition survey chns to analyze how changes in household per capita nutrient intake affect the intra household allocation of nutrients to deal with potential biases due to omitted variables and simultaneity i use measures of rainfall variation as instruments i find that nutritional intakes are more elastic for males especially prime age men than for females and significantly less elastic for the elderly

determinants of local school spending some consistent estimates the traditional median voter model predicts that median income and taxprice are the primary determinants of local school spending levels it further implies that lump sum grants wills be utilized like private income and thus income and grant coefficients should be the same our comprehensive search technique shows that excluding equalized assessed value these predictions hold up quite well over 2048 specifications income and taxprice elasticities are reasonable and tightly distributed with income and blockgrant effects of the same general size as note above any hint of flypaper effect is completely dependent on the inclusion of equalized assessed value in the regression equation since the state of new york has annual district level tax levy elections it would be hard to rationalize bureaucratic power or agenda control as capable of producing flypaper type effects so this absence is not surprising future research should 1 investigate the specification sensitivity of flypaper effects with other datasets and wealth variables and 2 examine election and tax rules for the possibility of budget maximizing actions by school officials finally the consistently positive effects of private schooling nonwhite and in poverty suggest that future work should attempt to model non linear income effects

ends against the middle determining public service provision when there are private alternatives abstract public provision of a service coexists with private market provision the quality of public provision is determined by majority vote preferences are not single peaked owing to the presence of private alternatives we identify two cases in one majority voting equilibrium always exists and the median income voter is pivotal in the other a necessary condition for equilibrium indentifies the pivotal voter who must have income below the median when equilibrium exists a coalition of middle income households who consume the public alternative will be opposed by a coalition of rich and poor households with the rich choosing private consumption

improving identification of demand side obstacles to schooling findings from revealed and stated preference models in two ssa countries summary efforts to expand primary education have shifted from a policy focus on supply building schools to demand side policies human capital theory posits that common demand side obstacles are high direct costs opportunity costs and low perceived benefits constructs that are difficult to measure empirically this study compares strategies to estimate obstacles to schooling through revealed and stated preferences using similar household survey data from two sub saharan african countries the typical determinants of schooling model underestimates demand side obstacles and gender differences and additional useful information for theory testing and policy is derived from analyzing parents stated preferences as well

evaluating the effects of optimally distributed public programs child health and family planning interventions this paper develops and tests an optimizing model determining the distribution of family planning and health subsidies across heterogeneous households and assesses the biases in cross area estimates of the health effects of such subsidies due to public resource optimization the model incorporates both health externalities and the endogenous response of the size of the recipient population to program subsidies longitudinal data describing child health and publicly provided family planning and health programs in 20 barrios in laguna province in the philippines are used to estimate the effects of such programs on child health and the relationships between the distribution of the programs and preprogram health levels the impact of a program on a particular childs health status is viewed as dependent upon the childs length of exposure to the program a basic feature of the model is the presence of health externalities which is shown to be sufficient along with plausible features of household behavior to make selective subsidization of fertility control either alone or in combination with health investment subsidies pareto efficient the model suggests that subsidization of fertility control is likely to be pareto efficient in the presence of health or human capital externalities when human capital and family size are gross substitutes and or when any per child human capital subsidies may substitute for direct subsidies to health investment and an equalizing distribution of the subsidies the highest family planning subsidies to the lowest health recipient households is efficient when both health and family planning subsidies are used fertility control subsidies minimize the subsidy burden for donors and are highest when total subsidy expenditures per child are greatest

the effects of financialization on investment evidence from firm level data for the uk this paper estimates the effects of financialization on physical investment in the uk using panel data based on balance sheets of publicly listed non financial companies supplied by worldscope for the period 1985 2013 we find robust evidence of an adverse effect of not only financial payments interests and dividends but also financial incomes on the rate of accumulation the negative impacts of financial incomes from interests and dividends are particularly strong for the pre crisis period our findings support the financialization thesis that the increasing orientation of the non financial sector towards financial activities is ultimately leading to lower physical investment hence to stagnant or fragile growth as well as long term concerns for productivity

accountability and yardstick competition in the public provision of education abstract this paper explores the institutional change introduced by the public disclosure of an education development index ideb basic education development index in 2007 to identify the effect of education accountability on yardstick competition in educational spending among brazilian municipalities an exploratory analysis of the data shows a minor reduction 20 in spatial interaction in public educational spending after ideb disclosure compared with the spatial correlation before disclosure of the index our main results explore a discontinuity around the cutoff of 30 students enrolled in the grade under assessment after ideb disclosure the estimates suggest that the spatial autocorrelation and thus yardstick competition is reduced by 52 falsification and robustness tests were performed and suggest that we can claim causality around small bandwidths of the cutoff this finding suggests that the public release of information may decrease the importance of neighbors information on voters decisions

electoral competition in the american states electoral competition is a concept that has played a central role in much of the state politics literature one commonly used indicator of competition in the states is the ranney index we offer an alternative indicator of competition one based on district level outcomes of state legislative elections after evaluating both indicators in terms of validity and reliability the analysis suggests that the district level indicator is both empirically and intuitively superior as a measure of electoral competition the implications of this finding are discussed

governmental structure trustee selection and public university prices and spending multiple means to similar ends estimate the effects of multiple instruments for exercising political control over public university prices and spending i find that public universities located in states with governmental structures that enhance political control and universities whose trustees are selected by nonacademic stakeholders charge significantly lower prices than universities located in states with decentralized systems

university challenges explaining institutional change in higher education higher education policy has been subject to considerable reform in oecd states over the past two decades some states have introduced tuition fees others have massively increased public funding for higher education and still others remain in stasis retaining the elitist model with which they began the postwar era this article develops the argument that higher education policy in the oecd is driven by a set of partisan choices within a trilemma between the level of enrollment the degree of subsidization and the overall public cost of higher education the author develops a formal model of the micromechanisms underlying movements within this trilemma noting the importance of partisan politics existing enrollment tax structure and access these propositions are tested statistically on a sample of twenty two oecd countries and through case histories of higher education reform in england sweden and germany

the financialisation offshoring nexus and the capital accumulation of us non financial firms the financialisation of the nonfinancial corporation has drawn the attention of many scholars who have identified two channels by which financialisation happens a higher proportion of financial assets compared to nonfinancial ones and a higher amount of resources distributed to financial markets one of the consequences of this is the decrease in investment parallel to financialisation many nonfinancial corporations have also engaged in an internationalization of their productive activities organizing them under global value chains surprisingly the intersections between the literature on financialisation and the literature on global value chain are still underdeveloped although for example offshoring may also explain the decrease in investment of nonfinancial firms this paper fills this gap using panel regressions for u s nonfinancial corporations between 1995 and 2011 we find evidence that both offshoring and financialisation are determinants to the decrease in investment and that financialisation occurs mainly for firms belonging to high offshoring sectors la financiarisation des societes non financieres a attire l attention de nombreux chercheurs qui ont identifie deux canaux par lesquels elle se produit les bilans des societes sont composes d une plus grande proportion d actifs financiers relativement aux actifs non financiers et une plus grande part des ressources est redistribuee vers les marches financiers l une des consequences qui en resulte est la baisse de l investissement parallelement a ce mouvement de financiarisation beaucoup de societes non financieres ont developpe l internationalisation de leur production en l organisant selon des chaines globales de valeur il est surprenant de constater que les liens entre la litterature sur la financiarisation et celle sur les chaines globales de valeur soit peu developpee bien que par exemple le transfert de la production a l etranger puisse aussi expliquer la baisse de l investissement des firmes non financieres cet article vise a combler cette lacune en menant des regressions sur un panel de firmes americaines entre 1995 et 2011 nous montrons que tant le transfert de production a l etranger que la financiarisation sont des determinants de la baisse de l investissement nous montrons egalement que la financiarisation touche surtout les firmes appartenant a des secteurs fortement inserees dans les chaines globales de valeur

the demand for primary schooling in madagascar price quality and the choice between public and private providers abstract we estimate a discrete choice model of primary schooling and simulate policy alternatives for rural madagascar among school quality factors the results highlight the negative impacts on schooling demand of poor facility quality and the use of multigrade teaching several grades being taught simultaneously by one teacher in public schools simulations indicate the feasibility of reducing multigrade in public schools by adding teachers and classrooms a policy that would lead to modest improvements in overall enrollments and would disproportionately benefit poor children given much higher price elasticities for poorer households raising school fees to cover some of the additional costs would strongly counteract these favorable distributional outcomes an alternative policy of consolidation of primary schools combined with multigrade reduction or other quality improvements is likely to be ineffective because of the strongly negative impact of distance to school

why financialisation hasn t depressed us productive investment the rate of capital accumulation in the usa has fallen markedly in recent decades works in the financialisation literature have tried to explain this phenomenon by arguing that rising financial payments and purchases have come at the expense of productive investment this article shows that such arguments are not supported by the data it also explains theoretically why rising dividend payments and the growth of corporations portfolio investment are compatible with the fact that corporations productive investment did not decline during the first two decades of neoliberalism in the usa there would necessarily be a trade off between these uses of funds if they were all funded out of current profits but there is no necessary trade off because borrowed funds are an additional source finally the article shows that the fall in us corporations rate of profit rate of return on investment in fixed assets fully accounts for the fall in their rate of capital accumulation

an economic analysis of delayed primary school enrollment in a low income country the role of early childhood nutrition this paper investigates why children in low income countries often delay primary school enrollment despite the prediction of human capital theory that schooling will begin at the earliest possible age we explore several explanations for delayed enrollment but focus on the hypothesis that delays are rational responses to early childhood malnutrition we test these alternative hypotheses using recent data from ghana our estimates which address a number of previously ignored econometric issues firmly support the hypothesis that early childhood malnutrition causes delayed enrollment we find little or no support for alternative explanations based on borrowing constraints and the rationing of places in school copyright 1995 by mit press

why governments should invest more to educate girls abstract women and men often receive the same percentage increase in their wage rates with advances in schooling because these returns decline with more schooling the marginal returns for women will tend to exceed those for men especially in countries where women are much less educated the health and schooling of children are more closely related to their mother s education than father s more educated women work more hours in the market labor force broadening the tax base and thereby potentially reducing tax distortions these three conditions it is argued justify the disproportionate allocation of public expenditures toward women s education

on allocative distortions in problems of self selection this article considers the general structure of self selection models by imposing conditions which permit the ordering of agents by their preferences we provide a characterization of the distortions inherent in the sorting process

private and public choices in public education an investigation of trustee effects the paper applies the concepts of the horizon problem agency costs monitoring and special interest incentives to trustee management of public schools and higher education we examine whether south carolina s 1984 education improvement act a major restructuring of educational organization and spending in south carolina is related to the ratio of pupils in private versus public schools we employ 30 years of county level data in south carolina and we uncover several things there is no statistically credible relation between public school expenditures per pupil and the private school public school enrollment ratio however we do find that the directed changes in rules organizational structure and incentives mandated by the 1984 educational improvement act are associated with a reduction in the relative number of children attending private school we interpret this to mean that the features of the law requiring better accountability and the like were perceived by parents to make for better education while the increased money spent was only a transfer to teachers or some other groups we find that organization matters more than money

majority rule and the public provision of a private good this paper extends the literature on the socialization of commodities by developing a model of voting over the public provision of a private good health care

public provision of private goods government may provide a good that can if legally permitted be supplemented by private purchases policy is determined by majority rule under standard assumptions on preferences a majority voting equilibrium exists a regime of positive government provision with no restriction on private supplements is shown to be majority preferred to a regime of either only market provision or only government provision combined public and private expenditure on the good is higher under this dual provision regime than under either of the alternatives under some preference configurations the median income voter is pivotal under others a voter with income below the median is pivotal

household income and child schooling in vietnam the stronger are the associations between household income and child schooling the lower is intergenerational social mobility and the less equal is opportunity this study estimates the associations between household income and children s school success in vietnam the estimates indicate that these associations are considerable this article also investigates some ways in which policies relate to household incomes school fees are progressive but school fees are only about one third of what households pay directly to schools and are a much smaller proportion of a household s total school related expenditures total household expenditures paid directly to schools increase with household income less proportionately than do school fees alone so the overall structure of such payments is less progressive than is the structure of school fees because school enrollment is positively related to household income moreover the structure of school fees is less progressive for the entire population than for the selected subset that has children enrolled in school further the two school quality measures that have the strongest positive association with children s school success are much more available to higher income households meaning that higher income households have greater school expenditures in part because they are obtaining higher quality schooling and not because charges for the same quality schooling are progressive across income classes

financialisation and the slowdown of accumulation over the past decades financial investment of non financial businesses has been rising and accumulation of capital goods has been declining the first part of the paper offers a novel theory to explain this phenomenon financialization the shareholder revolution and the development of a market for corporate control have shifted power to shareholders and thus changed management priorities leading to a reduction in the desired growth rate in the second part the link between accumulation and financialization is tested econometrically by means of a time series analysis of aggregate business investment for usa uk france and germany extensive test of robustness are performed for the first three countries evidence that confirms the negative effect of financialization on accumulation is found author s abstract

a market based evaluation of the election versus appointment of regulatory commissioners this paper examines the elected versus appointed commissioner dichotomy from a market value perspective previous empirical analysis tends to concentrate on rates rather than examining the impact on shareholders wealth we examine life insurance industry data during the period surrounding the passage of california s proposition 103 the primary impact of the referendum on life insurers is to change the method of commissioner selection from appointment to popular vote we find that this change significantly reduced the value of life insurers doing business in california this result is consistent with the recent findings of boyes and mcdowell 1989 and smartt 1994 using alternative evaluation procedures for firms in other regulated industries this implies that the change to a popular election of commissioners either increases the level of risk and or decreases the expected cash flows of regulated firms

does distance matter for institutional delivery in rural india this article estimates the causal effect of distance to health facility on in facility birth in rural india taking into account the endogenous placement of the health facility we find that women living farther away from the health facilities are less likely to give birth at a health facility each additional kilometre from the nearest health facility is associated with a 4 4 decline in the probability of in facility birth policy simulation results indicate that providing access to a health facility within 5 km would increase institutional delivery by 10 overall our findings confirm that distance is an important barrier to in facility births in rural india

data watch the world bank s living standards measurement study household surveys since 1985 the world bank has been collecting household survey data in developing countries that provide a rich source of information for assessing household welfare understanding household behavior and evaluating the impact of government policies this article describes these household surveys known as living standards measurement study lsms surveys and explains how to obtain their data lsms surveys have been implemented in over twenty developing countries and have been used to analyze poverty labor markets health and education pricing policies determinants of school performance savings and consumption smoothing health and nutrition policies and gender and fertility issues

public education expenditures and private school enrollment in this paper i investigate whether increases in public education expenditures lead to reductions in private school enrollment in order to deal with the endogeneity of public expenditures i use as a natural experiment the 1998 fundef reform in brazil that caused exogenous variations in local public school funding using data from brazilian school and population censuses i show that public education expenditures increases are associated with reductions in the share of private school enrollment for grade 1 however the effect is smaller for grades 2 to 4 which is consistent with the existence of costs associated with switching schools resume depenses pour l instruction publique et inscriptions dans les ecoles privees dans ce memoire on fait enquete pour etablir si des accroissements dans les depenses pour l instruction publique menent a des reductions dans les inscriptions dans les ecoles privees conscient de l endogeneite des depenses publiques l auteur utilise la reforme fundef de 1998 au brazil qui a entraine des variations exogenes dans le financement des ecoles publiques locales a partir des donnees des recensements bresiliens des ecoles et de la population on montre que les accroissements de depenses pour l instruction publique sont associes a des reductions dans la part des ecoles privees dans les inscriptions en premiere annee cependant l effet est plus faible pour les inscriptions dans les annees 2 a 4 qui suivent ce qui est coherent avec l existence de couts associes aux changements d ecole

an econometric model of a public university s income and enrollments abstract an econometric model of a public organization s income and outputs is applied to a public university and contains equations representing legislative demand for enrollments students attendance demand and university supply the results support the hypotheses that supply and the two demands determine the university s instructional funding and enrollments and that interest groups affect legislative demand while per student legislative funding for high cost graduate and professional students was not found to exceed that of undergraduates evidence is presented that these enrollments are financed by the estimated discretionary funds resulting from the legislature s high cost of controlling academic activities

commodity price shocks and child outcomes the 1990 cocoa crisis in cote d ivoire abstract we look at the drastic cut of the administered cocoa producer price in 1990 cote d ivoire and study to which extent cocoa producers children suffered from this severe aggregate shock in terms of school enrollment labor height stature and morbidity using precrisis 1985 88 and postcrisis 1993 data we propose a difference in difference strategy to identify the causal effect of the cocoa shock on child outcomes whereby we compare children of cocoa producing households and children of other farmers living in the same district or the same village this causal effect is shown to be rather strong for the four child outcomes we examine hence human capital investments are definitely procyclical in this context we also provide evidence of gender bias against young girls with respect to education and health care we finally argue that the difference in difference variations can be interpreted as private income effects likely to derive from tight liquidity constraints

what policies will reduce gender schooling gaps in developing countries evidence and interpretation summary this paper considers evidence for the effects of policies on gender gaps in education distinguishing between policies that are ostensibly gender neutral and those that explicitly target girls the demand for girls schooling is often more responsive than boys to gender neutral changes in school distance price and quality patterns which can be explained in a human capital investment model through assumptions about girls and boys schooling costs and returns among policies that target girls enrollments price incentives to households or schools and the provision of female teachers appear to be effective other interventions hold promise but have not been the subject of rigorous evaluation pointing to an important agenda for future research