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

the hyperbolic consumption model calibration simulation and empirical evaluation ur preferences for the long run tend to conflict with our short run behavior when planning for the long run we intend to meet our deadlines exercise regularly and eat healthfully but in the short run we have little interest in revising manuscripts jogging on the stairmaster and skipping the chocolate souffleala mode delay of gratification is a nice long term goal but instant gratification is disconcertingly tempting this gap between long run intentions and short run actions is apparent across a wide range of behaviors including saving choices a 1997 survey found that 76 percent of respondents believe they should be saving more for retirement looking only at respondents who believed they were at an age where you should be seriously saving already the survey found that 55 percent reported being behind in their savings and only 6 percent reported being ahead farkas and johnson 1997 the report on the survey concluded t he gaps between people s atti tudes intentions and behavior are troubling and threaten increased insecurity and dissatisfaction for people when they retire americans are simply not doing what logic and their own reasoning suggests they should be doing a 1993 luntz webber merrill lynch survey found similar answers when baby boomers were asked what percentage of your annual household income do you think you should save for retirement and what percentage of your annual

incentive effects of the u s welfare system a review the author would like to acknowledge support for prior work on this topic from the u s department of health and human services and helpful comments from three anonymous referees rebecca blank howard chernick john fitzgerald irwin garfinkel peter gottschalk edward gramlich david greenberg judith gueron james heckman v joseph hotz robert hutchens michael keane frank levy larry mead michael murray robert plotnick anuradha rangarajan philip robins howard rolston jeffrey smith and daniel weinberg all opinions and errors are those of the author alone

unemployment insurance and precautionary saving abstract models of precautionary saving imply that households will hold more assets when faced with greater income uncertainty however previous empirical studies of income uncertainty have produced somewhat mixed support for the precautionary saving hypothesis in this paper we note that differences in the state contingent income stream available to workers through the unemployment insurance ui program provides an excellent source of variation for testing the presence of a precautionary savings motive simulations of a stochastic life cycle model suggest that a ui system similar to the type currently in place in the u s can lead to a significant reduction in the assets accumulated by a median worker moreover there is considerable variation in the ui benefit schedules for workers living in different states in the u s which provides an exogenous source of variation for empirically testing the precautionary saving hypothesis we carry out this test using data on expected ui benefit replacement rates and financial assets held by households in the survey of income and program participation our empirical results are consistent with the predictions of the model and suggest that reducing the ui benefit replacement rate by 50 percent would increase gross financial asset holdings by 14 percent or 241 for the average worker we also find empirical evidence that this crowd out effect of ui on household saving is stronger for those facing higher unemployment risk and weaker for older workers both of which are implications from our precautionary saving model

a dynamic program for valuing corporate securities abstract we design and implement a dynamic program for valuing corporate securities seen as derivatives on a firm s assets and computing the term structure of yield spreads and default probabilities our setting is flexible for it accommodates an extended balance sheet equality arbitrary corporate debts multiple seniority classes and a reorganization process this flexibility comes at the expense of a minor loss of efficiency the analytical approach proposed in the literature is exchanged here for a quasi analytical approach based on dynamic programming coupled with finite elements to assess our construction which shows flexibility and efficiency we carry out a numerical investigation along with a complete sensitivity analysis

the effects of welfare vehicle asset rules on vehicle assets before 1996 households were typically ineligible for welfare if they had assets worth more than 1000 where 1500 from each vehicle s value was excluded from this determination however the 1996 welfare reform act began allowing states to increase their asset limits and vehicle exclusions this may prompt low income households to reallocate resources to or from vehicles we examine the effects of state vehicle asset rules on vehicle assets results show that liberalizing asset rules increases vehicle assets and that this increase is driven largely by eligible individuals increasing vehicle assets with no evidence indicating that ineligible individuals reduce vehicle assets to become eligible

does welfare play any role in female headship decisions abstract previous studies have examined whether the welfare system has contributed to the dramatic increase in single parent families this paper explores why the results in this literature are sensitive to the presence of state fixed effects it considers one natural explanation namely that the composition of the population differs across states in ways that are related to welfare program generosity after controlling for individual effects the results provide no evidence that welfare raises the propensity to form female headed households for either whites or blacks these results illustrate the potential pitfalls of assuming that state factors are fixed over a long period of time they also suggest that previous studies may have overstated the effect of welfare programs on family structure

the effect of means tested income support for the elderly on pre retirement saving evidence from the ssi program in the u s abstract we attempt to draw inferences about behavioral responses to means tested income support for the elderly by examining the effects on saving of the supplemental security income ssi program for the aged in the u s part of this program provides payments to the poor elderly operating as a means tested public retirement program we exploit state level variation in ssi benefits to estimate the effects of ssi on saving using data from the 1984 survey of income program participation we find evidence that high ssi benefits reduce saving among households with heads who are approaching the ssi eligibility age and are likely participants in the program

income transfers and assets of the poor contrary to the predictions of the standard life cycle model many low lifetime income households accumulate little wealth relative to their incomes compared to households with high lifetime income i use data from the panel study of income dynamics and a correlated random effects generalized method of moments estimator to decompose the rich poor gaps in wealth to permanent income ratio into the portions attributable to differences in characteristics such as labor market earnings income uncertainty observed demographics and the utilization of transfer programs which may have stringent income and liquid asset tests and those attributable to differences in the estimated coefficients on the respective characteristics the results suggest that wealth to permanent income ratios are increasing in permanent labor income and income uncertainty but that transfer income with or without asset tests discourages liquid asset accumulation the decompositions indicate that most of the rich poor wealth gap is attr

structural recovery of face value at default abstract we carefully study the transmission mechanisms from default free rates to corporate bond prices within structural models of endogenous default risk the transmission critically depends on whether the model is value based or cashflow based on the assumptions made for the drift of the state variable and on the way the residual value at default is shared among bondholders the recovery assumption is crucial recovery of face value which entails receiving the same share of residual value at default regardless of the remaining maturity greatly helps explaining the empirical evidence on bond price sensitivities to interest rates

welfare effects on female headship with area effects the existing literature on welfare effects on female headship in the united states shows significant positive correlations in cross section possibly increasing over time however when geographic or area effects are permitted in the estimation these correlations either disappear or reverse in sign the results have implications for the study of welfare effects in other countries including canada where benefits vary considerably across provinces and localities within them

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

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

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

the impact of snap vehicle asset limits on household asset allocation beginning in 2001 states were given the authority to formulate their own rules on how vehicles are counted toward the asset limit in the supplemental nutritional assistance program we exploit differences in timing of the state vehicle asset policy changes to identify their effect on vehicle assets and debts car ownership liquid assets holdings as well as non housing wealth we estimate difference in differences and household fixed effects specifications and find that liberalizing vehicle asset rules increases vehicle assets of households with a high ex ante probability of program participation households also take on more debt to finance their vehicles the increase in car value can be attributed primarily to less educated single parents who already owned a car before the policy change buying more expensive cars

does means testing welfare discourage saving evidence from a change in afdc policy in the united states abstract this paper provides empirical evidence on the impact of a welfare program s asset test on the saving behavior of its target population the approach exploits a policy experiment the essential federalization of the afdc program s asset testing policy in 1981 data on female headed households from the national longitudinal survey young women are used to test the hypothesis that likely afdc users adjusted their asset stocks in response to this change the findings indicate additional saving between 1978 and 1983 of about 25 cents for each additional 1 increase in the limit in most states

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

do welfare asset limits affect household saving evidence from welfare reform we use data from the panel study of income dynamics to estimate the effect of new saving incentives implemented as part of the 1996 welfare reform on household saving economic theory predicts that loosening asset limits will increase total savings for households with a large ex ante probability of welfare receipt such as female headed households with children we follow a sample of female heads with children and find that in both absolute terms and relative to comparison groups of male heads and female heads without children there has been no effect of welfare policy changes on the saving of at risk households

cleaning house new perspectives on households and economic development abstract this paper provides a critical review of the recent literature on households and economic development three related points are developed 1 household activities can be analyzed in economic terms particularly if these terms are broadly defined to encompass such factors as risk and uncertainty 2 significant differences between the economic position of men women and children within the patriarchal household mean that it cannot be treated as an undifferentiated unit of analysis 3 microeconomic analysis of the household must be situated within a larger structural analysis of gender and age based inequalities and their interaction with class structure and national position within the world capitalist system

welfare the earned income tax credit and the labor supply of single mothers during 1984 1996 welfare and tax policy were changed to encourage work by single mothers the earned income tax credit was expanded welfare benets were cut welfare time limits were added and welfare cases were terminated medicaid for the working poor was expanded as were training programs and child care during this same time period there were unprecedented increases in the employment and hours of single mothers we show that a large share of the increase in work by single mothers can be attributed to the eitc and other tax changes with smaller shares for welfare benet cuts welfare waivers training programs and child care programs