entrepreneurship and income inequality in southern ethiopia this article uses inequality decomposition techniques in order to analyze the consequences of entrepreneurial activities to household income inequality in southern ethiopia a uniform increase in entrepreneurial income reduces per capita household income inequality this implies that encouraging rural entrepreneurship may be favorable for both income growth and income distribution such policies could be particularly successful if directed at the low income low wealth and relatively uneducated segments of the society

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

the politics of conflict and consent abstract transaction cost economics claims to model the labor contract in terms of the opportunism practised by workers a recent alternative has seen custom as the main means by which workers impose their control of the contract both fail to explore workers co operative behavior in the workplace pay insufficient attention to managerial behavior and misunderstand the social organization of conflict and consent materials from industrial sociology and labor history are used to illustrate these limitations to show how the labor contract is in fact negotiated and to suggest how an alternative approach might be constructed

non farm income household welfare and sustainable land management in a less favoured area in the ethiopian highlands a bio economic model has been calibrated to the socio economic and biophysical characteristics of a less favoured area in the ethiopian highlands land degradation population growth stagnant technology and drought necessitates development of non farm employment opportunities in the area the model has been used to assess the impact of improved access to non farm income on household welfare agricultural production conservation investments and land degradation in the form of soil erosion the model simulations indicate that access to low wage off farm income is restricted by lack of employment opportunities since households otherwise would have engaged in more off farm wage employment than observed the simulations show that better unconstrained access to low wage non farm income has a substantial positive effect on household income total agricultural production crop and livestock production and farm inputs used are reduced when access to non farm employment is improved and thus increases the need to import food to the area access to non farm income reduces farm households incentives to invest in conservation and this leads to more overall soil erosion and more rapid land degradation even though intensity of production is reduced special policies are therefore needed to ensure land conservation and to sustain local food production

diversification and livelihood sustainability in a semi arid environment a case study from southern ethiopia abstract this paper examines the recently growing adoption of non pastoral livelihood strategies among the borana pastoralists in southern ethiopia a large portion of the current non pastoral participation is in petty and natural resource based activities pastoral and crop production functions are estimated using the cobb douglas model to analyse the economic rationale behind the growing pastoralist shift to cultivation and other non pastoral activities the low marginal return to labour in traditional pastoralism suggests the existence of surplus labour that can gainfully be transferred to non pastoral activities an examination of the pastoralist activity choices reveals that the younger households with literacy and more exposure to the exchange system display a more diversified income portfolio preference the findings underscore the importance of human capital investment and related support services for improving the pastoralist capacity to manage risk through welfare enhancing diversified income po

employment dynamics in the rural nonfarm sector in ethiopia do the poor have time on their side abstract we study rural employment transitions in ethiopia between farming and both low and high return nonfarm employment we find that initial asset holdings and access to saving and credit are important factors for transition into high return rural nonfarm employment and that households participation in high return rural nonfarm activities is robust to their experience of health shocks however shocks that affect their wealth or liquidity may trigger descents into low return nonfarm employment on the other hand shocks that reduce agricultural income motivate transitions into high return rural nonfarm employment

entrepreneurship selection and performance a meta analysis of the impact of education in developing economies this meta analytical review of empirical studies of the impact of schooling on entrepreneurship in selection and performance in developing economies looks at variations impact across specific characteristics of the studies a marginal year of schooling in developing economies raises enterprise income by an average of 5 5 percent which is close to the average return in industrial countries the return varies however by gender rural or urban residence and the share of agriculture in the economy furthermore more educated workers typically end up in wage employment and prefer nonfarm entrepreneurship to farming the education effect that separates workers into self employment and wage employment is stronger for women possibly stronger in urban areas and also stronger in the least developed economies where agriculture is more dominant and literacy rates are lower

the effect of fair trade affiliation on child schooling evidence from a sample of chilean honey producers we evaluate the impact of fair trade ft affiliation on child schooling within a sample of chilean honey producers with a retrospective panel data approach from a theoretical point of view we argue that ft should have a positive effect on child schooling since it generates a short run pure income effect together with a medium run productivity effect on both adult and child wages on the other hand because of the higher productivity generated by the medium run effect the opportunity cost of child education increases if they work with their parents the direction of the impact of ft affiliation on child schooling is therefore uncertain and requires empirical testing our econometric findings document a positive and significant impact of affiliation years on child schooling after controlling for endogeneity and heterogeneity between the treatment and control sample

economic growth comparative advantage and gender differences in schooling outcomes evidence from the birthweight differences of chinese twins abstract data from two surveys of twins in china are used to contribute to an improved understanding of the role of economic development in affecting gender differences in the trends in levels of and returns to schooling observed in china and in many developing countries in recent decades in particular we explore the hypothesis that these phenomena reflect differences in comparative advantage with respect to skill and brawn between men and women in the context of changes in incomes returns to skill and or nutritional improvements that are the result of economic development and growth

the cost of poverty alleviation transfer programs a comparative analysis of three programs in latin america summary a common criticism of antipoverty programs is that the high share of administrative nontransfer costs substantially reduces their effectiveness yet there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical evidence on program costs improved information and a better understanding of the costs of such programs are crucial for effective policymaking this study proposes and implements a replicable methodology for a comparative cost analysis of three similar poverty alleviation programs in latin america and assesses their cost efficiency the findings underscore that any credible assessment of cost efficiency requires a detailed analysis of program cost structures that goes well beyond simply providing aggregate cost information

agroclimatic shock income inequality and poverty evidence from burkina faso abstract this paper examines the impacts of agroclimatic shock on income inequality and poverty using household farm data from three agroecological zones of burkina faso together with income source decompositions of the gini coefficient and the foster greer thorbecke poverty index before and after a severe drought our findings reveal that because the poor lack acces to off farm income off farm income increases inequality and fails to shield poor households against agroclimatic risks the direction of the empirical relationship between changes in inequality and poverty after the drought depends critically on environmental variables and on apparent constraints on income diversification at different points in the income distribution

equity and educational performance in this paper we review the main issues under discussion in the field of economics of education with a special focus on latin america we seek to organize the debate about educational policies by showing how these policies respond to different models based on different assumptions and hypotheses about how the educational system functions methodological and informational problems make it difficult to test the validity of different policies this would explain the enormous number of studies in the field that conclude with conflicting policy prescriptions we also use data from chile to analyze the importance of the school in educational outcome and to explore the heterogeneous impacts of student and school characteristics on educational achievement the results obtained allow us to conclude that the school plays a very important role in explaining educational achievement we also find that low income students stand to benefit the most from attending a private school however this conclusion is valid for a marginal analysis and does not necessarily apply to a massive reallocation of students among schools

shocks consumption and income diversification in rural ethiopia abstract we present new evidence that households are unable to protect themselves from rainfall failure that occurs on average every five years in rural ethiopia however other less extreme rainfall variation and idiosyncratic shocks such as illness and crop pests do not impact significantly on consumption agricultural shocks impact negatively on farm income as expected however they also stimulate non agricultural earnings by an equivalent amount in the case of a covariate shock such as severe rainfall failure this smoothing mechanism may be ineffective and rainfall insurance or drought triggered safety nets could provide further protection

a farm household model for agri food policy analysis in developing countries application to smallholder farmers in sierra leone this paper presents a generic farm household model for use in the context of developing countries to gain knowledge on food security and rural poverty alleviation under different policy options it is a static positive programming model which simultaneously solves a set of microeconomic farm models reproducing the behaviour of representative individual farm households this model is designed to capture key features of developing countries agriculture such as the non separability of production and consumption decisions due to market imperfections the inter linkage between transaction costs and market participation decisions the interaction among farm households for factor markets and the seasonality of resource use model use is illustrated in this paper by simulating the impact of rice seed policy on the livelihood of representative smallholder farmers in sierra leone results show that the seed policy would improve farm productivity and boost household income but that it is not sufficient to fight poverty since 90 of the surveyed farm households would continue to live below the extreme poverty line of 1 usd equivalent per person per day

information and participation in social programs participation in social programs such as clubs and other social organizations results from a process in which an agent learns about the requirements benefits and likelihood of acceptance related to a program applies to be a participant and finally is accepted or rejected we propose a model of this participation process and provide an application of the model using data from a social program in mexico our empirical analysis illustrates that decision at each stage of the process are responsive to expectations about the decisions and outcomes at the subsequent stages and that knowledge about the program can have a significant impact on participation outcomes

the function of authority in transaction cost economics abstract this paper questions the transaction cost characterization of observed authority relations as efficient governance structures various inadequacies in the transaction cost account of work organization and the limits of firm size are traced to its neglect of the possibility that authority may be abused opportunistically this exemplifies a more general propensity in the transaction cost literature that of explaining economic organization in functionalist terms with little attention to the causal mechanisms through which efficient governance structures might actually arise three such mechanisms are considered but none is found to provide an adequate rationale for the imputation of efficiency to observed structures

using evidence of household income diversification to inform study of the rural nonfarm labor market in africa abstract the labor market literature in developing countries has seldom drawn on the studies of rural household income diversification this paper draws on such studies to inform future study of the rural nonfarm labor market in africa the review of evidence provides some surprising departures from traditional images of nonfarm activities of rural households among the most striking is the dominant importance in the majority of case study areas of nonfarm wage labor as compared to self employment of nonfarm sector earnings as compared to farm sector wage earnings and of local nonfarm earnings as compared to migration earnings the most worrying finding was the poor distribution of nonfarm earnings in rural areas despite the importance of these earnings to food security and farm investments this poor distribution implies significant entry barriers and market segmentation it is probable that this will lead over time to an increasingly skewed distribution of land and other assets in rural africa

why have urban poverty and income inequality increased so much argentina 1991 2001 abstract this article analyzes the trends in income inequality and poverty among argentine households during the nineties we assess the effect of changes in labor force participation unemployment educational levels and returns to individual characteristics on income inequality and poverty by using a microsimulation approach we found that unemployment accounts for a large part of the increase in income inequality and poverty experienced in the past decade changes in labor force participation had an equalizing effect over the whole period while changes in the returns to workers sociodemographic characteristics could be associated with a small increase in income inequality with respect to poverty unemployment affected negatively the proportion of households below the poverty line amplified the poverty gap and increased the severity of poverty in contrast changes in labor force participation are associated with a reduction in the poverty rate

rising inequality in mexico household characteristics and regional effects we use an empirical framework to identify the contributions of microeconomic factors to the sharp rise in household per capita income inequality in mexico between 1984 and 1994 results indicate that changes in returns to household characteristics in particular changes in returns to education are responsible for about half of the increase in the gini coefficient the deteriorating conditions in rural areas relative to the urban areas and of the southern region relative to other regions account for another fourth of the increase in the gini

can food for work encourage agricultural production abstract food for work ffw is the most widely used type of public works program in ethiopia through which a high share of the food aid is distributed this paper assesses the impacts of ffw in tigray a chronically food insecure region in ethiopia in terms of relieving liquidity constraints and thereby improving input use in agriculture a heckman selection model on the adoption and intensity of fertilizer use demonstrated that ffw positively influenced the decision to adopt fertilizer and there was no evidence of disincentive effect

contract duration and relationship specific investments empirical evidence from coal markets this paper examines the importance of specific relationship investments in determining the duration of coal contracts negotiated between coal suppliers and electric utilities data for 277 coal contracts are used to perform the analysis the results provide strong support for the view that buyers and sellers make longer commitments to the terms of future trade at the contract execution stage and rely less on repeated bargaining when relationship specific investments are more important

in the same boat but not equals the heterogeneous effects of parental income on child labour this paper examines the impact of parental income on child labour the empirical literature has found conflicting results regarding whether poverty leads parents to send their children to work mos

an empirical investigation of oliver williamson s organization of work oliver williamson argues that the attributes of the employment contract like intermediate transactions in general are essentially driven by the specificity of assets in the case of the organization of work it is the particular attributes of labour that determines the transaction costs of any given governance structure the paper presents a stylized account of the transaction cost model of the efficient organization of work stressing an underlying tension and ambiguity in the transaction cost framework the paper exploits a unique dataset to test for the first time with british data williamson s transaction cost predictions concerning the nature of employment contracts williamson tacitly assumes that asset specificity is exogenous in general however there is evidence in the literature that labour specificity is endogenous to employment contracts the paper endeavours to demonstrate that there is empirical evidence to suggest that specialized labour is indeed endogenous in the transaction cost mode

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

rural livelihood diversification in sub saharan africa a literature review abstractthis article provides a comprehensive review of the literature on the nature and evolution of rural livelihood diversification in sub saharan africa and the situation regarding smallholders it reveals mixed findings about the causes and consequences of livelihood diversification on rural smallholders adopting this strategy a lot of evidence from the literature suggests that it is relatively better off smallholders with sufficient assets who achieve successful livelihood diversification mainly by exploiting opportunities and synergies between farm and nonfarm activities because of asset constraints increase in incomes and wealth based on livelihood diversification has not yet benefitted the large majority of smallholders

does the nonfarm economy offer pathways for upward mobility evidence from a panel data study in ethiopia summary empirical studies across many developing countries routinely document a positive correlation between participation in rural nonfarm employment and households wealth or income this paper explores whether nonfarm employment leads to higher consumption expenditure growth in ethiopia we find that 1 households consumption expenditure growth is positively correlated with the initial share of nonfarm income 2 the growth elasticity of nonfarm income share is higher for wealthier households and 3 the main source of growth for nonfarm participants comes from the higher rates of return participants enjoy on their human and physical capital

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

integration of the sales force an empirical examination this article develops and tests a model of integration of a marketing function personal selling the model derived from transaction cost analysis as developed principally by williamson is formulated as a logistic function which is estimated with data from the electronic components industry as expected integration is associated with increasing levels of asset specificity difficulty of performance evaluation and the combination of these two factors contrary to the transaction cost model neither frequency of transactions nor interaction of specificity and environmental uncertainty is significantly related to integration the transaction cost model improves significantly upon the fit of a simple model relating integration to company size alone these results suggest that for studying transactions of this kind it is fruitful to view the firm as a governance structure

fair trade organic coffee rural livelihoods and the agrarian question southern mexican coffee families in transition summary we use a random sample of coffee producing households in southern mexico to compare opportunities associated with government subsidies and migration to the role of fair trade organic coffee in household livelihoods although land and labor returns among fair trade organic coffee growers are higher than for conventional growers differences in yields are more important than price premiums moreover investment in education and labor opportunities outside coffee dominate those in fair trade organic coffee the results highlight the value of an integrated approach to the agrarian question that improves productivity and prices and supports other pathways for improving incomes

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

the effect of specialty coffee certification on household livelihood strategies and specialisation abstract farm certification is rapidly becoming a sine qua non for access to specialty coffee markets at the centre of these changes are smallholder coffee producers responsible for 80 of global coffee production although rural households are known to depend on more than agricultural production alone the literature on specialty coffee and certification has rather narrowly focused on coffee income and production in this study broader impacts are explicitly taken into account household income was decomposed into categories corresponding to specific income generating activities and coffee income was broken down into price yield and area effects results show that coffee certification encourages farmers to specialise in coffee production increasing coffee income but not total household income at least not in the short run the time and effort required to attain the higher coffee income offered by certified production means farmers have to give up other activities this substitution effect cancels out the income effect such that there is no increase in total household income the lack of an effect on total household income suggests the return to the additional labour effort required for certified coffee production is not higher than in other activities questioning the benefits of certification for small scale producers

the effect of economic opportunity and family background on adolescent cohabitation on adolescent cohabitation and childbearing among low income blacks this article uses a hazards model permitting continuous covariates and fixed effects to estimate the effect of local employment opportunity and family background on the cohabitation and childbearing of black youths from low income households support is found for w j wilson s hypothesis that employment opportunity encourages the formation of cohabitational unions as well as for the opportunity cost hypothesis that employment opportunity discourages childbearing outside such unions however the latter effect appears to be larger suggesting that the opportunity cost hypothesis is the primary channel through which higher employment rates result in lower rates of illegitimacy among underclass youths

school attendance and child labor a model of collective behavior this paper theoretically investigates how community approval or disap proval aects school attendance and child labor and how aggregate behavior of the community feeds back towards the formation and persistence of an anti or pro schooling norm the proposed community model continues to take aggregate and idiosyncratic poverty into account as an important driver of low school attendance and child labor but it provides also an explanation for why equally poor villages or regions can display dierent attitudes towards schooling distinguishing between three dierent modes of child time allocation school attendance work and leisure the paper shows how the time costs of schooling and child labor productivity con tribute to the existence of a locally stable anti schooling norm it proposes policies that eectively exploit the social dynamics and initiate a permanent escape from the anti schooling equilibrium an extension of the model explores how an education contingent subsidy paid to the poorest families of a community manages to initiate a bandwagon eect towards education for all the optimal mechanism design of

credit constraints and agricultural productivity evidence from rural rwanda while potentially negative impacts of credit constraints on economic development have long been discussed conceptually empirical evidence for africa remains limited we use a direct elicitation approach on a national sample of rwandan rural households to empirically assess the extent and nature of credit rationing in the semi formal sector and its impact using an endogenous switching model elimination of all constraints could increase output by some 17 per cent implications for policy and research are spelled out

child labour in indonesian small industries abstract we analyse the geographic incidence of child labour in small manufacturing firms in indonesia at the village level our unique data set covers virtually all indonesian villages and urban neighbourhoods it allows us to distinguish between demand and supply side determinants of child labour we show by correcting for sample selection that a number of counterintuitive results child labour being unaffected by credit access and school proximity are the result of an interplay between supply and demand side determinants credit access and school proximity reduce child labour supply but simultaneously constitute positive location factors for firms thereby increasing the demand for child labourers to effectively reduce child labour growth oriented policies such as enhancing school and credit facilities should be complemented by policies specifically geared towards increasing school attendance

measuring changes in poverty a methodological case study of indonesia during an adjustment period analysis of the effects of policy changes on the poor is often hindered by the difficulties inherent in measuring poverty and comparing levels of poverty before and after policy changes this article outlines two techniques which can overcome many of these measurement problems stochastic dominance conditions which can facilitate a robust poverty ranking of distributions of living standards and a decomposable poverty index which allows measured changes in aggregate poverty to be disaggregated into their various components such as the changes among population subgroups and growth and redistributive components these techniques can be applied to a wide range of indicators of economic well being and poverty lines and to assumptions about the poor the approaches are illustrated using household survey data from indonesia before and after external shocks and the subsequent structural adjustment program in the mid 1980s the study finds that favorable initial conditions and pro poor pattern of growth enabled indonesia to maintain its momentum in poverty alleviation during the period

using shadow wages to estimate labor supply of agricultural households with few exceptions most studies of the labor demand and supply decisions of agricultural households in developing countries have relied on the empirical advantages of separability given the questionable nature of some of the assumptions sufficient for separability i apply a recent methodology that accounts for the simultaneity between the production and consumption decisions of a farm household using data from rural india direct estimates of the marginal productivities shadow wages of family male and female labor are derived from a cobb douglas agricultural production function the estimated shadow wages and income are then used as regressors in a structural model of labor supply

school subsidies for the poor evaluating the mexican progresa poverty program abstract this paper evaluates how the progresa program which provides poor mothers in rural mexico with education grants has affected enrollment poor children who reside in communities randomly selected to participate in the initial phase of the progresa are compared to those who reside in other control communities pre program comparisons check the randomized design and double difference estimators of the program s effect on the treated are calculated by grade and sex probit models are also estimated for the probability that a child is enrolled controlling for additional characteristics of the child their parents local schools and community and for sample attrition to evaluate the sensitivity of the program estimates these estimates of program short run effects on enrollment are extrapolated to the lifetime schooling and the earnings of adults to approximate the internal rate of return on the public schooling subsidies as they increase expected private wages

governmental interventions and household behavior in a developing country anticipating the unanticipated consequences of social programs abstract estimates of the joint effects of governmental health education and family planning programs as well as sources of water on fertility child mortality and schooling are obtained from combined district level and household level data from rural india the estimates are used both to test the implications of a model of household decision making and to assess the effectiveness of the joint public provision of such services in shifting resources from increasing family size to augmenting human capital per person the results appear consistent with household optimizing behavior and suggest that reductions in the costs of medical services contraceptives and schooling and the improvement of water sources are mutually reinforcing alternatives for implementing the joint policy goals of reduced population growth and increased human capital formation

making conditional cash transfer programs more efficient designing for maximum effect of the conditionality conditional cash transfer programs are now used extensively to encourage poor parents to increase investments in their children s human capital these programs can be large and expensive motivating a quest for greater efficiency through increased impact of the programs imposed conditions on human capital formation this requires designing the programs targeting and calibration rules specifically to achieve this result using data from the progresa randomized experiment in mexico this article shows that large efficiency gains can be achieved by taking into account how much the probability of a child s enrollment is affected by a conditional transfer rules for targeting and calibration can be made easy to implement by selecting indicators that are simple observable and verifiable and that cannot be manipulated by beneficiaries the mexico case shows that these efficiency gains can be achieved without increasing inequality among poor households

can drought increase total calorie availability the impact of drought on food consumption and the mitigating effects of a conditional cash transfer program abstract this study uses the panel data of a randomized experiment from the mexican progresa program to evaluate the impact of drought on total calorie availability and the mitigating effects of progresa on food consumption in periods of drought drought reduced total expenditures and total food expenditures but increased the total availability of calories this paradox can be explained by the impact of drought on the composition of calories that is it reduced the consumption of expensive calories in such foods as vegetables fruits and animal products but increased calories consumed from cheaper sources such as grains this study finds that progresa can completely mitigate the negative effects of drought on calorie availability from vegetables fruits and other sources however progresa cannot mitigate the impact of drought on calories available from grains the analysis also shows that during drought households who increase their consumption of grains get them mainly from purchased sources rathe

revisiting legal realism the law economics and organization perspective the contrast between american legal realism which ran itself into the sand schlegel 1979 p 459 and the law and economics movement which is perhaps the most important development in legal thought in the last quarter century posner 1986 p xix is dramatic that the one foundered while the other flourished is explained in large measure by the absence of an intellectual framework for legal realism and the use by law and economics of the powerful framework of neoclassical economics

the sloping land conversion program in china effect on the livelihood diversification of rural households summary through addressing the motivations behind rural households livelihood diversification this paper examines the effect of the sloping land conversion program slcp on livelihood diversification using a longitudinal household survey data set spanning the overall implementation of the slcp our results show that the slcp works as a valid external policy intervention to increase rural livelihood diversification in addition the findings demonstrate that the implementation of the slcp has had heterogeneous effects on livelihood diversification across different rural income groups the lower income group was more affected by the program in terms of income diversification

child labor and schooling in bolivia who s falling behind the roles of domestic work gender and ethnicity summary we analyze the role of gender and ethnicity in the work school tradeoff among school aged children we observe domestic chores in bolivian data and consider them work finding that girls are 51 more likely than boys to be out of school and working mostly in domestic activities for indigenous children the probability is 60 higher than non indigenous and indigenous girls are 23 more likely than boys to be out of school and working a more comprehensive measure of child labor reveals that in countries with large indigenous populations indigenous girls are most vulnerable to future poverty and exclusion due to low education

the impact of bolsa familia on schooling summary we use longitudinal household data and propensity score weighting methods to assess the impact of brazil s bolsa familia conditional cash transfer program on schooling outcomes of children aged 6 17 years weak aggregate effects mask considerable heterogeneity among girls the program significantly increases school participation by 8 percentage points and grade progression by 10 percentage points with large significant effects across both younger and older girls in rural areas but concentrated among girls aged 15 17 years in urban areas few significant impacts are found among boys we discuss implications and potential mechanisms for differential impacts by sex age and location

determinants of nonfarm earnings of farm based husbands and wives in northern ghana the nonfarm work participation decisions of married men and women in rural northern ghana were jointly and separately estimated for married couples through a bivariate probit using recent survey data selectivity bias was corrected for in estimating wage offer and labor supply equations using heckman s procedure education experience infrastructure distance to the capital and population density as well as interactions between education and infrastructure and between education and distance to the city were found to be significantly related to the probability of nonfarm labor market participation wages and the amount of nonfarm labor performed with significant differences by gender

transaction cost economics and contractual relations one of the key factors in the study of transaction costs economics is the concept of opportunism williamson 1986 develops a heuristic model of transaction costs and governance structures in which the critical dimensions with respect to which transaction costs differ are identified the frequency of exchange the degree of relationship specific investment and uncertainty this work examines whether there is empirical support for williamson s model firms in four different industries were interviewed about their contractual relationships with their customers or suppliers the degree of transaction costs differs both across industries and across firms within an industry although the author finds that there is strong support for the williamson 1986 model a critical dimension omitted from this model is market structure by affecting the risks of opportunism she finds that market structure also has important consequences for the nature of contractual relations governing firms transactions copyright 1997 by oxford university press

marital status and fertility in the united states welfare and labor market effects the incidence of marriage and the proportion of childbearing that occurs within marriage have decreased sharply in the united states in the last several decades this paper examines whether the probability that a woman is currently married and the number of children she has borne as reported in the 1980 u s census are related to two identifiable factors the variation in welfare programs across states specifically afdc and medicaid benefits and afdc up expenditures or the variation in the market wage opportunities available to women and to their potential husbands afdc and medicaid benefit levels are associated with fewer women being currently married medicaid benefits are related to lower fertility levels for both black and white women whereas afdc benefits in cash and food are associated with lower fertility among white women ages 15 24 those states that extend afdc benefits to families with unemployed parents in other words fathers in intact poor families do not have significantly more women married or higher fertility rates contrary to what might be expected from economic incentives men s market wages are associated with more frequent marriage and higher fertility whereas higher market wage opportunities for women have substantial effects in the opposite direction all of which are consistent with standard models of gender specialization and the demand for marriage and fertility

an investigation of oliver williamson s analysis of the division of labour in 2009 oliver williamson was jointly awarded the nobel prize in economics for his analysis of economic governance williamson was central to the emergence of the transaction cost framework as an important aspect of social scientific analysis part of this approach makes important efficiency predictions and prescriptions regarding the division of labour within firms in contemporary capitalist economies this discounts issues of power and privileges firm specific human assets as the key organisational driver indeed williamson s approach intentionally conflates the employment relation with exchanges for intermediate goods this article seeks to investigate williamson s explanatory claims through a uk based panel dataset using a dynamic logit modelling approach the findings question williamson s central argument the results instead are more consistent with the idea of the industry specificity of labour and highlight the importance of firm size

carbon sequestration and farm income in west africa identifying best management practices for smallholder agricultural systems in northern ghana abstract the interest in agricultural soils as global storage of carbon has increased in recent years along with the prospect of farmers participation in payment schemes under the clean development mechanism of the kyoto protocol thus a better understanding of agricultural practices that can increase soil carbon and enhance the livelihoods of farmers is necessary particularly in smallholder farming systems of west africa this study evaluates different crop management strategies both by their capacity to sequester carbon in agricultural soils and by their contribution to household income a case study in wa upper west region of ghana is used to test 48 different cropping strategies by means of a crop simulation model and a household level multiple criteria optimisation model each cropping strategy is evaluated after a 20 year simulation period by its capacity to accrue carbon in the soil by its economic performance at the plot level and by its contribution to the farm income with and without carbon payments a set of best management practices that concomitantly increase soil carbon and farm income are identified and classified by their cost of investment

financial deepening inequality and growth a model based quantitative evaluation we propose a coherent unified approach to the study of the linkages among economic growth financial structure and inequality bringing together disparate theoretical and empirical literature that is we show how to conduct model based quantitative research on transitional paths with analytical and numerical methods we calibrate and make tractable a prototype canonical model and take it to an application namely thailand 1976 96 an emerging market economy in a phase of economic expansion with uneven financial deepening and increasing inequality we look at the expected path generated by the model and conduct robustness experiments because the actual path of the thai economy is imagined here to be just one realization of many possible histories of the model economy we construct a covariance normalized squared error metric of closeness and find the best fit simulation we also construct a confidence region from a set of simulations and formally test the model we broadly replicate the actual data and identify anomalies robert m townsend is a professor at the university of chicago and a consultant at the federal reserve bank of chicago kenichi ueda is an economist at the international monetary fund the views expressed in this paper are those of authors and do not necessarily represent those of the frb chicago the federal reserve system or the imf we thank the national statistics office of thailand for permission to use the ses data we received helpful comments from robin brooks fabio canova marco cagetti larry christiano angus deaton paul evans jess gaspar hyeok jeong ashok mody tomoyuki nakajima hajime takizawa chris udry annette vissing jorgensen and the participants of the nber general equilibrium conference at new york university the conference honoring rolf r mantel in argentina seminars at cornell university grips hitotsubashi university ohio state university oxford university and the imf as well as the imf conference on macroeconomic policy and poverty reduction we are especially indebted to the editors and referees townsend acknowledges financial support from the nsf and nichd we thank natalia ramondo for excellent research assistance

does child labour displace schooling evidence on behavioral responses to an enrollment subsidy this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled does child labour displace schooling evidence on behavioral responses to an enrollment subsidy conducted between 1995 and 1996 in bangladesh the study observed that the subsidy increases schooling but its effect on child labour is ambiguous the subsidy increased schooling by far more than it reduced child labour substitution effects helped protect current incomes from the higher school attendance induced by the subsidy substitution effects helped protect current incomes from the higher school attendance induced by the subsidy the reduction in the incidence of child labour by boys girls represents about one quarter eighth of the increase in their school enrollment rate

shadow wages and peasant family labour supply an econometric application to the peruvian sierra a striking feature of developing economies is the large proportion of the work force that is self employed lack of widespread labor market participation in the agricultural sector can pose a major obstacle to the empirical implementation of economic models of the peasant household whether because wage data are simply not available or because the assumptions required to make use of wage data stretch the bounds of credulity this paper develops a methodology for estimating a structural labor supply model for primarily self employed peasant households which holds under a general agricultural technology and set of labor market conditions the unique feature of the approach is that the opportunity cost of time or shadow wage of household workers is explicitly estimated from an agricultural production function and is subsequently used to identify a set of structural labor supply parameters recent household survey data from rural peru is employed to estimate and perform various diagnostic tests on the model the empirical findings lend support to the hypothesis that peasant households allocate their members time as if to maximize a family utility function and moreover demonstrate the tractability of the shadow wage methodology and its usefulness in estimating more elaborate time allocation models

how does child labor affect the demand for adult labor evidence from rural mexico do employers substitute adults for children or do they treat them as complements using data from a mexican schooling experiment i find that decreasing child farmwork is accompanied by increasing adult labor demand this increase was not caused by treatment money reaching farm employers there were no significant increases in harvest prices and quantities nonlabor inputs or nonfarm labor supply furthermore coordinated movements in price and quantity can distinguish this increase in demand from changes in supply induced by the treatment s income effects thus declining child supply caused increasing adult demand employers substituted adults for children

the twin instrument fertility and human capital investment twin births are often used as an instrument to address selection of women into fertility however recent work shows selection of women into twin birth such that while ols estimates tend to be downward biased twin iv estimates will tend to be upward biased this is pertinent given the emerging consensus that fertility has limited impacts on women s labour supply or on investments in children using data for developing countries and the united states to estimate the trade off between fertility and children s human capital we demonstrate the nature and size of the bias in the twin iv estimator and estimate bounds on the true parameter

should transfers to poor families be conditional on school attendance a household bargaining perspective this article considers the welfare implications of transfers to poor families that are conditional on school attendance and other forms of investment in children s human capital family decisions are assumed to be the result of generalized nash bargaining between the two parents we show that as long as bequests are zero conditional transfers are better for children than unconditional transfers the mother s welfare may also be improved by conditional transfers thus conditioning transfers to bequest constrained families have potentially desirable intergenerational and intragenerational welfare effects conditioning transfers to unconstrained families make every family member worse off

intergenerational transmission of poverty and inequality parental resources and schooling attainment and children s human capital in ethiopia india peru and vietnam abstractacademic and policy literatures on intergenerational transmissions of poverty and inequality suggest that improving schooling attainment and income for parents in poor households will lessen poverty and inequality in their children s generation through increased human capital accumulated by their children however magnitudes of such effects are unknown we use data on children born in the twenty first century in four developing countries to simulate how changes in parents schooling attainment and consumption would affect poverty and inequality in both the parents and their children s generations we find that increasing minimum schooling or income substantially reduces poverty and inequality in the parents generation but does not carry over to reducing poverty and inequality substantially in the children s generation therefore while reductions in poverty and inequality in the parents generation are desirable in themselves to improve welfare among current adults they are not likely to have

teenage school attendance and cash transfers an impact evaluation of panes proquest denotes formulae omitted three years after a severe economic crisis the uruguayan government launched a temporary antipoverty plan the national plan for social emergency assistance panes which took place from april 2005 to december 2007 lasting for thirty four months this program included a cash transfer component citizen income which was in fact the main intervention of the plan in the short run the primary objective of this intervention was to provide cash assistance to indigent households in the long run it aimed at promoting social integration in many ways such as carrying out educational and labor interventions for adults encouraging households to foster child schooling and promoting health checks to pursue this objective in the original design program participation was conditional on school enrollment for those households with children and health checks for all beneficiaries however in practice conditionalities were not controlled owing to lack of administrative coordination among the involved institutions although promoting schooling was not the main objective of the plan the cash transfer might have affected school attendance and child labor through a direct income effect and also through the influence of the announced conditionalities the provision of conditional cash transfers as a means to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty has entailed a redesign of latin american social protection systems over the past two decades the abundant literature on impact evaluations of conditional cash transfers indicates that many programs have successfully increased child schooling particularly in the age group six to thirteen and in some cases have reduced child labor with no major undesirable effects on adult labor supply eclac 2006 fiszbein and schady 2009 bouillon and tejerina 2007 saavedra and garcia 2012 yet the design and implementation of these programs varies a great deal across different instances and baseline situations also differ across countries according to the existing literature baseline enrollment rates design issues such as payments scheme and timing type of conditionalities complementary supplyside interventions and the generosity of the transfer are strongly associated with the magnitude of the effects on schooling fiszbein and schady 2009 bouillon and tejerina 2007 saavedra and garcia 2012 this paper seeks to contribute to the accumulating literature about the impacts of cash transfers on teenage schooling and labor by providing evidence from a middle income country in which the initial enrollment rates were above the average of the countries where these programs have been previously launched we analyze program effects on school attendance and child labor for children aged fourteen to seventeen this group concentrates the main problems of the uruguayan educational system as it exhibits persistently high drop out rates owing to this circumstance it is important to find out to what extent cash transfers can contribute to overcome this problem we also explore the role of some of the potential channels highlighted in the cash transfer literature household income adult labor supply and labor income and conditionalities this evaluation is based on two data sets the official administrative records from panes applicants baseline data and two waves of a follow up survey that was specifically designed to carry out the impact evaluation of the program the first gathered eighteen months after the program started and the second two months after the program ended we provide evidence using two identification strategies a regression discontinuity design rdd using separately the data from each wave of the evaluation survey and a difference in differences dd approach that exploits the longitudinal nature of the collected data the questionnaire from the first wave of the follow up survey allows us to partially explore the role of conditionalities

specific investment economies of scale and the make or buy decision a test of transaction cost theory this paper develops empirical tests of three hypotheses arising from transaction cost theory as developed by oliver williamson evidence is provided from a new dataset on 178 inputs gathered from uk engineering firms the probability of buying in specialised inputs is higher if the production technology is non specific but only if there are economies of scale or scope furthermore the economies of scale scope effect is much reduced in the presence of specific assets this interactive hypothesis has not been formally tested before we also believe this to be the first cross section empirical test of transaction cost make or buy theory using european data

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

income diversification and entry barriers evidence from the tigray region of northern ethiopia abstract farm households diversify their income sources into off farm wage employment motivated by low farm income and availability of surplus family labor whereas they enter into off farm self employment to earn an attractive return farm households have upward sloping although inelastic off farm labor supply curves therefore increasing the availability of off farm activities and improving the wage rate received by farm households can expand the economic activity of the tigray regional state due to entry barriers relatively wealthy farm households may dominate the most lucrative rural non farm activities such as masonry carpentry and petty trade hence the underlying factors that hinder participation in non farm activities such as credit constraints and lack of skill may have to be addressed through the provision of credit and technical training for the poor

wage inequality and the distribution of education abstract this paper analyzes the relationship between education and wage inequality in metropolitan brazil the study is based on data from ten brazilian annual household surveys pnads which are available for the period 1976 1986 the universe of analysis is limited to occupied prime age males the inequality measure used was theil s second measure which is analytically convenient for a study of the determinants of inequality it is shown that there exist sharp differences in wage inequality across metropolitan areas to identify whether these large regional differences in inequality are directly associated with differences in educational levels or with differences in the steepness of the wage education profiles some simulations are conducted the results indicate that regional differences in the distribution of education are not able to explain much of the regional differences in wage inequality as a matter of fact the differences in wage inequality were shown to be intrinsically associated with differences in the steepness of the wage education profiles

the road taken origins and evolution of employment systems in emerging companies excerpt drawing on a unique archive of qualitative and quantitative data describing 100 bay area high technology firms within their first decade this paper examines the models of employment relations espoused by company founders and bow those models shaped the evolution of human resource management within their organizations information gleaned from interviews suggests that founders and others involved in designing and launching these companies had blueprints for the employment relation that varied along three key dimensions the primary basis of employee attachment and motivation the primary means for controlling and coordinating work and the primary criterion emphasized in selection based on combinations of these three dimensions firms in our sample cluster fall into one of four distinct types which we label the star factory engineering and commitment models multivariate statistical analyses document how the founder s employment model shaped the subsequent adoption and timing of various human resource policies and documents over these companies early histories as well as the speed with which the first full time human resource manager was appointed the findings are strongly suggestive of complementarities and a tendency toward internal consistency among dimensions of human resource management and of strong path dependence in the evolution of employment systems in organizations some implications of these findings for transactions cost perspectives on the employment relationship are discussed

welfare marital prospects and nonmarital childbearing the roles of the entitlements of the afdc program and marital prospects in the fertility and marriage choices of young women are assessed in the context of a model incorporating heritable endowment heterogeneity assortative mating concern for child quality and potential parental and public support alternatives estimates based on data describing the fertility and marital experience up to age 23 of the eight birth cohorts of women in the nlsy provide evidence that higher afdc benefit levels and lower marital prospects induce young women to choose to have a child outside of marriage

what s so spatial about diversification in nigeria summary many households in developing countries allocate their productive assets among various income generating activities in order to develop a portfolio of income from occupations with different degrees of risk expected returns and seasonal and liquidity constraints the push and pull factors influencing diversification decisions of households are widely discussed in the literature however no study to date has taken into account spatial interdependence of household decisions in spite of various channels of neighborhood effects such as information flow learning from others social networks and agglomeration economies this paper fills in the gap by incorporating spatial dependence in the choice model of diversification using a spatial auto regressive probit model and an advanced bayesian strategy to its estimation empirical analysis is run taking advantage of the nigerian general household survey panel 2010 11 providing gis coordinates for the surveyed households the results imply endogeneity of the neighbors decisions to allocate their productive assets among various occupations and signal the importance of social learning and agglomeration effects favoring the spillover of diversification activities through neighbors networks and local markets the households decisions respond to local environment factors such as weather shocks or infrastructural constraints as shown by the regional differences taking into account spatial interdependence is particularly important in the event of a wide divide of the data available into different zones as for example in case of the nigerian northern region where the states are larger

how responsive is investment in schooling to changes in redistributive policies and in returns this paper uses an unusual pay reform to test the responsiveness of investment in schooling to changes in redistribution schemes that increase the rate of return to education we exploit an episode where different israeli kibbutzim shifted from equal sharing to productivity based wages in different years and find that students in kibbutzim that reformed earlier invested more in high school education and in the long run also in post secondary schooling we further show that the effect is mainly driven by students in kibbutzim that reformed to a larger degree our findings support the prediction that education is highly responsive to changes in the redistribution policy

sri lanka can conditional cash transfer programs serve as safety nets in keeping children at school and from working when exposed to shocks this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study can conditional cash transfer cct programs serve as safety nets in keeping children at school and from working when exposed to shocks conducted the program started in 1997 and still exists today in sri lanka the study observed that income shocks on poor households are known to induce parents to take their children out of school and send them to work when other risk coping instruments are insufficient cct programs where the condition is on school attendance have been shown to be effective in increasing educational achievements and reducing child work shocks are highly prevalent and children have irregular periods of school enrollment children who are taken out of school are less likely to re enroll