spousal bargaining over care for elderly parents in china imbalances in sex ratios influence the allocation of support abstractusing a unique chinese survey of parents and adult children this paper examines how married children negotiate with their spouses for time devoted to caring for their own parents applying a collective bargaining framework i show that the sex ratio at marriage shifts household bargaining in favour of the husband s parents when women are less scarce or against his parents when women are scarcer such changing dynamics in the family may potentially reverse the current preference for sons in china implying that those with sons rather than daughters may be increasingly in need of state support

collective labor supply a single equation model and some evidence from french data in chiappori s 1988 collective model of labor supply hours of work are supposed flexible in many countries however male labor supply does not vary much in that case the husband s labor supply is no longer informative about the household decision process and individual preferences to identify structural components of the model additional information is needed we thus consider an approach in which the wife s labor supply is expressed as a function of the household demand for one specific good we demonstrate that the main properties of chiappori s initial model are preserved and apply our results on french data

life cycle equilibrium unemployment this paper extends the job creation job destruction approach to the labor market to take into account a deterministic finite horizon as hirings and separations depend on the time over which investment costs can be recouped the life cycle setting implies age differentiated labor market flows while search by the unemployed falls with age the separation rate is rather u shaped over the life cycle worker heterogeneity in the context of undirected search implies an intergenerational externality which is not eliminated by the hosios condition we show that age specific policies are required to attain the first best allocation

democracy and economic growth a historical perspective recent studies appear to show that democracy has no robust association with economic growth yet all such work assumes that the causal effect of democracy can be measured by a country s regime status in a particular year t which is correlated with its growth performance in a subsequent period t 1 the authors argue that democracy must be understood as a stock rather than a level measure that is a country s growth performance is affected by the number of years it has been democratic in addition to the degree of democracy experienced during that period in this fashion democracy is reconceptualized as a historical rather than a contemporary variable with the assumption that long run historical patterns may help scholars to understand present trends the authors speculate that these secular historical infiuences operate through four causal pathways each of which may be understood as a type of capital physical capital human capital social capital and political capital this argument is tested in a cross country analysis and is shown to be robust in a wide variety of specifications and formats

civil conflict democratization and growth violent democratization as critical juncture in this paper we provide an empirical investigation of the interaction between violent conflicts democratization and growth in the third wave of democratization the effect of democratization is weakened when taking into account the incidence of civil conflict the results show that the growth effect of democratization is heterogeneous and depends on the democratization scenario peaceful transitions to democracy have a significant positive effect on growth that is even larger than reported previously in the literature whereas violent transitions have no or even negative growth effects

does democracy cause innovation an empirical test of the popper hypothesis abstract democratic countries produce higher levels of innovation than autocratic ones but does democratization itself lead to innovation growth either in the short or in the long run the existing literature has extensively examined the relationship between democracy and growth but seldom explored the effect of democracy on innovation which might be an important channel through which democracy contributes to economic growth this article aims to fill this gap and contribute to the long standing debate on the relationship between democracy and innovation by offering empirical evidence based on a data set covering 156 countries between 1964 and 2010 the results from the difference in differences method show that democracy itself has no direct positive effect on innovation measured with patent counts patent citations and patent originality

do financial constraints hold back innovation and growth evidence on the role of public policy abstract this paper provides evidence that capital market imperfections hold back innovation and growth and that public policy can complement capital markets we deliver the evidence by studying the effects of government funding on the behavior of smes in finland by adapting the methodology recently proposed by rajan and zingales rajan r g zingales l 1998 financial dependence and growth american economic review 88 pp 559 587 to firm level data we show that government funding disproportionately helps firms from industries that are dependent on external finance we demonstrate that the result is economically significant and robust to a variety of tests

estimating consumption economies of scale adult equivalence scales and household bargaining power how much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married what percentage of a married couple s expenditures are controlled by the husband how much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus living apart we propose and estimate a collective model of household behaviour that permits identification and estimation of concepts such as these we model households in terms of the utility functions of its members a bargaining or social welfare function and a consumption technology function we demonstrate generic non parametric identification of the model and hence of a version of adult equivalence scales that we call indifference scales as well as consumption economies of scale the household s resource sharing rule or members bargaining power and other related concepts copyright 2013 oxford university press

extended families and child well being studies of household behavior have established the distribution of resources among household members predicts spending and savings patterns however there is a paucity of evidence on the relationship between the well being of individual family members and the distribution of resources within an extended family including non co resident family members given the central role the family plays in many models of economic behavior this is an important gap in the literature using rich longitudinal survey data from the indonesia family life survey ifls evidence is presented on the relationship between three measures of health and education related human capital of children and the distribution of resources among extended family members ifls is ideally suited for this research since the survey collects detailed information about income and wealth from both coresident and non co resident family members the empirical model is founded on a natural extension of the collective model of household decision making chiappori 1988 1992 to the extended family the model is particularly appealing in this context because it places few restrictions on preferences of individual family members and does not specify a specific bargaining mechanism that underlies negotiations the collective model yields empirical tests of whether the behavior of family members is pareto efficient a special case of the model allows all family members to be completely altruistic which is observationally equivalent to a unitary model of family behavior that special case is rejected by the data however the restrictions of the efficient model are not rejected indicating that non co resident family members are able to co ordinate allocation decisions with respect to child human capital investments in such a way as to make no family member better off without another member being worse off

a cournot nash model of family decision making this paper models a two person family each family member is utility maximising yet family members are interdependent because of caring and public goods within the family the two family members interdependent utility maximisation problems are first solved using a non cooperative or cournot nash game theoretic framework the cournot nash equilibrium is then used as a threat point in a bargaining game the paper provides a rigorous derivation of the properties of household demands a full analysis of the determinants of intra household resource allocation including the effect of varying household bargaining power and consideration of policy implications

the impact of education on subjective discount rate in ugandan villages abstract heterogeneity in time discounting may reinforce the existing barriers to save and invest faced by rural populations in developing countries we elicit a subjective discount rate for a varied sample of ugandan villagers in accordance with other studies we have found the discount rate to decrease with education we examine this correlation further by testing the causal effect of education and exploit two different sources of its variation school frequency across villages and the number of the respondents school going years that overlap with the era of the dictator idi amin s rule for men we find that education has a significant impact on their discount rate similar in magnitude for both types of instruments and robust to observable characteristics this finding highlights the importance of education in development

watta satta bride exchange and women s welfare in rural pakistan in a setting where husbands wield considerable coercive power forms of marriage should adapt to protect the interests of women and their families the authors study the pervasive marriage custom of watta satta in rural pakistan a bride exchange between families coupled with a mutual threat of retaliation they show that watta satta may be a mechanism to coordinate the actions of two sets of in laws each of whom wish to restrain their sons in law but who only have the ability to restrain their sons the authors empirical results support this view the likelihood of marital inefficiency as measured by estrangement domestic abuse and wife s mental health is significantly lower in watta satta arrangements as compared with conventional marriages but only after properly accounting for selection

parental wealth and adult children s welfare in marriage abstract many studies find that parental resources importantly determine children s human capital schooling returns and earnings the collective household approach suggests that in addition parental resources of marital partners may importantly affect resource distributions within marriage this paper presents empirical results consistent with this framework they suggest that parental wealth continues to play roles in augmenting welfare of children into adulthood beyond provision of human capital in early life cycle stages or direct financial aid during adulthood and that actual transfers from parents to adult children do not fully measure influences of parental wealth on behaviors and welfare of adult children

spousal control and intra household decision making an experimental study in the philippines i elicit causal effects of spousal observability and communication on financial choices of married individuals in the philippines when choices are private men put money into their personal accounts when choices are observable men commit money to consumption for their own benefit when required to communicate men put money into their wives account these strong treatment effects on men but not women appear related more to control than to gender men whose wives control household savings respond more strongly to the treat ment and women whose husbands control savings exhibit the same response changes in information and communication interact with underlying control to produce mutable gender specific outcomes

household bargaining over fertility theory and evidence from malaysia we develop and test a model of household bargaining over fertility when transfers between spouses are possible the model makes precise how the fertility preferences of each spouse translate into fertility outcomes we show this depends on whether or not spouses can commit to their future actions within marriage if couples bargain with commitment fertility outcomes take account of both spouses fertility preferences and do not depend on the threat point in marital bargaining if couples bargain without commitment the influence of each spouse s fertility preference on fertility outcomes depends on the relevant threat point in marital bargaining and the distribution of bargaining power we test the models using household data from the malaysia family life survey this data set contains information on each spouse s desired fertility level as well as fertility outcomes we exploit differences in threat points in marital bargaining across ethnic groups to help identify the underlying bargaining model the evidence suggests couples bargain without commitment

gender of children bargaining power and intrahousehold resource allocation in china abstract based on the prevalent son preference in china this paper proposes a new measure of relative bargaining power within the household using data from china health and nutrition survey we show that a woman with a first born son has a 3 9 percentage points greater role in household decision making than a woman with a first born daughter having a first born son improves the mother s nutrition intakes and reduces her likelihood of being underweight while thinking of these impacts as being channeled through intrahousehold bargaining power we cannot fully rule out other possible direct effects of a first born son on the outcomes

look who s talking the impacts of the intrahousehold allocation of mobile phones on agricultural prices abstract using data from the philippines we study the impact of mobile phones on the prices agricultural producers receive for their cash crop we first look at the impact on price of mobile phone ownership at the household level because this masks a considerable amount of heterogeneity we then look at the impact on price of the intrahousehold allocation of mobile phones we find that whether the household owns a mobile phone has no impact on price but whether a farmer or spouse owns a mobile phone is associated with a 5 to 8 per cent increase in price

intra household resource allocation an inferential approach if household income is pooled and then allocated to maximize welfare then income under the control of mothers and fathers should have the same impact on demand with survey data on family health and nutrition in brazil the equality of parental income effects is rejected unearned income in the hands of a mother has a bigger effect on her family s health than income under the control of a father for child survival probabilities the effect is almost twenty times bigger the common preference or neoclassical model of the household is rejected if unearned income is measured with error and income is pooled then the ratio of maternal to paternal income effects should be the same equality of the ratios cannot be rejected there is also evidence for gender preference mothers prefer to devote resources to improving the nutritional status of their daughters fathers to sons

intra family distribution of paid work time this article analyses the intra family distribution of paid work time in five european countries france germany italy spain and the uk to that end we formulate a collective model which allows us to characterize the efficient labour supply decisions of each spouse this two equation model is then simultaneously estimated by using national panel data drawn from the european community household panel echp 1994 2001 empirical results clearly show that in all sample countries the labour supply of wives is affected by own wages household and own nonlabour incomes and the number of children whereas evidence for husbands differs across countries

the empirical content of nash bargained household behavior in households whose allocation decisions can be represented as nash bargained household decisions extrahousehold environmental parameters eeps serve as pure shifters of the threat points the comparative statics of changes in demands due to changes in these eeps are given these are incorporated into a comprehensive statement of the empirical content of nash bargained household behavior including a nash generalization of barten s 1966 fundamental matrix equation of the theory of consumer demand estimation and data requirements are discussed along with nested testing of the following structure the neoclassical model is nested in the nash bargained model which in turn is nested in an unrestricted model of household demands emphasized throughout is the enriched menu of explanatory variables for demand analysis provided by the nash model as well as the model s ability to jointly analyze i household formation and ii intrahousehold allocation decisions

large demographic shocks and small changes in the marriage market between 1958 and 1961 china experienced one of the worse famines in her history birth rates fell during these years and recovered immediately afterwards the famine also adversely affected the health of these cohorts this paper provides non parametric estimates of the total effects of the famine on the marital behaviour of famine affected cohorts in the rural areas of sichuan and anhui these reduced from estimates incorporate general equilibrium and heterogeneous treatment effects two important components of equilibrium marital behaviour next the paper uses a structural model of the marriage market the choo siow model to decompose observed marital outcomes into quantity and quality effects of the famine the structural estimates show that the famine substantially reduced the marital attractiveness of the famine born cohort the conclusion is that the small observed changes in marriage rates of the famine born cohorts are due to a substantial decline in their marital attractiveness controlling for changes in educational attainment does not change the conclusion

rational household labor supply traditionally household behavior is derived from the maximization of a unique utility function in this paper we propose an alternative approach in which the household is modeled as a two member collectivity taking pareto efficient decisions the consequences of this assumption are analyzed in a three good model in which only total consumption and each member s labor supply are observable if the agents are assumed egoistic i e they are only concerned with their own leisure and consumption it is possible to derive falsifiable conditions upon household labor supplies from both a parametric and nonparametric viewpoint if alternatively agents are altruistic restrictions obtain in the nonparametric context useful interpretation stems from the comparison with the characterization of aggregate demand for a private good economy

children as collective goods and divorce settlements the failure of many divorced fathers to comply with court mandated child support awards has been identified as a major reason why a growing number of children live in poverty in female headed households this paper presents a model that seeks to explain why so many divorced fathers allow their children s welfare to suffer as a consequence of divorce the point of departure is the recognition that children are collective consumption goods from the point of view of the father and mother within marriage proximity and altruism serve to overcome the free rider problem associated with the provision of public goods however on divorce the noncustodial parent suffers a loss of control over the allocative decisions of the custodial parent and it is not feasible for the couple to achieve a pareto optimal allocation of their joint resources a model of optimal marriage contracts is constructed in which a couple decides on the allocation of resources within marriage and on the terms of a settlement in the event

female headed households and female maintained families are they worth targeting to reduce poverty in developing countries controversy exists over whether to target public and private sector programs to female headed households in developing countries in the attempt to combat poverty and social disadvantage the issues related to the definition and measurement of female headship and the importance of the concept for development policy are discussed a systematic review is then presented of the empirical evidence on the relation between female headship and poverty if female headed households tend to be poorer on average than other households headship should seriously be considered as a potentially useful criterion for targeting antipoverty interventions especially in developing countries where means testing is not feasible the authors examine the potential costs and benefits of targeting female headship and review the experience of chile one of the few countries which has targeted female headship through government intervention and the only one which has evaluation data available the analysis of the project experience is used along with a review of the empirical evidence to answer the question of the desirability and efficiency of targeting female headship in order to reduce poverty in developing countries

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

bargaining over babies theory evidence and policy implications it takes a woman and a man to make a baby this fact suggests that for a birth to take place the parents should first agree on wanting a child using newly available data on fertility preferences and outcomes we show that indeed babies are likely to arrive only if both parents desire one and there are many couples who disagree on having babies we then build a bargaining model of fertility choice and match the model to data from a set of european countries with very low fertility rates the distribution of the burden of child care between mothers and fathers turns out to be a key determinant of fertility a policy that lowers the child care burden specifically on mothers can be more than twice as effective at increasing the fertility rate compared to a general child subsidy

economic decision making by cohabitors findings regarding income pooling cohabitation rates are increasing in the us but little is known about how cohabitors make economic decisions for instance do female cohabitors treat their male partner s income as shared household income when choosing hours worked does income sharing differ among types of cohabitors this study investigates whether or not cohabitors pool income by drawing inferences from a generalized model of labour supply the empirical work uses data from the 1993 current population survey and the 1987 national survey of families and households these data sets provide evidence that cohabitors taken as a group do not pool all income however there is also evidence that cohabitors are not homogeneous in their behaviour income pooling is not rejected for cohabitors in longer term relationships and for those who have a biological child together

search unemployment and age abstract we examine a search and matching model of the labor market with overlapping generations of workers in this model we focus on the effects of the finite lifetime of workers as a result of finite lifetime very old workers with the same productivity as younger workers generally earn less a market solution with nash bargained wages is never optimal as old workers search too long compared to the efficient solution we also examine the effects of policy measures such as hiring subsidies or unemployment insurance on employment labor market institutions have a differential impact for different age groups

college choice as a collective decision although the choice between colleges can be thought of as being made collectively by a family models of educational choice almost universally portray the decision as made by the student alone using a novel experimental method for identifying collective decision functions i find that students have more influence than parents over the decision but not exclusive control students care more than parents about classroom experience and future earnings ignoring the dual agent nature of the decision can weaken predictions and lead to poorly targeted policy designs jel i21 j24 d13

democratisation and growth this article challenges cross sectional findings that democracy has a negligible effect on growth we employ a new dataset of political transitions during the third wave of democratisation and examine the within effect of democratisation in countries that abandoned autocracy and consolidated representative institutions the panel estimates imply that on average democratisations are associated with a 1 increase in annual per capita growth the dynamic analysis reveals that while during the transition growth is slow in the medium and long run it stabilises at a higher level this evidence favours development theories of democratic rule and friedrich hayek 1960 s idea that the merits of democracy appear in the long run leading politicians and commentators have argued that democratisation will bring prosperity and growth into pariah and economically poorly performing countries 1 others however remain sceptical pointing to the mixed and inconclusive empirical evidence the old debate dating back to plato and aristotle on which political regime is socially and economically optimal arises again this debate is not purely academic and philosophical as it has important policy implications in the last thirty years the world has experienced an unprecedented move towards democratic institutions influential policy makers and scholars urge western authorities to foster democratic movements in totalitarian countries see the economist article philosophers and kings june 19th 2003 yet the question remains will democratisation bring economic growth to assess the average growth effect of a successful democratic transition we analyse the evolution of annual real per capita gdp growth before and after incidents of permanent democratic reform in the 1960 2003 period in our analysis we exploit a newly constructed dataset of permanent democratisations during the so called third wave of democratisation and the 1990s when many former socialist countries moved towards representative rule the panel results reveal new evidence that contrast with the previous mainly cross sectional work first conditioning on time invariant country characteristics and global shocks a permanent democratisation is associated with approximately a one half to one per cent increment in annual real per capita gdp growth second a dynamic j shaped effect emerges with considerable though not this article is a major revision of an earlier paper titled aristotle was right stable democracy fosters

bringing it all back home return migration and fertility choices summary return migration exerts a wide ranging influence upon the countries of origin of the migrants we analyze whether returnees adjust their fertility choices to the norms that prevail in their previous countries of destination using egyptian household level data egyptian men migrate predominantly toward other arab countries characterized by a higher number of children per woman relying on a two step instrumental variable approach to control for the endogeneity of the migration decisions we show that return migration has a positive and significant influence on marital childbearing

gender power fertility and family policy the birth of children often shifts the balance of power within a family if family decisions are made according to the welfare function of the spouses this shift in power might cause a time consistency problem in a model of cooperative family decision making we show that this problem can lead to a systematic downward bias in fertility by keeping fertility low spouses mitigate the ex ante undesired shift in the balance of power that results from the presence of children this provides scope for welfare enhancing policy intervention we discuss to what extent existing family policy measures are suitable for overcoming the bias

independence of allocative efficiency from distribution in the theory of public goods when is the pareto optimal amount of public goods independent of income distribution subject to some regularity conditions the answer is when preferences of every individual i can be represented by a utility function of the form u x i y a y x i b i y where x i is i s consumption of private goods and y is the amount of public goods

women in politics evidence from the indian states abstract this paper uses panel data from the 16 larger states in india during the period 1967 2000 to study the effects of female political representation in the state legislatures on public goods policy and expenditure it finds that politicians gender affects policy but that their social position i e their caste should be taken into account as well female legislators in seats reserved for lower castes and disadvantaged tribes invest more in health and early education and favor women friendly laws such as amendments to the hindu succession act which was designed to give women the same inheritance rights as men they also favor redistributive policies such as land reforms in contrast female legislators from higher castes do not have any impact on women friendly laws oppose land reforms invest in higher tiers of education and reduce social expenditure the causal effect of female legislators is estimated using close elections between women and men

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

age dependent employment protection this paper examines the age related design of firing taxes by extending the theory of job creation and job destruction to account for a finite working life time we first argue that the potential employment gains related to employment protection are high for older workers as they are magnified by the proximity to retirement but higher firing taxes for these workers increase job destruction rates for the younger generations furthermore from a normative standpoint when firms cannot ex ante age direct their search the impact of each generation of unemployed workers on the average return on vacancies makes the internalization of the search costs for the other generations imperfect through the ex post nash bargaining process we show that the first best age profile of firing taxes is typically hump shaped partially in contradiction with existing policies in some european countries taking into account the fact that the human capital of older workers is more specific than general tends to exacerbate these results

intrahousehold bargaining female autonomy and labor supply theory and evidence from india standard models of labor supply predict that unearned income decreases labor supply we propose an alternative noncooperative household model in which a woman s unearned income improves her autonomy within the household which raises her gains from working and can increase her labor supply we find empirical support for this model using women s exposure to the hindu succession act in india as a source of exogenous variation in their unearned income exposure to the hindu succession act increases a woman s labor supply by between 3 8 and 6 1 percentage points particularly into high paying jobs autonomy increased by 0 17 standard deviations suggesting that control of income is a potential channel for these effects thus policies that empower women can have an additional impact on the labor market which can further reinforce autonomy increases

how women s rights affect fertility evidence from nigeria using data from the demographic and health surveys dhs this paper estimates the effect on fertility of a legal reform in nigeria in 1999 that lowered the value of women s testimony in court i find that the yearly probability of giving birth of women exposed to the reform did not change in general for women exposed to the enforced reform this probability increased by at least 0 04 using stated preferences on fertility i find that fertility increased among women who want fewer children than their husband does but decreased among women who want more children than their husband does i examine the hypothesis that the reform increased for women the value of being married and hence decreased their intra household bargaining power consequently shifting fertility decisions in the direction of husbands preferences jel j13 j18 k10

do two earner households base their choice of residential location on both incomes this article focuses on the role of individual incomes in the residential location decisions of two earner households conventional studies often treat households as a black box and describe them by a single utility function the article raises the question is the household utility paradigm an adequate framework for understanding the location decisions of two earner households it tests an implication of the household utility paradigm the income pooling hypothesis for location decisions the results provide evidence for rejecting the hypothesis among childless families but fail to provide evidence for rejecting it when children are present the results raise the need to address intrahousehold dynamics in modelling location decisions

democracy volatility and economic development growth stability is an important objective because development requires sustained increases in income because volatility is costly for the poor and because volatility deters growth we study the determinants of average growth and its volatility as a two equation system and find that higher levels of democracy and diversification lower volatility whereas volatility itself reduces growth muslim countries instrument for democracy and measures of diversification identify volatility in contrast to the lack of consensus on the democracy growth relationship the democracy stability link is robust rather than focus on growth this paper forges an alternative link between democracy and development through the volatility channel

democracy and economic growth a meta analysis despite a sizeable theoretical and empirical literature no firm conclusions have been drawn regarding the impact of political democracy on economic growth this article challenges the consensus of an inconclusive relationship through a quantitative assessment of the democracy growth literature it applies meta regression analysis to the population of 483 estimates derived from 84 studies on democracy and growth using traditional meta analysis estimators the bootstrap and fixed and random effects meta regression models it derives several robust conclusions taking all the available published evidence together it concludes that democracy does not have a direct impact on economic growth however democracy has robust significant and positive indirect effects through higher human capital lower inflation lower political instability and higher levels of economic freedom democracies may also be associated with larger governments and less free international trade there also appear to be country and region specific democracy growth effects overall democracy s net effect on the economy does not seem to be detrimental

collective labour supply taxes and intrahousehold allocation an empirical approach most empirical studies of the impact of labor income taxation on the labor supply behavior of households use a unitary modeling approach in this article we empirically analyze income taxation and

intergenerational transfers in philippine rice villages gender differences in traditional inheritance customs abstract this paper examines education land and nonland asset transfers from parents to children in five rice villages in the philippines a model with family fixed effects explains transfers better than either individual heterogeneity or observed parent and child characteristics without family fixed effects families facing different land constraints exhibit significantly different patterns of educational investment in children in a subsample with completed inheritance daughters receive less education land and total inheritance but are compensated with nonland assets parents also exhibit preferential behavior towards children of the same gender daughters of better educated mothers receive more land nonland assets and total inheritance better educated fathers give land preferentially to sons but favor daughters in education

control and ownership of assets within rural ethiopian households this article investigates how the control and devolution of productive assets are allocated among husband and wife theory predicts that bargaining power within marriage depends on the division of assets upon divorce and on control over assets during marriage using detailed household data from rural ethiopia we show that assets brought to marriage ownership of assets control within marriage and disposition upon death or divorce are only partly related productive resources are controlled by the household head disposition upon death or divorce only loosely depends on individual ownership during marriage but control is associated with larger claims upon divorce assets brought into marriage have little impact on disposition upon death but matter in case of divorce

child labor school attendance and intrahousehold gender bias in brazil an extensive survey data set of brazilian households is used to test whether intrahousehold gender bias affects the decisions of mothers and fathers to send their sons and daughters to work and to school an intrahousehold allocation model is examined in which fathers and mothers may affect the education investment and the child labor participation of their sons and daughters differently because of differences in parental preferences or differences in how additional schooling affects son s and daughter s acquisition of human capital brazilian household survey data for 1998 are used to estimate the impact of each parent s education on the labor market participation and school attendance of their sons and daughters for labor market participation the father s education has a greater negative impact than the mother s education on the labor status of sons the father s education also has a greater impact on son s labor status than on daughter s for schooling decisions the mother s education has a greater positive impact than the father s education on daughter s school attendance but fathers have a greater positive impact on sons school attendance than on daughter s

the saving behaviour of a two person household the facts that wives are typically younger than their husbands and that women typically live longer than men imply that wives may have more incentive to save for old age than do husbands a theoretical model of the determination of household saving and portfolio choice is introduced which takes into account differences in preferences for saving the most important result is that the level and the composition portfolio of saving and the time path of consumption are dependent on the distribution of income within the household women typically live longer than men and wives are typically younger than their husbands these two facts imply that preferences about saving for old age in married households with forward looking members may differ between husband and wife this paper presents a theoretical analysis of saving and portfolio behaviour if the members of the household have differ ent preferences over future consumption as compared to current consump tion the analysis stands in contrast to unitary models of household intertemporal allocation which assume that the household has a single utility function thus this paper is a contribution in a novel context to the burgeoning literature on intra household decision making the base case analysis is for a simple two person husband and wife1 two period model in which there is only one asset saving it is assumed that because of the two facts given at the start of the introductory paragraph the husband discounts the future more than the wife in section ii the implications of a non cooperative decision making process for the base case are derived see ulph 1988 for a non cooperative model of demand and

recovering individual preferences for non market goods a collective travel cost model traditional recreation demand models do not make a distinction between a household and an individual as the reference decision making unit thus assuming that a family maximizes a single utility function even if the family consists of different individuals such models ignore the possibility of family members divergent preferences for non market goods this study proposes a novel approach the collective travel cost model ctcm to eliciting individual preferences for a non market good such as a recreation site by using revealed preference data this approach accounts for the intra household resource allocation and the role of each household member s preferences we show that the collective travel cost model can be applied to estimating a recreation demand model that yields individual welfare estimates appropriate for policy analysis of non market goods such as the willingness to pay to access a recreation site we find that how resources are distributed within the household reflects significant differences in welfare measures

welfare and family stability do benefits affect when children leave the nest the welfare system has long been criticized for its incentives against marriage this paper examines one way in which welfare actually may keep families together the fact that benefits increase with family size may encourage teenagers to stay in welfare recipient households welfare benefit incentives affecting coresidence are twofold 1 a parent loses benefits if a child leaves the household and 2 a child may receive additional benefits if s he leaves the parental household at a theoretical level these incentives are shown to have an ambiguous effect on the coresidence decision empirically ifind that children are more likely to leave their parents the smaller the benefit loss that the parent suffers this result illustrates a potential side effect of welfare time limits which effectively make children less valuable to welfare parents who reach the time limit when children no longer increase the benefits available to lowincome parents more children may leave the parental household before age 18 welfare s effects on living arrangements are estimated to be considerably stronger than most previously estimated effects on childbearing or female headship

education choices in mexico using a structural model and a randomized experiment to evaluate progresa in this paper we evaluate the effect of a large welfare program in rural mexico for such a purpose we use an evaluation sample that includes a number of villages where the program was not implemented for evaluation purposes we estimate a structural model of education choices and argue that without such a framework it is impossible to evaluate the effect of the program and especially possible changes to its structure we also argue that the randomized component of the data allows us to identify a more flexible model that is better suited to evaluate the program we find that the program has a positive effect on the enrollment of children especially after primary school we also find that an approximately revenue neutral change in the program that would increase the grant for secondary school children while eliminating for the primary school children would have a substantially larger effect on enrollment of the latter while having minor effects on the former

determinants of patent rights a cross national study abstract this paper presents an index of patent rights for 110 countries for the period 1960 1990 the index is used to examine what factors or characteristics of economies determine how strongly patent rights will be protected the evidence does indicate that more developed economies tend to provide stronger protection but the underlying factors which influence patent protection levels are the country s level of research and development r d activity market environment and international integration which are correlated with its level of development the results qualify however that r d activity influences patent protection levels after a nation s research sector reaches a critical size an implication of this is that to raise patent protection levels in weakly protecting countries it is important to foster a significant research base in those countries and thereby create incentives for protecting patent rights

the impact of conditional cash transfers on marriage and divorce abstracta growing number of less developed countries have introduced conditional cash transfer programs in which funds are targeted to women economic models of the family suggest that these transfer programs may lead to marital turnover among program beneficiaries data from the experimental evaluation of the progresa program in mexico is used to provide new evidence on the short run impacts of targeted transfers on couples union dissolution and individuals new union formation decisions we find that although the overall share of women in union does not change as a result of the program marital turnover increases intact families eligible for the transfers experienced a modest 0 32 percentage points increase in separation rates with most of the effect concentrated among young and relatively educated women households in contrast young single women with low educational attainment levels experienced a substantial increase in new union formation rates the marital transition patterns are consistent

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

does the old age pension scheme improve household welfare evidence from india abstract as india s population has been ageing due to declines in fertility and mortality rates more policy emphasis has been placed on reducing poverty among the elderly the present study aims to examine the effect of indira gandhi national old age pension scheme ignoaps on household welfare indicators such as consumption expenditure income assets and poverty using the household longitudinal data based on the india human development survey in 2004 5 and 2011 12 we have applied the propensity score matching to build a counterfactual group and have used the propensity score weighted fixed effects model to eliminate time invariant unobservable household characteristics the results show that the ignoaps participation increased consumption expenditure food and non food expenditure and assets while reducing the household labour supply the sub sample estimations show that these effects are observed only when recipients are women however the results of difference in difference model imply that the poverty reducing effect deteriorated in 2011 12 after the government made several changes to programme specifications in 2007 this was likely because some households which accessed ignoaps after 2007 reduced the labour supply significantly while keeping the level of consumption

do national patent laws stimulate domestic innovation in a global patenting environment a cross country analysis of pharmaceutical patent protection 1978 2002 this paper evaluates the effects of patent protection on phar maceutical innovations for 26 countries that established pharmaceutical patent laws during 1978 2002 controlling for country characteristics through matched sampling techniques to establish two proper comparison sets among 92 sampled countries and through country pair fixed effects regressions this study yields robust results national patent protection alone does not stimulate domestic innovation as estimated by changes in citation weighted u s patent awards domestic r d and pharmaceutical industry exports however domestic innovation accelerates in countries with higher levels of economic development educational attainment and economic freedom additionally there appears to be an optimal level of intellectual property rights regulation above which further enhancement reduces innovative activities

strategic choices in polygamous households theory and evidence from senegal this paper proposes a strategic framework to account for fertility choices in polygamous households a theoretical model specifies the main drivers of fertility in the african context and describes how the fertility of one wife might impact the behavior of her co wives it generates predictions to test for strategic interactions exploiting original data from a household survey and the demographic and health surveys in senegal empirical tests show that children are strategic complements one wife raises her fertility in response to an increase by the other wife because children are the best claim to resources controlled by the husband this result is the first quantitative evidence of a reproductive rivalry between co wives it suggests that the sustained high level of fertility in africa does not merely reect women s lack of control over births as is often argued but also their incentives to have many children this paper also contributes to the literature on household behavior as one of the few attempts to open the black box of non nuclear families

static and intertemporal household decisions we discuss the most popular static and dynamic models of household behavior our main objective is to explain which aspects of household decisions different models can account for using this insight we describe testable implications identification results and estimation findings obtained in the literature particular attention is given to the ability of different models to answer various types of policy questions

motives for private transfers over the life cycle an analytical framework and evidence for peru abstract this paper tests for the motives for private income transfers we consider two motives altruism and exchange the question of private transfer motives is important because such motivation can influence the effects of public income transfers on the distribution of income using a household survey for peru we find that transfer amounts received increase with recipient pre transfer income which contradicts a key prediction of the strong form of the altruism hypothesis but is consistent with exchange we also find that capital market imperfections are likely to be an important cause of private transfers and that social security benefits crowd out the incidence of private transfers

preference heterogeneity power and intrahousehold decision making in rural malaysia abstract this paper examines conjugal household responsibilities roles preference heterogeneity and intrahousehold power relations in rural malay families its three major contributions are to provide an effective initial indicator of separate spheres within the family develop and implement a method for measuring the extent of conjugal preference heterogeneity and illustrate the value of combining this direct measure of preference heterogeneity with a measure of power in estimating household expenditure patterns for three major items food schooling and housing improvement these three measurement innovations applied to the rural malaysia context demonstrate the potential for more direct efforts to model and measure intrahousehold decisions

the political economy of development a cross national causality test of development democracy growth hypothesis the empirical investigation of the development democracy growth hypothesis estimates positive correlations and causal associations between development and democracy and democracy and growth among the preconditions for the emergence of democracy market and culture show strong and highly significant positive effects which are largely transmitted directly development affects democracy directly and indirectly via education and investment the positive causal association between democracy and growth is transmitted both directly and indirectly via labor and welfare accordingly the hypothesized compatibility between economic development and political democracy is confirmed while rejecting the trade off between political democracy and economic growth

the national system of innovation in historical perspective contrary to some recent work on so called globalisation this paper argues that national and regional systems of innovation remain an essential domain of economic analysis their importance derives from the networks of relationships which are necessary for any firm to innovate whilst external international connections are certainly of growing importance the influence of the national education system industrial relations technical and scientific institutions government policies cul tural traditions and many other national institutions is fundamental the historical examples of germany japan and the former ussr illustrate this point as well as the more recent contrast between east asian and latin american countries introduction the national system of friedrich list according to this author s recollections the first person to use the expression national system of innovation was bengt ake lundvall and he is also the editor of a highly original and thought provoking book 1992 on this subject however as he and his colleagues would be the first to agree and as lundvall himself points out the idea actually goes back at least to friedrich list s conception of the national system of political economy 1841 which might just as well have been called the national system of innovation the main concern of list was with the problem of germany overtaking england and for underdeveloped countries as germany then was in relation to england he advocated not only protection of infant industries but a broad range of policies designed to accelerate or to make possible industrialisation and economic growth most of these policies were concerned with learning about new technology and applying it the racialist and colonialist overtones of the book were in strong contrast to the inter nationalist cosmopolitan approach of the classical free trade economists and list s belief that holland and denmark should join the german bund and acquire german nationality because of their descent and whole character reads somewhat strangely in the european community of today nevertheless despite these unattractive features of his outlook he clearly anticipated many contemporary theories after reviewing the changing ideas of economists about development in the years since the second world war the world bank 1991 concludes that it is intangible investment in knowledge accumulation which is decisive rather than physical capital investment as was at one time believed pages 33 35 the report cites the new growth theory

adverse selection in the marriage market hiv testing and marriage in rural malawi asymmetric information in the marriage market may cause adverse selection and delay marriage if partner quality is revealed over time sexual safety is an important but hidden partner attribute especially in areas where hiv is endemic a model of positive assortative matching with both observable attractiveness and hidden sexual safety attributes predicts that removing the asymmetric information about sexual safety accelerates marriage and pregnancy for safe respondents and more so if they are also attractive frequent hiv testing may enable safe people to signal and screen consistent with these predictions we show that a high frequency opt out hiv testing intervention changed beliefs about partner s safety and accelerated marriage and pregnancy increasing the probabilities of marriage and pregnancy by 26 and 27 percent for baseline unmarried women over 28 months estimates are larger for safe and attractive respondents conversely a single test intervention lacks these effects consistent with other hiv testing evaluations in the literature our findings suggest that an endogenous response to hiv risk may explain why the hiv aids epidemic has coincided with systematic marriage and pregnancy delays

the impact of conditional cash transfers on consumption and investment in nicaragua abstract this article examines the impact of a nicaraguan conditional cash transfer programme on measures of expenditures and productive investment despite clear evidence from a randomised evaluation that the programme increased current expenditures there is little evidence that it increased agricultural or non agricultural investment an estimated marginal propensity to consume out of the transfers of nearly one combined with no effect of cumulative past transfers on current consumption corroborate the direct evidence on investment in contrast to gains made in human capital investment the potential for long term increases in consumption as a result of other forms of increased investment may be limited

unitary or noncooperative intrahousehold model evidence from couples in uganda we present an overview of the evidence regarding the unitary collective and non cooperative models of household decision making and discuss how they can affect individual and household welfare we then discuss the results of an artefactual experiment conducted in uganda with spouses in order to test whether household members maximize common preferences or instead are willing to pay a significant cost to hide money from their spouse we find that both the unitary and non cooperative models exist in the intra household decision making process and that a one size fits all model of household decision making is unlikely to be satisfactory

child labor and the labor supply of other household members evidence from 1920 america this paper analyses the effect of child labor on household labor supply using 1920 us census micro data the aim of the analysis is to understand who in the household benefits from child labor in order to identify a source of exogenous variation in child labor i use state specific child labor laws i find that a rise in the proportion of working children by household is associated with no variation in parents labor supply i also find a strong negative externality among children as the proportion of working children by household rises everything else equal the probability that each child works falls while the probability that he attends school rises this suggests that parents redistribute entirely the returns from child labor to the children in the household consistent with a model of household labor supply with fully altruistic parents

endogenous gender power household labor supply and the demographic transition abstract we present a microeconomic model of the household in which there exists no difference in spousal preferences but childrearing is more time costly for women bargaining between the wife and the husband forms the basis of household decisions marital bargaining power is determined according to the incomes of the spouses which in turn help to determine their reservation utility levels outside the marriage the endogeneity of bargaining power introduces a non cooperative element to the couples decision making problem because both the husbands and the wives take into account how their pre marital education decisions affect their marital power and the share they extract from household resources in the future the model predicts that wives invest more than is pareto efficient in their education in order to increase their bargaining power in marriage as a consequence couples have fewer children and consume more when exogenous structural changes lead women to invest more in education a corollary of the model is that empowering women directly through social reforms such as a lower gender wage gap leads to lower fertility and higher spousal consumption and leisure

new evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic growth it is often maintained that democracy is a luxury which comes at a price in terms of subsequent slower increases in national living standards however various recent cross section studies on economic growth have found evidence that lack of civil and political liberties is negatively correlated with economic growth using a new measure of democracy which is based upon the number of years that a country can be regarded as a democracy the robustness of this relationship is examined both direct and indirect effects of lack of democratic liberties are analysed our main conclusion is that the relationship between democracy and economic growth is not rubust

intra household resource allocation and familial ties abstract in this paper we investigate the link between intra household resource allocation and familial ties between household members we show that within the same geographic economic and social environments households where members have stronger familial ties nuclear family households achieve near pareto efficient allocation of productive resources and pareto efficient allocation of consumption while households with weaker familial ties extended family households do not we propose a theoretical model of the household based on the idea that altruism between household members vary with familial ties which generates predictions consistent with the observed empirical patterns

implications of spillover effects within the family for medical cost effectiveness analysis medical cost effectiveness analyses traditionally treat patients as isolated individuals and neglect the effects of improvement in patients health on the welfare of their family members we use a model based on a family utility function with altruistic linkages to show that there can be direct and indirect effects on the welfare of all family members we focus specially on a model of how the spillover effects to the spouse in a two person family might affect choice of treatments for prostate cancer we then test the predictions of this model by analyzing treatment choices of prostate cancer patients using the linked seer medicare database we find that our results are consistent with the model s predictions we conclude that cost effectiveness analyses may better reflect the full costs and benefits of medical interventions if they incorporate these family effects however concerns about equity present a dilemma for the practice of cea from the societal perspective

how does intergenerational investment respond to changes in the marriage market evidence from china abstract this paper examines how intergenerational investment responds to changes in the marriage market two major channels are modeled and empirically tested first expecting gender specific impacts on the future marriage market for their children parents adjustments in educational investment differ by the gender of children and second changes in marriage market conditions have contemporaneous impacts on intrahousehold bargaining because they change existing couples remarriage options which affects their educational investment in their children we test our model by exploiting a policy change in favor of local urban men in the urban marriage market in china we find that educational investment by local local couples decreases for sons but changes little for daughters consistent with the decrease in children s educational investment female favored consumption decreases while male favored consumption increases these results provide evidence of interaction between the intrahousehold bargaining and the future marriage prospect effects

household income as a determinant of child labor and school enrollment in brazil evidence from a social security reform abstractthis article studies the effects of household income on labor participation and school enrollment of children aged 10 14 in brazil using a social security reform as a source of exogenous variation in household income i find that increased benefits are associated with increases in school enrollment for girls as well as a smaller reduction in their labor participation but i find no effects for boys i also uncover evidence that the gender of the benefit receiver matters for girls labor variables only benefits received by females reduce girls work

village banking and maternal and child health evidence from ecuador and honduras abstract many microcredit institutions bundle credit with health education or other programs this paper reviews arguments on such tie ins and concludes that net benefits are possible but requires empirical testing quasi experimental data from project hope s health banks and credit only village banks are then examined the paper presents evidence that health practices do not improve automatically with greater wealth in honduras results show that health bank participation is robustly associated with reduced subsequent conditional child diarrhea probability but in no specification does credit only bank participation have this effect in ecuador results suggest a larger effect of credit only banks in both countries health bank participation significantly raises subsequent healthcare over credit only participation and at least reduces the tendency to switch from breast feeding to bottle feeding as income rises effects on expenditures are ambiguous there is no clear link between tie ins and bank performance

determinants of food consumption in rural sierra leone abstract this paper reports the application of a quadratic expenditure system with demographic variables to the household consumption leisure choice component of a household firm model a system of seven commodities is estimated including five foods non food and leisure appropriate for such a level of disaggregation a demand system is used the quadratic expenditure system which allows for a flexible relationship between full income and commodity expenditures without sacrificing parsimony in parameters demographic data on households are explicitly incorporated into the model allowing for a richer specification than can be achieved by using per capita variables the data are from a cross section survey of households in rural sierra leone price variation exists by region permitting estimation of a complete demand system engel curves are found to be significantly non linear with marginal expenditure on rice the major staple declining with higher income most foods are found to be reasonably price responsive with sizeable own price substitution effects declining with higher income aggregate labor supply is found to be price inelastic

married with children a collective labor supply model with detailed time use and intrahousehold expenditure information we propose a collective labor supply model with household production that generalizes an original model of blundell chiappori and meghir 2005 in our model adults individual preferences not only depend on own leisure and individual private consumption of market goods they also depend on the consumption of domestic goods which are produced by combining goods bought on the market with individuals time we apply our model to new and unique data on dutch couples with children the data contains detailed information about the spouses time use and the intrahousehold allocation of all expenditures our application uses a novel estimation strategy that builds upon the familiar two stage allocation representation of the collective model we obtain interesting and plausible empirical results spouses preferences depend on the consumption of domestically produced goods including children s welfare in addition pareto weights depend on variables like the individual wages and the share in the household s nonlabor income finally and perhaps surprisingly we do not nd evidence that mothers care more for their children than fathers this paper draws on data of the liss panel of centerdata special thanks go to marika de bruijne and arthur van soest who helped to construct the questionnaire and to guillaume schollier

shared agency the dominant spouse s impact on education expenditure summary in this paper we consider whether it is the gender of the decision maker or the extent of agency that they wield that is crucial to increasing household welfare this is an important question as development policy is often formed on the basis that placing resources in the hands of women results in greater household welfare indonesia provides the ideal opportunity to study this issue because it is home to ethnic groups with very different gender norms from male dominance the patrilineal batak to female dominance the matrilineal minangkabau using ifls data for three rounds we consider the impact of decision making by the dominant spouse on household expenditure on education we find that in indonesia when the dominant spouse male or female has sole control of decision making there is an overall negative impact on education expenditure this leads us to argue that it is more important to consider the issue of spousal dominance than to wholly focus on gender

household bargaining and excess fertility an experimental study in zambia we posit that household decision making over fertility is characterized by moral hazard due to the fact that most contraception can only be perfectly observed by the woman using an experiment in zambia that varied whether women were given access to contraceptives alone or with their husbands we find that women given access with their husbands were 19 less likely to seek family planning services 25 less likely to use concealable contraception and 27 percent more likely to give birth however women given access to contraception alone report a lower subjective well being suggesting a psychosocial cost of making contraceptives more concealable

a note on the life cycle search and matching model with segmented labor markets abstract recently there has been renewed interest in labor search and matching models that incorporate a life cycle structure by assuming finite horizons existing studies provide detailed analyses on the age dynamics of job creation and destruction assuming that workers of all ages search for jobs in the same market this paper examines a related environment that has drawn less attention where the labor market is exogenously segmented by age the paper finds sufficient conditions for the model to yield unambiguous predictions on the age profiles of key variables and compares them with the corresponding conditions in models with a single market the paper further examines the age profiles of these key variables in the efficient allocation in particular with no persistence in idiosyncratic match productivity the efficient allocation is found to exhibit monotonic age profiles for the job finding and separation rates

should we write prenuptial contracts abstract a successful marriage requires for both parties to make investments in their relationship and marital assets how such assets would be divided if and when the parties divorce is an important factor determining each party s ex ante investment incentives using the incomplete contracting approach we characterize the optimal asset division rule one that provides the parties with the best investment incentives we then discuss the circumstances under which the spouses would agree in equilibrium to contract out state imposed rules governing the allocation of marital assets upon divorce we conclude by exploring the implications of our results in the context of various asset division rules currently discussed by policy makers

income and democracy existing studies establish a strong cross country correlation between income and democracy but do not control for factors that simultaneously affect both variables we show that controlling for such factors by including country fixed effects removes the statistical association between income per capita and vari ous measures of democracy we present instrumental variables estimates that also show no causal effect of income on democracy the cross country corre lation between income and democracy reflects a positive correlation between changes in income and democracy over the past 500 years this pattern is con sistent with the idea that societies embarked on divergent political economic development paths at certain critical junctures jel d7 e 1