multiproduct short run hospital cost functions empirical evidence and policy implications from cross section data economists and policymakers have been interested in hospital costs and the structure of hospital technologies for several decades now early interest was focused on the possibility of scale economies which implied increased efficiency for larger hospitals 6 8 12 13 18 20 while more recent interest has been stimulated by the inflationary spiral of hospital costs 1 15 17 22 as hospital costs have risen important policy questions concerning the impact on costs of the hospitals diagnostic case mix the hospitals admitting physicians the hospitals size and the hospitals efficiency have emerged and researchers have attempted to deal with these issues within the context of increasingly complex econometric models 1 2 5 24 27 however in attempting to analyze these important policy issues researchers have been forced to make two major types of compromises on the one hand appropriate data are often not available for estimating a well specified cost function e g information on admitting physicians and diagnostic case mix are often missing so that problems of specification error often plague the econometric results conversely in using imaginative ways to deal with data problems e g weighting in patient and out patient care to form a single index of hospital services 1 27 or estimating separate cost functions for each department in the hospital 2 researchers sometimes place unrealistic and unnecessary constraints on their econometric models the purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of several of the primary hospital characteristics mentioned above on the short run costs of hospitals within a theoretically consistent framework in the following discussion we also develop the theoretical

econometric analysis of the hospital size patient load relation 1986 econometric analysis of the hospital size patient load relation applied economics vol 18 no 7 pp 793 805

the household response to persistent natural disasters evidence from bangladesh we examine the short run economic impacts of recurrent flooding on bangladeshi households surveyed in 2000 2005 and 2010 in 2010 household income and expenditure survey hies households answered a set of questions on whether they were affected by flood and its likely impacts we identify two treatment affected groups by using the self reported data and historical rainfall data based flood risk index we estimate a difference indifference did model to quantify the impacts on income expenditure asset and labour market outcomes and further extend our analysis to different income and expenditure brackets overall we find robust evidence of negative impacts on agricultural income and expenditure intriguingly the extreme poor i e the bottom 15th quintile experience significant positive impacts on agricultural income in the self reported treatment case

hospital ownership and performance this study compares the performance of three ownership forms of hospitals for profit private nonprofit and public further classified according to whether or not the hospital is run by a hospital chain data come from a 1979 national survey of u s hospitals the authors find that hospital cost is quite similar among alternative ownership forms as is profitability the results do not provide much empirical support for standard property rights theory several reasons are suggested why this may be so

maize market participation among female and male headed households in ethiopia abstractthis paper examines the market participation gaps and their causes between female headed households fhhs and male headed households mhhs in ethiopia using an oaxaca blinder decomposition approach the results showed that structural coefficient effects accounted for 74 per cent 65 of the differences between fhh and mhh in the net buyer net seller maize market positions the gap between fhh and mhhs regarding quantities of maize sold was largely explained by endowment effects the results imply that closing the observed market participation gaps will require policy interventions that facilitate equal access for both fhhs and mhhs to resources and other supportive social networks

estimation of vulnerability to poverty using a multilevel longitudinal model evidence from the philippines using the panel data for the philippines in 2003 2009 we estimate a three level random coefficient model to measure household vulnerability and to decompose it into idiosyncratic and covariate com

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

gender and rural non farm entrepreneurship despite their increasing prominence in policy debates little is known about gender inequities in non agricultural labor market outcomes in rural areas using matched household enterprise community data sets from bangladesh ethiopia indonesia and sri lanka this paper documents and analyzes gender differences in the individual portfolio choice and productivity of non farm entrepreneurship except for ethiopia women are less likely than men to become nonfarm entrepreneurs women s nonfarm entrepreneurship isn t strongly correlated with household composition or educational attainment but is especially prevalent amongst women who are the head of their household female led firms are much smaller and less productive on average though gender differences in productivity vary dramatically across countries mean differences in log output per worker suggest that male firms are roughly 10 times as productive as female firms in bangladesh three times as those in ethiopia and twice as those in sri lanka by contrast no significant differences in labor productivity were detected in indonesia differences in output per worker are overwhelmingly accounted for by sorting by sector and size they can t be explained by differences in capital intensity human capital or the local investment climate nor by increasing returns to scale

the effect of trade openness on women s welfare and work life summary this study of 134 countries analyzes whether women are generally the losers or winners of globalization the results show that economic integration does not directly improve women s life expectancies women s access to primary and secondary education may improve slightly although women s welfare does not seem to improve more than that of men on the other hand economic integration does influence women s professional lives in developing countries trade openness increases female labor force participation in industrialized states it decreases the share of working women trade openness in developed countries increases the number of women employed in the service sector while in developing states it increases the number of women working in industrial jobs and in agriculture

alternative definitions of headship and the feminisation of income poverty in post apartheid south africa abstract in measuring gender differences in the risk of income poverty many studies use female headship as a proxy for gender however a number of well documented concerns with the use of self reported headship as an analytical category have suggested that headship is often a relatively blunt unit of analysis against the backdrop of a large and growing difference in income poverty rates between self reported female and male headed households in post apartheid south africa this study considers several alternative definitions of headship that have been proposed in the development literature the findings suggest that there is an association between self reported female headship and a female household member being identified as the main breadwinner however the conventional definition of headship is likely to underestimate the growing risk of income poverty in female headed households relative to male headed households compared with several alternative definitions the findings also suggest that alte

gender and multidimensional poverty in nicaragua an individual based approach most existing empirical papers concerned about multidimensional poverty use the household as the unit of analysis so that the multidimensional poverty status of the household is equated with the multidimensional poverty status of all its members this assumption ignores intra household inequalities additionally households containing both a female and a male cannot contribute to a gender gap in poverty so gender differentials in poverty cannot be estimated but the sustainable development goals have put special emphasis on gender equality therefore new measures able to capture the gender differences are needed consequently in this paper we propose an individual based multidimensional poverty measure in order to estimate the three i s of multidimensional poverty incidence intensity and inequality in nicaragua as well as the gender differentials we also estimate logit regressions to better understanding the determinants of multidimensional poverty in this country overall we find that there are statistically significant gender differences in multidimensional poverty in nicaragua but they are estimated to be small and lower than 5 however the gender differential in inequality is larger than 10 and it suggests that multi dimensionally poor women are living in very intense poverty when compared with multi dimensionally poor men we also find that the elderly and children are the most vulnerable people in terms of multidimensional poverty in this country furthermore when information on employment domestic work and social protection is considered in the analysis the gender gaps become more substantial and women are more likely to be poor than men

are women overrepresented among the poor an analysis of poverty in 10 developing countries abstract this paper presents new evidence on the proportion of women in poverty in 10 developing countries it compares poverty measures for males and females and for male and female headed households and investigates the sensitivity of these measures to the use of per capita and per adult equivalent units and different definitions of the poverty line while poverty measures are higher for female headed households and for females the differences are significant in only a fifth to a third of the datasets the contribution of female headed households to aggregate poverty is less than that of females due to the low population share of the former stochastic dominance analysis reveals that differences between male and female headed households and between males and females are often insignificant except for ghana and bangladesh where females are consistently worse off these results suggest that cultural and institutional factors may be responsible for higher poverty among women in these countries our results point to the need to analyze determinants of household income and consumption using multivariate methods and to give greater attention to the processes underlying female headship

are female headed households more food insecure evidence from bangladesh summary this paper uses household and village level survey data to investigate the food security of male and female headed households in bangladesh with particular attention to indigenous ethnic groups and finds no significant differences in the food security between these two types of households the absence of social and cultural restrictions among the indigenous groups permitting their females greater freedom to participate in the labor force coupled with informal redistributive mechanism is attributed to their less food insecurity this result indicates that noneconomic institutions can significantly impact economic outcomes such as food security

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

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

decomposing the gender wealth gap in ecuador abstract unlike the gender earnings gap that has been amply studied the gender wealth gap has only recently begun to receive attention studies of the gender wealth gap have been concentrated on developed countries and have been limited by the use of household level data using individual level and sex disaggregated wealth data for ecuador this paper examines the pattern of wealth inequality across genders at different points of the wealth distribution for sole and then partnered household heads we use a new oaxaca blinder type decomposition method based on unconditional quantile regression to investigate the sources of the gap at different quantiles our results show that among sole heads the gap favors men across the distribution and is largest at the lower tail among partnered heads the gap is much less pronounced throughout the distribution actually reverting at the lower tail for both sole and partnered heads at the lower tail of the distribution the gender gap is primarily associated with differing returns to covariates at the median and upper quantiles gender differences in endowments ownership of savings accounts education and age drive the gap gender bias in inheritance plays a significant role only at lower and median wealth levels overall our results show stark contrasts with results for developed countries and important differences between sole versus partnered heads our study also adds evidence to the long standing debate over whether female household heads are poorer than male heads and calls for the pursuit of wealth differentiated policies and social programs to increase women s participation in the formal economy as well as the returns to their participation

shifting theories partial perspectives on the household there is a neglect of networks within cooperative conflict models which arises because of the patriarchal households assumed but households are not the same everywhere because their structure is dependent upon social context and they are a sub system of wider social relations and realities understanding households in this paper female headed households requires us to study the varied contexts in which households are situated and the social relations of individuals within these institutions using contributions from feminist economics and realist social theory this paper shows how these frameworks can explain the diversity of social reality in household formations and relations

women headed households and household welfare an empirical deconstruction for uganda abstract analysis of the first nationally representative household survey of uganda shows that women headed households are not poorer when assessed by consumption or income nor do they appear consistently disadvantaged on social indicators some subgroups of women headed households do have lower economic welfare including those headed by widows and those in urban areas gender inequalities in educational attainment appears to be the major source of what economic disadvantage such women headed households do face high remittances receipts play a key role in maintaining economic parity between women and men headed households

does access to formal finance matter for welfare and inequality micro level evidence from nigeria using a treatment effects model decomposition techniques and representative household data from nigeria we study the welfare and inequality implications of access to formal finance while improving household welfare formal access to finance increases inter household inequalities despite ameliorating the inequality enhancing effect of urban residence and enhancing the inequality ameliorating effect of greater educational attainment the positive effect of access to formal finance on inequality is smaller than the effect of unobserved household characteristics indicating that welfare and equality enhancing strategies should follow a holistic approach as opposed to one focusing on one isolated policy variable at a time

demystifying nonparticipation in microcredit a population based analysis abstract given the current popularity of microcredit schemes as a means of poverty alleviation their accessibility to the poorest is of obvious concern this paper examines a targeted microcredit program in bangladesh to assess its coverage among the poor and to identify program and client related barriers impeding participation a population survey of over 24 000 households reveals that although three quarters are eligible for microcredit less than one quarter participate rates of participation in microcredit are higher among poorer households multivariate analysis identifies lack of female education small household size and landlessness as risk factors for nonparticipation based on a 7 random sample of this population the implications of these findings for poverty alleviation policies and programs are discussed

forecasting tourist arrivals using origin country macroeconomics this study utilizes both disaggregated data and macroeconomic indicators in order to examine the importance of the macroeconomic environment of origin countries for analysing destinations tourist arrivals in particular it is the first study to present strong empirical evidence that both of these features in tandem provide statistically significant information of tourist arrivals in greece the forecasting exercises presented in our analysis show that macroeconomic indicators conducive to better forecasts are mainly origin country specific thus highlighting the importance of considering the apparent sharp national contrasts among origin countries when investigating domestic tourist arrivals given the extent of the dependency of the greek economy on tourism income but also given the perishable nature of the tourist product itself results have important implications for policy makers in greece