are household production decisions cooperative evidence on pastoral migration and milk sales from northern kenya market based development efforts frequently create opportunities to generate income from goods previously produced and consumed within the household production within the household is often characterized by a gender and age division of labor market development efforts to improve wellbeing may lead to unanticipated outcomes if household production decisions are noncooperative we develop and test models of household decision making to investigate intrahousehold decision making in a nomadic pastoral setting from kenya our results suggest that household decisions are contested with husbands using migration decisions to resist wives ability to market milk

sequential labor decisions under uncertainty an estimable household model of west african farmers this paper reports estimates of the structural parameters of a stochastic control model that describcs the labor decisions of small farmers in burkina faso west africa the focus of the estimation is on measuring flexibility in production and intertemporal substitutability in consumption full information maximum likelihood estimates of the primitive parameters of the model are computed even though optimal labor decision rules cannot be derived analytically vuong s non nested model specification test shows that this method yields parameter estimates that are superior to those derived by assuming that farmers solve a deterministic control problem the low levels of agricultural labor effort commonly observed in the survey area are shown to be a consequence both of the low productivity of labor in archaic rainfed agriculture and of farmers awareness that in the absence of a labor market overly ambitious production plans lead to seasonal manpower constraints to meet rainfed farmers concerns agricultural research institutes and extension services should factor flexibility into their research agendas

women s access to credit does it matter for household efficiency studies that assess the impact of credit constraints on farm households efficiency have largely used the household as the unit of analysis this can be problematic when there are gender based market imperfections and asymmetries in how rights resources and responsibilities are distributed within the household constraints on women matter in addition to the efficiency loss associated with the husbands credit constraints when women are unable to meet their needs for capital their households experienced an additional 11 drop in efficiency this suggests that there are efficiency based arguments for enhancing women s access to capital and that studies based only on the household s head may significantly underestimate the true economic impact of credit constraints copyright 2008 oxford university press

endogenous trading constraints with incomplete asset markets abstract this paper endogenizes the borrowing constraints on capital in a production economy with incomplete markets we find that these limits get looser with income a property that is consistent with us data on credit limits the framework with endogenous limits is then used to study the effects of a revenue neutral tax reform that eliminates capital income taxes our results illustrate that it is very important to take into account the effects of tax policies on the limits throughout the transition these effects can be big enough to change the overall conclusion about the desirability of a tax reform

the impact of agricultural and household technologies on women a conceptual and quantitative analysis in burkina faso abstract agricultural technologies new cultivars inorganic fertilizers soil and water conservation techniques in sub saharan africa have been primarily introduced to male farmers by male dominated extension services on the family plots these yield increasing input intensive technologies increase the demand for farm labor so not only do men obtain most of the direct benefits from the introduction of technology but this labor intensive technology also increases the demands on women s time for additional labor this raises the question are the combined effects of agricultural technologies beneficial or detrimental to women we first develop a labor market model that examines the impact of agricultural and household technologies on labor allocation and income determination within the household we then discuss the important issue of how household labor allocation decisions and division of income are made within the family in sub saharan africa we use a programming model to estimate the effects of these technologies on household incomes and the income of women the results indicate that the impact of agricultural technologies depends on the type of decision making prevailing in the household in contrast household technologies increase the welfare of women regardless of the type of decision making however with bargaining behavior agricultural technologies do benefit women and there is some empirical support for this type of household behavior in sub saharan african households

from evidence to calibration for starting point bias willingness to pay for treated mosquito nets in gujarat india this study uses a bidding format to assess households willingness to pay wtp for treated mosquito nets tmns it tests for starting point bias by allocating respondents randomly to three different starting bids rs 50 rs 75 and rs 100 and following this response with one further closed bid offer and a final open ended wtp question there is a clear presence of starting point bias by undertaking a simulated market experiment sme this study attempts to measure the magnitude and direction of the bias so that the necessary calibration factor can be calculated with which to adjust the mean willingness to pay value it was observed that the true mean wtp adjusted for starting point bias rs 56 26 is not very different from the unadjusted mean wtp of rs 57 38 it is concluded that the presence of starting point bias even in carefully designed wtp studies using a bidding format cannot be ruled out however the existence of starting point bias itself does not reflect the magnitude of the problem it

macroeconomic volatility and external imbalances abstract does macroeconomic volatility uncertainty affects accumulation of net foreign assets in oecd economies over the period 1970 2012 changes in country specific aggregate volatility are after controlling for a wide array of factors significantly positively associated with net foreign asset position a standard open economy model with time varying macroeconomic uncertainty can quantitatively account for this relationship the key mechanism is precautionary motive more uncertainty induces residents to save more and higher savings are in part channeled into foreign assets data and theory suggest that volatility is an important determinant of the medium long run evolution of external imbalances in developed countries

agricultural household models extensions applications and policy this book presents the basic model of an agricultural household that underlies most of the case studies undertaken so far the model assumes that households are price takers and is therefore recursive the decisions modeled include those affecting production and the demand for inputs and those affecting consumption and the supply of labor comparative results on selected elasticities are presented for a number of economies the empirical significance of the approach is demonstrated in a comparison of models that treat production and consumption decisions separately and those in which the decisionmaking process is recursive the book summarizes the implications of agricultural pricing policy for the welfare of farm households marketed surplus the demand for nonagricultural goods and services the rural labor market budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings in addition it is shown that the basic model can be extended in order to explore the effects of government policy on crop composition nutritional status health saving and investment and to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the effects on budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings methodological topics primarily the data requirements of the basic model and its extensions along with aggregation market interaction uncertainty and market imperfections are discussed the most important methodological issues the question of the recursive property of these models is also discussed

the impact of development on women a specific factors analysis abstract the specific factors model is employed in this paper as a means of explaining how economic development may serve to diminish women s welfare three changes associated with the development process are analyzed for their effect on women s real and relative wage 1 an expansion of trade induced by an improvement in the terms of trade 2 technological change and 3 an increase in female labor force participation

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

hearts and spades paradigms of household economics abstract this paper explains why the feminist critique of inequalities within the family poses a serious challenge to conventional economic theories of the household but it also discusses those aspects of both neoclassical and marxian theory that are useful to an analysis of conflict within the family arguing that the bargaining power models being developed by some neoclassical theorist are complementary to marxist influenced structural accounts

gender disparity in access to information do spouses share what they know summary the united nations un has declared lack of access to information to be the third major challenge confronting women in developing countries after poverty and violence analyzing a unique dataset of husbands and wives in rural paraguay we identify systematic differences between women and men s knowledge of financial markets and find that the factors that help predict individuals knowledge of these markets vary by gender specifically women are less likely than men to be informed about the financial institutions operating in their communities women are more likely to know what is required to obtain loans from financial institutions if they are more educated live with other adult women belong to wealthier households are in a stronger bargaining position vis a vis their spouses or have their husbands approval to take out entrepreneurial loans

informal insurance arrangements with limited commitment theory and evidence from village economies recent work on consumption allocations in village economies finds that idiosyncratic variation in consumption is systematically related to idiosyncratic variation in income thus rejecting the hypothesis of full risk pooling we attempt to explain these observations by adding limited commitment as an impediment to risk pooling we provide a general dynamic model and completely characterise efficient informal insurance arrangements constrained by limited commitment and test the model using data from three indian villages we find that the model can fully explain the dynamic response of consumption to income but that it fails to explain the distribution of consumption across households

formally modelling a gender segregated economy a response to william darity jr abstract william darity jr s model presented in the november 1995 issue of world development darity 1995 is an important attempt to provide an outline for gender based analysis at the household level the model falls short however because it focuses on income maximization without specific constraints on the man s time this paper demonstrates that as formulated there is no internal maximization solution possible and then offers additional economic information that would be meaningful and appropriate to make darky s model well specified

north south lending and endogenous domestic capital market inefficiencies abstract we develop an open economy model of intertemporal trade under asymmetric information capital market imperfections are endogenous and depend on a country s stage of economic development relative to the perfect information benchmark north south capital flows are dampened and possibly reversed and world interest rates are lower whereas riskless rates are equalized across borders the domestic loan rate is higher in poorer countries the model can be applied to a number of policy issues including the debt overhang problem the indexation of foreign public debts and the effect of income distribution on growth

determinants of the intrahousehold allocation of food in the rural philippines this study shows that the opportunity cost of time for husbands and wives can affect the intrahousehold distribution of food in a developing country equations which explain the relative allocation of calories within households were estimated for husbands wives and children with data for the rural philippines the estimating equation is derivable from both a joint household utility function and a bargaining model because the same households were included in the four survey rounds the various observations for a given individual were averaged for each variable in the estimation procedure wages were estimated using the heckman approach

liquidity constrained markets versus debt constrained markets this paper compares two different models in a common environment the first model has liquidity constraints in that consumers save a single asset that they cannot sell short the second model has debt constraints in that consumers cannot borrow so much that they would want to default but is otherwise a standard complete markets model both models share the features that individuals are unable to completely insure against idiosyncratic shocks and that interest rates are lower than subjective discount rates in a stochastic environment the two models have quite different dynamic properties with the debt constrained model exhibiting simple stochastic steady states while the liquidity constrained model has greater persistence of shocks

addressing food security in africa via multiple livelihood strategies of women farmers abstract because food insecurity is primarily a problem of low household incomes and poverty and not just inadequate food production projects and programs for food insecure african farmers which aim at increasing production of subsistence crops may be ineffective instead government should look for ways to improve returns to farmers resources in a broader context which may include expanded opportunities for non farm microenterprises and agricultural labor this has been the conventional wisdom since the writings of amartya sen still unclear however are the implications of his thinking for the roles of african women farmers who are traditionally the food crop producers in africa and are often food insecure immediate expansion of income earning activities such as cash cropping and non farm microenterprises may not be possible for women in male headed households in many african societies where cash income is seen as part of the male domain in addition women farmers may need a long adjustment period to diversify their income sources fully because most african countries are at the early stages of structural transformation different developmental interventions both in policy and in technology are therefore needed to address food security and economic transformations in africa in the short and long term

gender differentials in farm productivity implications for household efficiency and agricultural policy abstract within many african households agricultural production is simultaneously carried out on many plots controlled by different members of the household detailed plot level agronomic data from burkina faso provides striking evidence of substantial inefficiencies in the allocation of factors of production across the plots controlled by different members of the household production function estimates imply that the value of household output could be increased by 10 15 by reallocating currently used factors of production across plots this finding contradicts standard models of agricultural households a richer model of behaviour which recognizes that the individuals who comprise a household compete as well as co operate has important implications for the structure of agricultural production and for the design of agricultural policy

consumer bankruptcy a fresh start consumer bankruptcy provides partial insurance against bad luck but by driving up interest rates makes life cycle smoothing more difficult we argue that to assess this trade off one needs a quantitative model of consumer bankruptcy with three key features life cycle component idiosyncratic earnings uncertainty and expense uncertainty exogenous negative shocks to household balance sheets we find that transitory and persistent earnings shocks have very different implications for evaluating bankruptcy rules more persistent shocks make the bankruptcy option more desirable larger transitory shocks have the opposite effect our findings suggest the current us bankruptcy system may be desirable for reasonable parameter values jel d14 d91 k35

haddad lawrence john hoddinott and harold alderman eds intrahousehold resource allocation in developing countries models methods and policy baltimore md johns hopkins university press 1997 384 pp 55 00 in this volume economists demographers sociologists and anthropologists collaborate in the study of how resources are allocated within households in developing countries and why it matters from a policy perspective surveying a broad range of theory and evidence the contributors examine the many social and cultural factors that influence decisions about the family and household level about the allocation of time income assets and other resources ths contributors show that a more complete understanding of intrahousehold behaviour can increase the likelihood that policies will reach the people they are intended to affect

can agricultural input subsidies reduce the gender gap in modern maize adoption evidence from malawi abstract nationally representative data for malawi were used to measure the gender gap in adoption of modern maize and to investigate how if at all malawi s farm input subsidy program fisp has impacted the gap regression results show the probability of adopting modern maize was 12 lower for wives in male headed households and 11 lower for female household heads than for male farmers receipt of subsidized input coupons had no discernible effect on modern maize adoption for male farmers receiving a subsidy for both seed and fertilizer increased the probability of modern maize cultivation by 222 for female household heads suggesting the fisp has likely reduced the gender gap in adoption of modern maize in malawi

flypaper effects in transfers targeted to women evidence from brac s targeting the ultra poor program in bangladesh abstract many development interventions target transfers to women however little evidence directly explores the flypaper effects of whether women retain control over these transfers once within the household and how reallocation of the transfers affects women s empowerment we study these dynamics in the context of brac s randomized cfpr tup program in bangladesh which provides livestock and training to rural women in ultra poor households our analysis confirms previous findings that cfpr tup increased household asset ownership but shows complex effects on targeted women women appear to retain ownership over transferred livestock but new investments from mobilized resources are largely owned by men cfpr tup also reduces women s movement outside the home and control over income consistent with transferred livestock requiring maintenance at home however beneficiary women also report intangible benefits such as increased social capital and even with limited mobility a preference for work inside the home given a hostile environment outside the home

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

how does gender affect sustainable intensification of cereal production in the west african sahel evidence from burkina faso better understanding of gender differences in the adoption of agricultural intensification strategies is crucial for designing effective policies to close the gender gap while sustainably enhancing farm productivity we examine gender differences in adoption rates likelihood and determinants of adopting strategy sets that enhance yields protect crops and restore soils in the west african sahel based on analysis of cereal production in burkina faso applying a multivariate probit model to a nationally representative household panel we exploit the individual plot as unit of analysis and control for plot manager characteristics along with other covariates reflecting the socio cultural context of farming combined with the economic attributes of inputs we find that female managers of individual cereal fields are less likely than their male counterparts to adopt yield enhancing and soil restoring strategies although no differential is apparent for yield protecting strategies more broadly gender disaggregated regressions demonstrate that adoption determinants differ by gender plot manager characteristics including age marital status and access to credit or extension services do influence adoption decisions furthermore household resources influence the probability of adopting intensification strategy sets differently by gender of the plot manager variables expressing the availability of household labor strongly influence the adoption of soil restoring strategies by female plot managers by contrast household resources such as extent of livestock owned value of non farm income and area planted to cotton affect the adoption choices of male plot managers rectifying the male bias in extension services along with improving access to credit income and equipment to female plot managers could contribute to sustainable agricultural intensification

e baying for blood noncompetitive flexible pricing in entertainment ticketing some demand side evidence this article gives some exploratory results from estimating a consumer surplus type equation which features a number of economic and demographic variables as regressors we calculate an income elasticity for the maximum surplus that individuals would ever perceive themselves to be getting by being allowed to buy at a set price the results also show that those who attend the cinema are significantly less inclined to generate a surplus in flexible price events markets whilst young adults offer to pay quite a large amount more for their heavily desired entertainment this suggests that part of the burden of a shift in ticket pricing methods may be borne by the parents of young adults

technology capital and the us current account the u s bureau of economic analysis bea estimates the return on investments of foreign subsidiaries of u s multinational companies over the period 1982 2006 averaged 9 4 percent annually after taxes u s subsidiaries of foreign multinationals averaged only 3 2 percent two factors distort bea returns technology capital and plant specific intangible capital technology capital is accumulated know how from intangible investments in r d brands and organizations that can be used in foreign and domestic locations used abroad it generates profits for foreign subsidiaries with no foreign direct investment fdi plantspecific intangible capital in foreign subsidiaries is expensed abroad lowering current profits on fdi and increasing future profits we develop a multicountry general equilibrium model with an essential role for fdi and apply the bea s methodology to construct economic statistics for the model economy we estimate that mismeasurement of intangible investments accounts for over 60 percent of the difference in bea returns

discussion of macroeconomic volatility and external imbalances by alessandra fogli and fabrizio perri this paper by fogli and perri investigates both theoretically and empirically the effects of volatility on net foreign asset accumulation there are two key contributions on the empirical side the paper shows that countries that experienced higher volatility relative to other oecd countries accumulated on average more net foreign assets on the theoretical side the paper shows that a two country incomplete market model with time varying volatility can account for this empirical relationship the authors are addressing an important topic related to earlier discussions on global imbalances which have become even more relevant in the context of the global financial crisis in this comment i review some of the main empirical and theoretical findings and provide some further thoughts about the broader implications of this paper for international macro

the effect of the value of time on food consumption patterns in developing countries evidence from sri lanka this study shows that the opportunity cost of women s time can affect household food consumption patterns in developing countries demand equations for rice bread and the ratio of bread to total cereal consumption are estimated for urban sri lankan households the demand specification which is based on the new household economics includes as explanatory variables the woman s estimated market wage and the household s full income and alternatively observed income wages are estimated using the heckman procedure to correct for sample selection bias

price policy poverty and power within rural west african households abstract this paper explores the impact of agricultural price policy on poverty in west africa a region in which prices are an important tool for raising rural household incomes a game theoretic collective model of household income generation and resource allocation is developed that incorporates three features typical of west african rural households preference heterogeneity among women and men individual resource control and power mediated bargaining over resource control in the face of changes in households economic environments to explore price effects the model is used to simulate the income impacts of large increases in cotton prices accompanying fast paced agricultural liberalisation in burkina faso in the 1980s the paper shows that where resources are controlled individually by household members rather than pooled pareto efficiency in income generation does not hold the impact of agricultural price policy on poverty is mediated by bargaining over resource control within households bo

capital liberalization and the us external imbalance abstract differences in financial systems are often named as a prime candidate for the current state of global imbalances this paper focuses on cross country heterogeneity in access to international financial markets that derives from the presence of capital controls and argues that the process of capital liberalization over the past decades can explain a substantial fraction of us net external liabilities we present a simple two country model with an internationally traded bond in which capital controls are reflected in the presence of borrowing and lending constraints on that bond in a us versus the rest of the world row scenario we perform experiments that are largely consistent with countries liberalization experiences a reduction in the row s controls on capital outflows and or a tightening in the row s borrowing constraint enable the us economy to better insure against consumption risk relative to the rest of the world and therefore decrease its motives for precautionary asset holdings relative to the rest of the world as a result of these asymmetric shifts in countries barriers to capital mobility the us runs a long run external deficit

international capital flows external assets and output volatility abstract cross sectional evidence for 119 developing emerging and developed countries shows over the last three decades that countries with an on average higher volatility of output growth experience more procyclical capital outflows over the business cycle than those countries with the same growth rate but a more stable output path this stylized pattern shows up in addition to the recently established fact that countries with higher macroeconomic uncertainty tend to accumulate higher external asset positions to explain this finding we present an open economy real business cycle model with stochastic growth rates in which higher uncertainty of the expected income stream increases the precautionary savings of households we show that the combination of income risk and the precautionary savings motive leads to both more procyclical capital outflows in the shorter run and a higher long run external asset position

capital market imperfections international credit markets and nonconvergence abstract we consider a two country growth model with international capital markets these markets fund capital investment in both countries and operate subject to a costly state verification csv problem investors in each country require some external finance but also provide internal finance which mitigates the csv problem when two identical except for their initial capital stocks economies are closed they necessarily convergemonotonicallyto the same steady state output level unrestricted international financial tradeprecludesotherwise identical economies from converging and poor countries are necessarily net lenders to rich countries oscillation in real activity and international capital flows can occur journal of economic literatureclassification numbers e00 f00 f34 g14

domestic or global imbalances rising income risk and the fall in the us current account when default leads to exclusion from financial markets the implied loss of consumption smoothing opportunities is more costly when income volatility is high a rise in income risk thus makes default less attractive allowing creditors to relax borrowing limits i show how in an open economy this endogenous financial deepening may reduce aggregate foreign assets in response to a rise in individual income risk against the precautionary savings intuition conditions for this depend on whether default constrains complete or uncontingent contracts the post 1980 rise in us household income risk strongly reduces foreign assets when domestic markets are complete or world interest rates low

commercialization and the balance of women s dual roles in non income pooling west african households barked on structural adjustment programs of which agricultural liberalization has been a major component as previously depressed farmgate prices are allowed to rise increasing incentives for farm households to produce marketed crops such liberalization has the side effect of accelerating commercialization through raising households real incomes it is expected to improve rural peoples physical well being both women and men in west african farm

contingent valuation techniques for assessing environmental impacts further evidence abstract this paper provides further evidence on the development and application of the iterative bidding technique used to assess environmental impacts three specific issues the hypothetical nature of the survey technique the questionnaire information structure and the bidding procedure starting point are examined theoretically and empirically to determine their effect on individual bid behavior the empirical results indicate that the importance of these influences may have been overstated in earlier studies

inefficiency of male and female labor supply in agricultural households evidence from uganda this article analyzes the efficiency of the intra household allocation of female and male labor inputs in agricultural production in a collective household model spouses optimal on farm labor supply is such that the marginal rate of technical substitution between male and female labor is equated over different crops using the uganda national household survey 2005 06 we test whether this condition holds by estimating production functions and controlling for endogeneity using a method proposed by gandhi navarro and rivers 2009 we find that women are less productive than men that there is more female labor input on low productivity parcels and that men are relatively more productive on female controlled plots compared with male controlled plots total farm output could be higher and pareto improvements could be possible if male labor was reallocated to female controlled plots and or female labor was reallocated to male controlled plots

efficiency and equality in a simple model of efficient unemployment insurance abstract this paper describes the efficient allocation of consumption and work effort in an economy in which workers face idiosyncratic employment risk and considerations of moral hazard prevent full insurance we impose a lower bound on the expected discounted utility that can be assigned to any agent from any date onward and show with this feature added that the efficient unemployment insurance scheme induces an invariant cross sectional distribution of individual entitlements to utility the paper thus provides a simple prototype model suited to the study of the normative question what is the trade off between equality and efficiency in resource allocation journal of economic literature classification numbers d31 d63 d82 j65

gender and trade within the household observations from rural guatemala abstract a household model proposed by carter and katz 1992 assumes that resource exchanges and the division of expenditure responsibilities among household members are directly observable and important to their individual and collective responses to new opportunities and constraints this paper illustrates that it is possible to observe the complex processes that characterize the domestic economy by examining several examples of intrahousehold resource transfers and expenditure flows among a sample of rural households in the central highlands of guatemala it is found that women transfer significant labor time to a new male income generating activity with the greatest single source of variation in the value of this intrahousehold resource transfer being the availability of older daughters to perform the domestic labor that is normally the responsibility of the female head it is also shown that the transfer of female land to her husband is in some cases compensated for or reciprocated by the transfer of tradeable goods at the end of the agricultural season with regard to women s remunerated labor activities older daughters enable their mothers to pursue these either by relieving them of some of their domestic responsibilities and or by directly contributing their labor to their mother s income generating endeavors nonfood expenditures are analyzed in light of the relative responsibilities of men and women in decision making finance and purchase it is found that increased male agricultural income is largely spent on male goods affecting women s ability to purchase food and domestic technology the paper concludes by arguing that the results obtained from direct observation of intrahousehold transfers are useful for the prediction and interpretation of microlevel policy impacts not obtainable from aggregate household information

do spouses realise cooperative gains experimental evidence from rural uganda summary we use experimental data from variants of public good games to test for household efficiency among married couples in rural uganda spouses frequently do not maximise surplus from cooperation and perform better when women are in charge of allocating the common pool women contribute less to this household common pool than men and opportunism is widespread these results cast doubts on many models of household decision making experimental results are correlated with socio economic attributes and suggest that assortative matching improves household efficiency developing non cooperative household models sensitive to the context specificity of gender relations emerges as a promising future research agenda

women and structural transformation development is at a relatively early stage 2 analysis of women s role as economic actors as distinct from being part of the labor force in general is still rudimentary 3 the extent to which and the conditions under which gender may influence a variety of economic outcomes are not well researched the nature and the extent of segmentation of economic activity between males and females and their changing roles in different socioeconomic settings and during the course of economic development are inadequately investigated in economic literature 4 consequently whether the efficiency and welfare losses from women s low participation in economic activity are significant in static and dynamic contexts is inadequately articulated much of the research on women in developed countries has been in a comparative static context 5 the changes in incomes technology demography and tastes with regard to women s roles however are not only much more rapid but also simultaneous in developing countries making research in a comparative static context of relatively little value the implications of the dynamic factors are analytically complex to handle but are critical for public policy even where policy implications are obvious from the existing limited research however these have not always been effectively incorporated by governments in their actions this article first summarizes the major themes of the various types

wages for wives renegotiating gender and production relations in contract farming in the dominican republic abstract this study analyzes the intersection of gender and production relations in small scale contracting in nontraditional agriculture the case of the processing tomato industry in the dominican republic exemplifies patterns found throughout the region building on a critique of unitary household models i analyze the gendered relations mobilizing resources for contract farming as appears common contracting has heightened demand for women s farm labor contracting has simultaneously provided women with openings for contesting the appropriation of their unpaid labor and many women are claiming payment for work in contract farming this case demonstrates the importance of gender issues in informing contract farming debates and policy interventions

the macroeconomic implications of rising wage inequality in the united states in recent decades american workers have faced a rising college premium a narrowing gender gap and increasing wage volatility this paper explores the quantitative and welfare implications of these changes the framework is an incomplete markets life cycle model in which individuals choose education intrafamily time allocation and savings given the observed history of the u s wage structure the model replicates key trends in cross sectional inequality in hours worked earnings and consumption recent cohorts enjoy welfare gains on average as higher relative wages for college graduates and for women translate into higher educational attainment and a more even division of labor within the household

welfare impacts of technological change on women in southern mali abstract it has often been hypothesized that new agricultural technologies could have an adverse impact on women because additional labor required of them reduces the time spent and therefore income earned from private field activities this study shows that the expansion of cotton cultivation on the household communal fields in southern mali associated with the introduction of new technologies results in increased payments to women for their increased labor on the cotton fields unfortunately these payments are small compared to the loss of revenue from private plot production thus the net effect of the expansion of household cotton cultivation is a reduction in incomes of women who cultivate private plots short run policy implications of this study are that improving women s income requires concern with their private plot earnings for example profitability of the private field crops could be increased with higher input use in the long run as land becomes even more constrained emphasis needs to be placed on institutional changes to increase women s bargaining power so that they obtain larger shares of the new income streams resulting from technological change on the communal field institutional changes already occurring in the region with the apparent objective of increasing women s and non household head men s bargaining power include organized work teams and the movement toward smaller nuclear families

gender agricultural production and the theory of the household virtually all models of the household assume that the allocation of resources is pareto efficient within many african households agricultural production occurs on many plots controlled by different members of the household pareto efficiency implies that factors should be allocated efficiently across these plots i find in contrast that plots controlled by women are farmed much less intensively than similar plots within the household controlled by men the estimates imply that about 6 percent of output is lost because of inefficient factor allocation within the household the paper suggests a new approach to modeling intrahousehold allocation consistent with the empirical results

effects of technological change in agriculture on food consumption and nutrition rice in a west african setting abstract this paper traces the effects of technological change in agriculture to production and income effects and to consumption and nutritional effects the study environment is west africa the gambia the technological change considered is various new modes of rice production versus traditional rice production main findings of this empirical analysis are the following 1 it cannot be assumed that by focusing investment on a woman s crop one helps women farmers the more a new technology increased labor productivity in rice the more there was a takeover of the rice production technology by male producers and the more the crop became a communal crop for household food security household income increased substantially 2 much of the increased income is spent on increased calorie consumption it makes no difference for the degree of change in calorie consumption levels if change in real income is in the form of cash or subsistence food 3 technological change effects mediated through income are traced to increased food consumption calories at the household level where it is found to significantly improve children s nutritional status especially in the rainy season

household bargaining power and agricultural supply response evidence from ethiopian coffee growers summary this paper investigates whether preference heterogeneity between spouses contributes to limited cash crop production in southern ethiopia using the value of livestock each spouse would take in the event of divorce as a measure of bargaining power this paper shows a significant negative correlation between the bargaining power proxies and coffee output livestock ownership during marriage does not have a significant impact on coffee production in contrast to the case in commercial production women s exit options have a weak positive effect on production of the staple crop enset

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

testing among models of intrahousehold resource allocation households are the locus for much economic decision making households function as producers investors in human and physical capital managers of risk and as consumers many resources are allocated within households and the effects of many policies depend on the dynamics of household decision making for example household decisions about allocating food among individual household members may determine who benefits from programs to improve health nutrition or welfare in many microeconomic studies the household is treated as an individual for analytical purposes in other words it is assumed that a household acts as a single entity with a single set of preferences recently however a number of economists have recognized that households are sites of conflict as well as cooperation and have begun to use new classes of models to explain how resources are allocated among household members this literature has especially improved our understanding of households in which income is not completely pooled in such a setting standard household models may offer misleading conclusions about the effects of policies on individual household members i this paper goes beyond recent surveys of intrahousehold issue by explicitly examining the assumptions predictions and empirical implications of different intrahousehold models in particular it analyzes empirical tests that distinguish among competing models by clarifying the similarities and differences among alternative models this paper also clarifies what has actually been demonstrated and what has not been demonstrated by previous empirical studies in so doing the paper points to specific topics in need of further research this paper is organized as follows section 2 analyzes the assumptions and predictions of each of the five main classes of intrahousehold resource allocation models section 3 describes empirical tests of these assumptions along with an analysis of empirical work that has been generated sections 4 and 5 discuss the questions that remain unanswered and directions for future research

gender property rights and natural resources abstract attention to gender differences in property rights can improve the outcomes of natural resource management policies and projects in terms of efficiency environmental sustainability equity and empowerment of resource users although it is impossible to generalize across cultures and resources it is important to identify the nature of rights to land trees and water held by women and men and how they are acquired and transmitted from one user to another the paper particularly examines how the shift from customary tenure systems to private property in land trees and water has affected women the effect of gender differences in property on collective action and the implications for project design

is a turnaround in africa possible without helping african women to farm a turnaround in africa is not possible in the short run of at least 1 decade without helping women farmers with hand hoes gain equal access to basic agricultural inputs and resources this is so because women are such active participants in farming it is estimated that for 82 countries women constitute 46 of the agricultural labor force in sub saharan africa and 31 of the force in north africa and the middle east in the long run however a turnaround is possible without helping women to farm because women farmers will be displaced as agricultural intensification occurs but because the intensification process will be extremely uneven both within and between african countries the displacement of women farmers will also be uneven thus their displacement will be blocked or slowed down in regions with sufficient land resources and land extensive family systems extensive male out migration lack of control of animal diseases or the presence of gender neutral incentives to produce in conclusion women farmers in these regions will still be the norm while those in other regions will be displaced as intensification required by a turnaround proceeds to insure that women farmers are not displaced policy planners at international national and local levels should communicate with technical experts and extension specialists about the need to incorporate women as agricultural producers with full access to yield increasing inputs in development projects

accelerating food production in sub saharan africa in 1982 26 countries in africa faced acute food shortages and nutrition problems during the 1960s the continents food production per person fell 7 and during the 1970s it fell an additional 15 in only 8 countries which account for less than 15 of the regions population did per capita agricultural production actually increase in the 1970s in view of the expectation that the urban population will quadruple during the last quarter of this century present trends are intolerable and must be reversed another disturbing problem that needs urgent attention is the rapid depletion of vital topsoil estimated by the director general of the un food and agriculture organization to be a frightening 6 million hectares per annum this volume provides up to date definitions of the food and nutrition problems that face africa now and in the medium term future the book also deals with the policy needs for promoting growth of food production the concept of solving our food shortages by increasing production is the policy of the southern african development coordination conference sadcc the book also examines food policy in the context of national development strategies though potentially rich sub saharan africa is at present extremely poor in 1979 per capita gross national product gnp in the whole area was only 411 compare this with a gnp per capita of 9440 in the countries of the industrialized world the demand for improved living standards presses from virtually every quarter while available resources are extremely limited without exception each country of the region faces the problem of determining food policy in the context of its overall national development strategy several chapters in this volume by representatives from both sub saharan africa and donor countries and agencies analyze past experiences and suggest aid strategies for accelerating agricultural growth in the region several stress the point that the aid most urgently required is that which would assist our region in greater utilization of its agricultural base in order to increase overall production and lessen dependence on food aid

an examination on the cost efficiency of the banking industry under multiple output prices uncertainty this article formulates a behavioural model of profit maximization which explicitly incorporates both multiple output prices risk and safety first practice this theoretical model is specifically suitable for investigating financial institutions whose output prices frequently encounter a variety of risks such as loan defaults arrears the sample banks are empirically found to be highly risk averse furthermore risk preferences exert little effect on the technical efficiency estimates whereas the same estimates obtained by the standard fixed effect model under certainty tend to be overestimated evidence is found that a specialized bank offering a single product with a larger scale of production will be preferable in an uncertain atmosphere

a century long perspective on agricultural development this article strategically surveys the past century s literature on agricultural development we organize the discussion around three grand themes that reveal the richness of agricultural development as an intellectual endeavor first we explore the role of agriculture in the broader development process from a macroeconomic and political economy perspective we then examine the role of technological and institutional change in successful agricultural development finally the focus turns to a microeconomic perspective on agricultural household decision making and the problems of imperfect and missing markets asymmetric information and transactions costs that lead to widespread apparent inefficiency and disequilibrium

endogenous borrowing constraints with incomplete markets this article develops ways to endogenize the borrowing constraints used in a class of computable incomplete markets models we allow the constraints to depend on an investor s characteristics such as time preference risk aversion and income streams the proposed constraint can be interpreted as a borrowing limit within which an investor has no incentive to default using a numerical algorithm we find that for an array of structural parameters the endogenous borrowing constraints can be much less stringent than the ad hoc borrowing constraints adopted by the existing studies

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

collective action within the household insights from natural resource management summary households face many collective action situations with members working together to produce livelihoods and allocate goods but neither unitary nor bargaining models of the household provide frameworks to analyze the conditions under which households work collectively and when they fail to do so drawing on the institutional analysis and development framework based in the natural resource management literature this paper explores the factors that encourage and inhibit collective action and provides insights into how to understand collective action problems within the household as dynamic multi actor situations with outcomes that can be evaluated by multiple criteria not just efficiency

the mobilization of women s labor for cash crop production a game theoretic approach in the last decade or so economists have modeled phenomena such as household labor supply fertility behavior and child survival rates using the household as the unit of analysis this paper presents data that call into question the assumption that the household is a joint decision making unit which maximizes a neoclassical household utility function the data come from a study of the mobilization of women s labor by their husbands for irrigated rice production in north cameroon the first section of this paper describes briefly the massa rice and sorghum farming system and then considers the relationship between the amount of compensation women receive from their husbands for their labor on rice production and the amount of labor they allocate to rice production the findings suggest that a bargaining model may describe the intrahousehold relations of production and distribution better than the neoclassical model the second section specifies a nash bargaining model and contrasts it with the neoclassical model of the household using the bargaining framework the third section explores in more detail possible explanations of the allocative inefficiency which seems to characterize many of the rice cultivating households

household behaviour and nutrition in developing countries abstract this article reviews some of the recent major research findings concerning the effect of household behaviour on food consumption and nutrition important extensions to the understanding of household behaviour have been made in the areas of the impact of income and price changes agricultural households the effects of agricultural commercialization the new household economics and particularly the effect of time as a scarce economic resource the intrahousehold allocation of food and the determinants of nutritional status this knowledge is important because the response by households affects the final impact of economic changes and government actions on the nutritional status of the population

precautionary wealth accumulation this paper provides theoretical foundations for when individual and aggregate wealth accumulation increase as earnings risk increases stated in terms of a simple picture the problem addressed in this paper is to find sufficient conditions such that the pattern in figure 1 holds figure 1 describes a situation in which an individual s expected wealth accumulation profile is weakly greater at each age over the life cycle whenever the individual faces one earnings process that is riskier than another earnings process other things equal two important open questions can be answered by finding sufficient conditions for the pattern in figure 1 to occur first there is the question of when theory predicts that households that face more earnings risk have more expected wealth accumulation at any point in the life cycle than households that face less earnings risk the development of such a theory would be helpful as there is a sizeable empirical literature related to this question which is surveyed by browning and lusardi 1996 second there is the question of when theory predicts that aggregate wealth accumulation increases as earnings risk increases much of the interest in the precautionary savings literature is based on the possibility that an important part of aggregate wealth is due to uninsured earnings risk this question can also be answered with figure 1 the idea is to treat the expected wealth profile of one individual as the realized average wealth profile of a large number of similarly situated individuals the law of large numbers justifies this when shocks are independent across individuals and thus earnings risk is idiosyncratic since aggregate wealth holding is a weighted sum of the average wealth holdings of individuals at different ages an upward shift of the expected wealth profile of all agents then implies that aggregate wealth holding increases with increases in earnings risk other things equal this paper provides the first general answer to when the pattern in figure 1 occurs in the context of a multi period model with independent earnings shocks the answer is given at two levels in terms of properties of the decision rule for savings i e the savings function and in terms of preferences a savings function maps an individual s current state e g current wealth and earnings and age into savings or wealth carried into the next model period given a specific earnings process since economists are familiar with the merits of sufficient conditions stated in terms of preferences i will try to motivate why sufficient conditions stated in terms of the savings function are interesting first they are widely applicable they apply to theories where savings decisions maximize a utility function or are given by a rule of thumb they also apply to models where there is wage risk and there are both consumption saving and labour leisure decisions second in so far as the savings function can be estimated it is useful for an empirical

consumption and risk sharing over the life cycle a striking feature of u s data on income and consumption is that inequality increases with age this paper asks if individual specific earnings risk can provide a coherent explanation we find that it can we construct an overlapping generations general equilibrium model in which households face uninsurable earnings shocks over the course of their lifetimes earnings inequality is exogenous and is calibrated to match data from the u s panel study on income dynamics consumption inequality is endogenous and matches well data from the u s consumer expenditure survey the total risk households face is decomposed into that realized before entering the labor market and that realized throughout the working years in welfare terms the latter is found to be more important than the former

sovereign risk and secondary markets conventional wisdom says that in the absence of default penalties sovereign risk destroys all foreign asset trade we show that this conventional wisdom rests on one implicit assumption that assets cannot be retraded in secondary markets without this assumption foreign asset trade is possible even in the absence of default penalties this result suggests a broader perspective regarding the origins of sovereign risk and its remedies sovereign risk affects foreign asset trade only if default penalties are insufficient and secondary markets work imperfectly to reduce its effects one can either increase default penalties or improve the working of secondary markets jel f34 g12 g15

estimating the willingness to pay for water services in developing countries a case study of the use of contingent valuation surveys in southern haiti progress in improving the quality and quantity of water used by people in rural areas of the developing world has been unsatisfactory in two respects 1 supplies that have been built are frequently neither used correctly nor properly maintained and 2 extension of improved service to unserved populations has been slow though this poor record is not the result of a single factor a major impediment to improved performance is inadequate information on the response of consumers to new service options the behavioral assumptions that typically underlie most rural water supply planning efforts are simple it is commonly assumed that so long as financial requirements do not exceed 5 of income rural consumers will choose to abandon their existing water supply in favor of the improved system several reviews by the world bank bilateral donors and water supply agencies in developing countries have shown however that this simple model of behavioral response to improved water supplies has usually proved incorrect 1 in rural areas many of those served by new systems have chosen to continue with their traditional water use practices

financial market globalization symmetry breaking and endogenous inequality of nations this paper investigates the effects of financial market globalization on the inequality of nations the world economy consists of inherently identical countries which differ only in their levels of capital stock each country is represented by the standard overlapping generations model modified only to incorporate credit market imperfection an integration of financial markets affects the set of stable steady states as it changes the balance between the equalizing force of the diminishing returns technology and the unequalizing force of the wealth dependent borrowing constraint the model is tractable enough to allow for a complete characterization of the stable steady states in the absence of the international financial market the world economy has a unique steady state which is symmetric and stable in the presence of the international financial market symmetry breaking occurs under some conditions that is the symmetric steady state loses its stability and stable asymmetric steady states come to exist in the stable asymmetric steady states the world economy is endogenously divided into the rich and poor countries the borrowing constraints are binding in the poor but not in the rich the world output is smaller the rich are richer and the poor are poorer in any of the stable asymmetric steady states than in the unstable symmetric steady state

the risk free rate in heterogeneous agent incomplete insurance economies abstract why has the average real risk free interest rate been less than one percent the question is motivated by the failure of a class of calibrated representative agent economies to explain the average return to equity and risk free debt i construct an economy where agents experience uninsurable idiosyncratic endowment shocks and smooth consumption by holding a risk free asset i calibrate the economy and characterize equilibria computationally with a borrowing constraint of one year s income the resulting risk free rate is more than one percent below the rate in the comparable representative agent economy

noncooperative decision making in the household evidence from malawi this paper proposes a novel test of productive efficiency in the household that also allows a test of noncooperative decision making i extend the collective model chiappori 1988 1997 to allow labor choices to affect future bargaining power by raising the value of outside options even if household consumption sharing is efficient labor choices are no longer efficient using data on malawi where there is predetermined variation in land rights that determine outside options in marriage i show that individuals spend more time on agricultural labor and less time on wage labor when household land is theirs they also have lower overall income and consumption the results are inconsistent with the fully efficient collective model but consistent with a noncooperative model with limited commitment where individuals allocate their labor supply to maximize future bargaining power limited commitment can lead to inefficient allocations that reduce household welfare

household production reconsidered gender labor conflict and technological change in malaysia s muda region abstract the notion of the farm household as a bounded unit of production and consumption has become enshrined as a category of analysis and as a policy ideal this article points to the limitations of the neoclassical theory of the farm household for understanding technological and economic change and suggests an alternative politicized approach that focuses on gender relations within and among households evidence to illustrate these arguments comes from the muda region of malaysia often regarded as the archetypical farm household economy

competitive risk sharing contracts with one sided commitment this paper analyzes dynamic equilibrium risk sharing contracts between profit maximizing intermediaries and a large pool of ex ante identical agents that face idiosyncratic income uncertainty that makes them heterogeneous ex post in any given period after having observed her income the agent can walk away from the contract while the intermediary cannot i e there is one sided commitment we consider the extreme scenario that the agents face no costs to walking away and can sign up with any competing intermediary without any reputational losses we demonstrate that not only autarky but also partial and full insurance can obtain depending on the relative patience of agents and financial intermediaries insurance can be provided because in an equilibrium contract an up front payment effectively locks in the agent with an intermediary we then show that our contract economy is equivalent to a consumption savings economy with one period arrow securities and a short sale constraint similar to bulow and rogoff 1989 from this equivalence and our characterization of dynamic contracts it immediately follows that without cost of switching financial intermediaries debt contracts are not sustainable even though a risk allocation superior to autarky can be achieved

extra household factors and women farmers supply response in sub saharan africa abstract this note discusses extra household factors which may constrain the response of women farmers in sub saharan africa to an increase in prices of crops they sell the discussion focuses on property rights social norms transport facilities and the organization of markets

supply response in an agrarian economy with non symmetric gender relations abstract there is a growing recognition that gender relations matter for supply response to devaluation and other structural adjustment policies in sub saharan africa but most household models that introduce gender differentiation nevertheless preserve an essential symmetry between male and female household members and do not capture elements of subordination or coercion in male female relations this paper seeks to contribute by developing a model based on stackelberg type equations in which the husband occupies the position of firstmover reflecting his power to set the parameters for women s choices the model is contextualized with reference to tanzania