risk sharing and internal migration over the past two decades more than half the population in rural tanzania migrated within the country profoundly changing the nature of traditional institutions such as informal risk sharing mass internal migration has created geographically disperse networks on which the authors collected detailed panel data by quantifying how shocks and consumption co vary across linked households they show how migrants unilaterally insure their extended family members at home this finding contradicts risk sharing models based on reciprocity but is consistent with assistance driven by social norms migrants sacrifice 3 to 7 percent of their very substantial consumption growth to provide this insurance which seems too trivial to have any stifling effect on their growth through migration

modeling household behavior in developing countries discussion a large and growing body of literature has examined how agricultural households cope with risk much of the work has focused on which types of households are better able to smooth consumption testing whether households with more resources and greater access to income smoothing institutions such as credit markets or well functioning labor markets exhibit greater consumption smoothing however income shocks may have different effects upon different individuals within households and differences in individual ability to smooth income or consumption may have welfare consequences which go beyond foregone income the development of collective household models challenges the assumption that individuals within households maximize a single utility function the assumption of income pooling has also been rejected in a growing body of empirical research on intrahousehold resource allocation however research on risk pooling within households and differences in individual abilities to smooth consumption is relatively new selected papers are discussed

credit market constraints consumption smoothing and the accumulation of durable production assets in low income countries investments in bullocks in india in this paper we formulate and estimate a finite horizon structural dynamic model of agricultural investment behavior that incorporates the major features of low income agricultural environments income uncertainty constraints on borrowing and rental markets and the use of investment assets to generate income and smooth consumption the model is fit to longitudinal indian household data on farm profits bullock stocks and pump sets the estimated structural parameters are used to assess the effects on the life cycle accumulation of bullocks agricultural profits and welfare associated with complete markets and bullock liquidity and with second best policies that provide assured sources of income to farmers and weather insurance

how resilient are labour markets to natural disasters the case of the 1998 bangladesh flood abstract natural disasters devastate economies as they impede capital accumulation the resilience of labour markets is crucial for the poor who rely on labour to reduce risk we evaluate how the 1998 flood of the century affected wages in bangladesh we find short term declines in agricultural and non agricultural wages agricultural workers who moved towards non agricultural employment to cope benefitted through a lower percentage reduction in short term wages endowed with human capital salaried workers were unable to mitigate income risk extending the eligibility of credit access or relief programmes may preserve local businesses and their employees in the years following a flood

specific experience household structure and intergenerational transfers farm family land and labor arrangements in developing countries data from indian rural household survey was used to test th hypothesis that the coexistence in traditional rural societies of extended intergenerational families infrequent land sales and high reliance on family members as farm laborers is the result of the economic advantages which accrue from the knowledge gained by farming a particular ploy of land over a long period of time the land specific experience of elderly members of a intergenerational household who farmed the land as a child and then as an adult are expecially critical in adverse weather years most previous investigators attributed the existence of multigenerational households the use of family members rather than hired laboreds and the infrequency of land sales to deficiencies in the market i e labor market imperfections and an absence of capital insurance and asset markets in the present investigations these same characteristics are viewed as having an economic advantages a model for estimating the contribution of the experience of the elderly household members to agricultural profits was developed and applied to data from a 3 year panel study of 2900 indian rural farm households the data was collected between 1968 71 by the national council of applied economic research the survey collected information on farm profits farm inputs demographic characteristics and the effects of weather conditions on profits a major limitation of the study was a lack of information on the duration of land ownership age of household members was substituted as a proxy for duration of ownership findings were consistent withe the hypothesis in poor agricultural years gross returns for households which contained an elderly household member were greater than the gross returns for comparable households which did not contain an elderly member the economic advantages of specific knowledge embodied in the experienced elderly farmer were comparable to the economic advantages which accrued to households whose members were more educated the hypothesis cannot fully explain the existence of intergenerational families since there is a relatively large proportion of such families among nonfarm families in many countries including india findings suggest that intergenerational families may provide for more occupational diversity and thereby reduce income risks the specific experience hypothesis has policy implications if technological changes are introduced the value of specific experience may be lost and the frequency of intergenerational households may decline the hypothesis may also explain why farmers are reluctant to agree to land redistribution and consolidation schemes this reluctance may disappear after sufficient technological change has occurred

educational homogamy how much is opportunities individuals match on length and type of education we find that around half of the systematic sorting on education is explained by the tendency of individuals to marry someone who went to the same educational institution or to an institution near them this may be due to low search frictions or selection of people with the same preferences into the same institutions the residual half of the systematic sorting on education is a direct effect of partners education which is potentially explained by complementarities in household production in couples with same education

child fostering in africa when labor and schooling motives may coexist abstract the paper proposes a theoretical framework for understanding purposive child fostering in africa whereby a non orphaned child is sent to live temporarily with relatives in the model adults decide whether to foster in or out a child in conjunction with other household choices e g own time allocation between market and non market activities children s amount of work and schooling by allowing for positive externalities from fostering and thus asymmetric motives for fostering in labor and out human capital the proposed framework predicts that school age children are sent to better off households and that some families may foster in and out simultaneously the model identifies the conditions under which all actors involved children included may benefit from fostering arrangements but also points to situations where fostering may become an opportunity to marginalize a subset of children the paper aims to provide a sound theoretical foundation that sheds light on why there exists mixed empirical evidence on the effects of fostering on children s well being and cautions against demonizing non parent residence as unequivocally detrimental to children

consumption smoothing and the welfare consequences of social insurance in developing economies studies of risk in developing economies have focused on consumption fluctuations as a measure of the value of insurance a common view in the literature is that the welfare costs of risk and benefits of social insurance are small if income shocks do not cause large consumption fluctuations we present a simple model showing that this conclusion is incorrect if the consumption path is smooth because individuals are highly risk averse hence social safety nets could be valuable in low income economies even when consumption is not very sensitive to shocks

international migration the brain drain and poverty a cross country analysis the aim of the paper is threefold first it empirically investigates the effect of international migration on poverty in origin countries using data from a cross country analysis second it explores the specific part of the income distribution from which migrants are drawn by comparing the effect of international migration on different income quintiles of the population finally given that the selection of migrants depends not only on the income level of their households but also on the skill levels of movers the paper casts some light on the implications of the emigration of skilled workers on poverty this article shows that the stock of international migrants have a positive effect on the income of the poor while it does not have a significant impact on the income of the middle and top quintiles of the population in particular a 10 per cent increase in the per capita stock of migrants resident in oecd nations augments the income of the poor by 1 per cent on average and ceteris paribus finally the poverty reducing effect of migration holds even when the emigration process selects the best and the brightest

property rights land liquidity and internal migration in the early twentieth century a large number of households resettled from the european to the asian part of the russian empire we propose that this dramatic migration was rooted in institutional changes initiated by the 1906 stolypin land titling reform one might expect better property rights to decrease the propensity to migrate by improving economic conditions in the reform area however this titling reform increased land liquidity and actually promoted migration by easing financial constraints and decreasing opportunity costs treating the reform as a quasi natural experiment we employ difference in differences analysis on a panel of province level data that describe migration and economic conditions we find that the reform had a sizeable effect on migration to verify the land liquidity effect we exploit variation in the number of households participating in the reform this direct measure of the reform mechanism estimates that land liquidity explains approximately 18 of migration during this period

migrants and housing investments theory and evidence from nigeria the dominance of housing may reflect limitations in the menu of investment choices available to migrants in the country of origin in many developing countries individuals face relatively few savings opportunities where productive assets such as land farm assets are associated with high risks and or low rates of return housing investments offer unique advantages in that they are durable highly visible and associated with low risk and monitoring requirements however there are some important drawbacks associated with housing investments in particular where resale and rental markets for housing are not well developed migrants housing assets may be relatively illiquid and irreversible in the next section i provide some background on general patterns of investment behavior among migrants here the evidence on housing investments is discussed for a rich set of migrant sending and receiving countries in section iii i develop the conceptual framework for understanding migrants housing investment decisions section iv provides a description of the data sources section v outlines the empirical strategy in section vi i discuss the empirical findings section vii presents conclusions excerpt

remittances and household wealth after conflict a case study on urban burundi few studies have researched the use of remittances in conflict affected contexts this study analyzes unique data from burundi testing three hypotheses relative deprivation investment and insurance derived from new economics of labor migration studies employing propensity score matching results show that remittances are common among wealthier households rejecting the relative deprivation hypothesis remittances have strong effects on non productive assets such as living conditions and food security and weak effects on productive assets such as asset ownership poorer households invest mostly in non productive assets suggesting that remittances are insurance for the poor whereas wealthier households seem largely unaffected by remittances

parental human capital investment and old age transfers from children is it a loan contract or reciprocity for indonesian families abstract this paper proposes two alternative models of intergenerational transfers linking parental investment in human capital of children to old age support the first model formulates these transfers as a pure loan contract and the second model as self enforcing reciprocity both models predict neutrality of intergenerational redistribution of resources within the family also known as the difference in income transfer derivatives property two models however provide different reasons for the failure of this property and yield different policy implications for parental human capital investment and provision of old age support specification tests on the indonesian family life survey data reject the pure loan model in favor of the reciprocity model the estimated difference in income transfer derivatives for this data is found to be significantly higher than the difference estimated by altonji hayashi and kotlikoff altonji et al 1992 altonji j g hayashi f and kotlikoff l j 1992 is the extended family altruistically linked direct tests using micro data the american economic review vol 82 5 1177 98 for the u s psid data

vulnerability of victims of civil conflicts empirical evidence for the displaced population in colombia summary internal conflicts and the forced displacement often caused by such conflicts impose a heavy burden on the civilian population and greatly damage a community s overall welfare the present study employs a household level survey administered to 2 322 colombian displaced households to estimate changes in household welfare after displacement and to assess aggregate consumption levels in destination sites we also assess whether households are able to smooth consumption and we analyze the strategies they are compelled to adopt in order to cope our results indicate that victims of civil conflict face difficulties in generating income are unable to rely on usual risk sharing mechanisms and are forced to draw upon costly coping strategies in order to smooth consumption the vulnerability of displaced households and the possibility of falling into poverty traps highlight the need to design and implement specific policies for victims of internal conflict in order to cope with the displacement shock

marriage and consumption insurance what s love got to do with it when markets are incomplete individuals may choose to marry to diversify their labor income risk love however can complicate the picture if love is fleeting or the resolution of agents income uncertainty occurs predominantly later in life then marriages with good economic matches last longer in contrast if love is persistent and the resolution of uncertainty to agents income occurs early then marriages with good economic matches are more likely to be caught short with too little love to save a marriage consequently once married the partners will be more likely to divorce evidence is provided to distinguish between these alternative scenarios

precautionary behavior migrant networks and household consumption decisions an empirical analysis using household panel data from rural china abstract we develop a test of precautionary behavior in the consumption decisions of rural agricultural households among surveyed households facing a median level of consumption risk 10 of savings can be attributed to a precautionary motive and this increases to 15 for households with consumption per capita below the poverty line we next use distant lags of local rainfall shocks uncorrelated with current consumption growth to identify the size of migrant networks outside the village and then present evidence that both poor and nonpoor households engage in less precautionary saving as the size of the village migrant network increases

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

winners and losers among a refugee hosting population abstractthe impact of a sudden mass influx of forced migrants on the hosting economy is understudied and not well understood using a household panel data set for the kagera region in tanzania we test the impact of the mass refugee presence on the welfare of the local population our identification strategy exploits variations in the timing of arrival as well as the spatial distribution of rwandese and burundi refugees we find a positive and aggregate effect but households are affected differently depending on their main initial occupation

who gets the job referral evidence from a social networks experiment we use recruitment into a laboratory experiment in kolkata india to analyze how job networks select individuals for employment opportunities we present evidence that individuals face a tradeoff between choosing the most qualified individual for the job and the individual who is ideal from the perspective of their social network the experiment allows randomly selected subjects to refer members of their social networks to subsequent rounds of the experiment and varies the incentive schemes offered to these participants we find that when faced with performance pay individuals are more likely to refer co workers and less likely to refer family members high ability participants who are offered performance pay recruit referrals who perform significantly better on a cognitive ability task and also prove to be more reliable as evidenced by their choices in the trust game and performance on an effort task

the crowding out effect of formal insurance on informal risk sharing an experimental study abstract this paper investigates the crowding out effect of formal insurance on informal risk sharing arrangements via theory and laboratory experiment our model and simulation predict that the crowding out of private transfers is often more than one for one and will reduce the total risk coverage furthermore the existence of a moderate degree of altruism exaggerates the crowding out effect especially when there is an ex ante income inequality these predictions are mostly supported by the laboratory experiment except that the crowding out effect is not more than one for one and hence the total risk coverage is not significantly reduced by formal insurance

deep impact geo simulations as a policy toolkit for natural disasters adverse post natural disaster outcomes in low income regions like elevated internal migration levels and low consumption levels are the result of market failures poor mechanisms for stabilizing income and missing insurance markets which force the affected population to respond and adapt to the shock they face in a spatial environment with multiple locations with independent but inter connected markets these transitions quickly become complex and highly non linear due to the feedback loops between the micro individual level decisions and the meso location wise market decisions to capture these continuously evolving micro meso interactions this paper presents a spatially explicit bottom up agent based model to analyze natural disaster like shocks to low income regions the aim of the model is to temporally and spatially track how population distributions income and consumption levels evolve in order to identify low income workers that are food insecure the model is applied to the 2005 earthquake in northern pakistan which faced catastrophic losses and high levels of displacement in a short time span and with market disruptions resulted in high levels of food insecurity the model is calibrated to pre crisis trends and shocked using distance based output and labor loss functions to replicate the earthquake impact model results show how various factors like existing income and saving levels distance from the fault line and connectivity to other locations can give insights into the spatial and temporal emergence of vulnerabilities the simulation framework presented here leaps beyond existing modeling efforts which usually deals with macro long term loss estimates and allows policy makers to come up with informed short term policies in an environment where data is non existent policy response is time dependent and resources are limited

storm damage and risk preferences panel evidence from germany individuals risk preferences may change after experiencing external socio economic or natural shocks theoretical predictions and empirical studies suggest that risk taking may increase or decrease after experiencing shocks so far the empirical evidence is sparse especially when it comes to developed countries we contribute to this literature by investigating whether experiencing financial and health related damage caused by storms affects risk preferences of individuals in germany using unique panel data we find that household heads were more risk seeking after they experienced storm damage we do not find evidence of exposure to storm per se regardless of damage experience which suggests that household heads have to suffer damage for their risk preferences to be affected these results are robust across a battery of alternative model specifications and alternative storm damage measures magnitude of financial damage we rule out other potential explanations such as health related and economic shocks the self reported storm damage data is broadly confirmed by regional storm damage data provided by the insurance industry while we cannot identify the channels through which experiencing storm damage affects risk preferences from our data we suggest and discuss some potential channels the results may have important policy implications as risk preferences affect for instance individuals savings and investment behaviour adoption of self protection and self insurance strategies and technology adoption

measurement error in recreation demand models the joint estimation of participation site choice and site characteristics abstract in the demand for recreational fishing sites an important explanatory variable differentiating sites is the unobserved expected catch rate since the observed catch rate is subject to sampling variability using the average of a site s observed catch rates causes the parameter estimator on catch to be biased downward we develop and demonstrate a solution to this errors in variables problem when there are repeated measurements on the catch rate consistent and efficient estimates of both the demand parameters and the expected catch rates are obtained by simultaneously estimating them by maximum likelihood an empirical example demonstrates the importance of simultaneous estimation

assortative matching and risk sharing abstract this paper explores the sorting patterns in a two sided matching market where agents facing different risks match to share them when preference belongs to the class of harmonic absolute risk aversion hara the risk premium is perfectly transferable within each partnership thus a stable match minimizes the social cost of risk in the systematic risk model where agents are ranked by their holdings of a common risky asset the convexity of the joint risk premium in joint risk size leads to negative assortative matching nam in the idiosyncratic risk model where agents are ranked by their independent riskiness in the sense of second order stochastic dominance ssd nam arises when preference exhibits decreasing absolute risk aversion dara in the sense of ross and riskier background risk leads to more risk averse behavior however nam may fail to arise when riskier background risk leads to more risk tolerant behavior

the formation of risk sharing networks this paper examines the formation of risk sharing networks in the rural philippines we find that geographic proximity possibly correlated with kinship is a major determinant of mutual insurance links among villagers age and wealth differences also play an important role in contrast income correlation and differences in occupation are not determinants of network links reported network links have a strong effect on subsequent gifts and loans gifts between network partners are found to respond to shocks and to differences in health status from this we conclude that intra village mutual insurance links are largely determined by social and geographical proximity and are only weakly the result of purposeful diversification of income risk the paper also makes a methodological contribution to the estimation of dyadic models

periodic high risk as a cause of fertility decline in a changing rural environment survival strategies in the 1980 1983 south indian drought in the attempt to explain persistent high fertility in much of the third world attention has been drawn both to current returns from child labor and to the mitigation or avoidance of future risks the latter can be subdivided into meeting emergencies while the parental generation is still of working age and providing for old age or even safeguarding the transmission of family property on parental death the problems of old age have recently received most attention and they may well be of paramount importance in many societies yet in a research program that we have conducted in rural south india since 1979 the reasons given for demographic behavior have more frequently emphasized the need to plan strategies to meet periodic crisis than to ensure old age support 2 nevertheless one should not underemphasize the latter merely because the problem is predictable and the solutions understood in the study area for the great majority of the aged the support system still worked well 3 in contrast in our investigations of marriage fertility control and education we repeatedly discovered that a fundamental consideration with regard to parental decisions in these areas was to strengthen the ability of the family to withstand periodic crises 4 by far the most important type of crisis in this dry drought prone area was recurrent famines resulting

income shocks consumption wealth and human capital evidence from russia abstract using the russia longitudinal monitoring survey this article investigates how russian households consumption responds to income shocks and in particular how household wealth and human capital affect the households ability to smooth consumption an instrumental variable estimation method with household fixed effects is implemented after correcting for potential problems of sample attrition using the inverse probability weighting method the article finds that household consumption in russia is only partially protected from idiosyncratic shocks the analysis also provides evidence that wealthier households can better smooth their consumption furthermore changes in income have less impact on consumption when households have members with higher education levels wealth effects are more pronounced in rural areas while education effects are stronger for urban households

on the economics of nonmarket transfers the role of altruism abstract we examine altruistically motivated consumption transfers in an effort to account for nonmarket transfers we find that altruistic linkages lead to autonomous negotiation free transfers and that such transfers positively respond to stronger altruism we also find that given fairly natural assumptions concerning the altruism parameters mutual altruism does not necessarily result in group social harmony even though its rise narrows the conflict range in spite of enhanced transfers prompted by such a rise both parties may end up worse off these results help explain why in some social environments a shift toward market oriented transfers and exchanges may be quicker than in others as the disadvantages decline in utility associated with intragroup altruistic linkages outweigh the advantages

altruism and beyond an economic analysis of transfers and exchanges within families and groups 1 introduction 2 altruism transfers and wellbeing 3 the timing of intergenerational transfers an implication 4 an exchange implication of transfers the demonstration effect 5 transfers by migrants a strategic motive for remittances 6 exchange with recognition costs an explanation of migrants performance 7 intrafamilial transfers and exchanges forming and sustaining altruism

are international remittances altruism or insurance evidence from guyana using multiple migrant households abstract while international remittances provide significant disposable income for many households in less developed countries there is no consensus on migrants remittance motivation two principal competing explanations for remittances are altruism and risk sharing this paper employs previously unanalyzed data to bring new evidence to the debate we develop a simple theoretical model that yields distinct testable predictions for each motivation among the model s testable predictions is differential remittance behavior by migrants from households with multiple versus single migrants under altruism and risk sharing our estimation finds significant differences in remittance behavior of multiple and single migrants and these differences support the altruistic incentive to remit

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

motivations to remit evidence from botswana in this article a theory of motivations to send remittances is described and tested with data from botswana altruism is one of the motivations tested and found to be an insufficient explanation for remittances among migrants in botswana a refinement of the model stipulates a modified altruism or enlightened self interest in this model the relationship between the migrant and family is tempered by an implicit understanding of mutual benefit the household strategy may be to encourage some members to migrate as a means of spreading risk and sharing gains the household strategy is similar to an insurance policy where migration is to places where market potential is high the risks incurred might be high the example is given of migration during a drought in botswana migrant remittances were greater in households with more cattle or households with more to lose drought alone was not statistically related to remittances increases in remittances were related to increased levels of education it is suggested that repayment was the motive for parents investment in migrants education migrants gains are identified as the potential for an inheritance the security of channeling investments through a trusted family member and security in having a home to return to it is pointed out that the altruism and family remittances from urban migration were strategies that bridged the simple dynamic of either urban development or rural development impacting on family welfare it is suggested that household models of economy adopt some measure to express the relationship of household wealth to remittances from urban migrants

no toilet no bride intrahousehold bargaining in male skewed marriage markets in india abstract haryana state in india is characterized by widespread discrimination against women including a severe population level sex imbalance in this context an innovative social marketing campaign which targeted pro sanitation messages to households active in local marriage markets was implemented with the goal of increasing toilet ownership this paper estimates the impact of this program known colloquially as no toilet no bride on household level latrine ownership private sanitation coverage in haryana increased by 21 specifically among households with boys active on the marriage market this effect is larger and concentrated in marriage markets where women are relatively scarce and absent when women are relatively abundant which together suggest the program operated by successfully linking sanitation outcomes with marriage market competition induced by local scarcities of women due to male biased sex ratios

should we track migrant households when collecting household panel data household relocation economic mobility and attrition biases in the rural philippines based on household panel data that tracked migrant households with an additional survey cost of 17 percent this article describes behavior of household relocation and quantifies the extent of attrition biases in estimating the determinants of percapita household consumption and of its growth rate many households relocate for non economic reasons and to rural destinations while the small number of urban migrants improved their wellbeing faster than did others such heterogeneity among migrants may be a reason behind the negligible attrition biases caused by the omission of migrants in the inference on the average behavioral coefficients among the original population

testing efficient risk sharing with heterogeneous risk preferences previous papers have tested e cient risk sharing under the assumption of identical risk preferences in this paper we show that if in the data households have heterogeneous risk preferences the tests proposed in the past reject e ciency even if households share risk e ciently to address this issue we propose a method that enables one to test e ciency even when households have difierent preferences for risk the method is composed of three tests the flrst one can be used to determine whether in the data under investigation households have homogeneous risk preferences the second and third test can be used to evaluate e cient risk sharing when the hypothesis of homogeneous risk preferences is rejected we use this method to test e cient risk sharing in rural india using the flrst test we strongly reject the hypothesis of identical risk preferences we then test e ciency with and without the assumption of preference homogeneity in the flrst case we reject e cient risk sharing at the village and caste level in the second case we still reject e ciency at the village level but we cannot reject this hypothesis at the caste level this flnding suggests that the relevant risk sharing unit in rural india is the caste and not the village

income smoothing and consumption smoothing one way that risk averse households protect consumption levels is to borrow and use insurance mechanisms another way common in low income economies is to diversify economic activities and make conservative production and employment choices households thus tend toward limiting exposure only to shocks that can be handled with available credit and insurance typically both types of mechanisms are studied independently but much more can be learned by studying them together first we obtain a more complete picture of risks costs and insurance possibilities second it opens the way to considering biases in standard tests of credit and insurance

moving forward looking back the impact of migration and remittances on assets consumption and credit constraints in the rural philippines abstract this paper investigates the impact of migration and remittances on asset holdings consumption expenditures and credit constraint status of households in origin communities using a unique longitudinal data set from bukidnon philippines taking into account the endogeneity of the number of migrants and remittances received a larger number of migrant children reduces the values of nonland assets and total expenditures per adult equivalent however remittances have a positive impact on housing consumer durables nonland assets total expenditures per adult equivalent and educational expenditures enabling asset accumulation and investment in human capital neither migration nor remittances affects current credit constraint status

fertilizer use risk and off farm labor markets in the semi arid tropics of india a two period model is developed in which a risk averse farmer uses off farm labor to smooth consumption leading to greater use of fertilizer fertilizer demand is shown to increase with the depth of the off farm labor market controlling for exogenous weather risk farmers use more fertilizer the lower the unemployment rate and the higher the share of nonagricultural work in total off farm labor the results suggest that off farm labor markets and own farm production may be complementary in risky production environments so that policies which promote the depth of the off farm labor market in low income areas may also bolster farm productivity copyright 2003 oxford university press

trade tastes and nutrition in india this paper introduces habit formation into an otherwise standard model of international trade household tastes evolve over time to favor foods consumed as a child the opening of trade causes preferred goods to rise in price as these were relatively inexpensive in autarky neglecting the correlation between tastes and agro climatic endowments overstates the short run nutritional gains from agricultural trade liberalization and masks potential caloric losses for laborers i examine the predictions of this model of trade with habit formation using household survey data from india both by looking across indian regions and by examining the consumption patterns of inter state migrants

do private transfers displace the benefits of public transfers evidence from south africa abstract this paper investigates whether government transfer programs displace or crowd out private support focusing on a large increase in state old age pensions in south africa using data spanning the period of the expansion we find that each rand of public pension income to the elderly leads to a 0 25 0 30 rand reduction in private transfers from children living away from home however despite the large increase in income there were no significant changes in migration labor supply or household composition we also show that evaluations of the distributional effects of the pension are overstated when crowding out is ignored

risk sharing across communities this paper studies cross community risk sharing there is now a large body of theoretical and empirical work on informal insurance where people mitigate risk by sharing income a consistent empirical finding is that risk sharing is not complete within villages often the observed sets of individuals 2 one reason researchers suspect is that risk sharing does not take place at the village level but between individuals and families 3 we build a theoretical model where risksharing takes place between pairs of agents there are idiosyncratic shocks to individual income and community level shocks we consider how the opportunity for cross community links affects the shape and efficiency of risk sharing arrangements we find that when links across villages form there can be less risk sharing within a village welfare is higher for those directly or indirectly connected across villages but lower for those with no path connecting them to the other village overall welfare can be higher thus empirical findings that insurance within a village is not complete is not necessarily evidence of an inefficient pattern of risk sharing relations rather the finding is consistent with risk sharing patterns that involve cross community relations and such patterns may yield higher aggregate welfare despite incomplete insurance within a village this paper makes two contributions first it demonstrates the importance of a network analysis by examining pairwise incentives to form relations and the resulting pattern we can see new risk sharing outcomes second with this network model we show how informal risk sharing across communities has both aggregate and distributional effects to study network outcomes we posit a simple two stage model first we provide a benchmark model for risk sharing for a given network then working backwards we consider incentives to form risk sharing links 4 to illustrate consider a rural population and ask how people might link

wealth weather risk and the composition and profitability of agricultural investments despite the growing evidence that farmers in low income environments are risk averse there has been little empirical evidence on the importance of risk in shaping the actual allocation of production resources among farmers differentiated by wealth the authors use panel data on investments in rural india to examine how the composition of productive and nonproductive asset holdings varies across farmers with different levels of total wealth and across farmers facing different degrees of weather risk income variability is a prominent feature of the experience of rural agents in low income countries the authors report evidence based on measures of rainfall variability that the agricultural investment portfolio behavior of farmers in such settings reflects risk aversion due evidently to limitations on consumption soothing mechanisms such as crop insurance or credit markets the authors results suggest that uninsured weather risk is a significant cause of lower efficiency and lower average incomes a one standard deviation decrease in weather risk measured by the standard deviation of the timing of the rainy season would raise average profits by up to 35 percent among farmers in the lowest wealth quartile moreover rainfall variability induces a more unequal distribution of average incomes for a given distribution of wealth wealthier farmers are willing to absorb significant risk without giving up profits to reduce production risk smaller farmers have to invest their limited wealth in ways that reduce their exposure to risk at the cost of lower profit rates the authors found that at high levels of rainfall variability differences in rates of profit per unit of agricultural assets were similar across classes of wealth but over the sample range of rainfall variability these rates of profit were always higher for the poorer farmers than for the wealthier ones suggesting that the disadvantages of small farmers in risk diffusion are more than offset by their labor cost advantage

wage and employment effects of malawi s fertilizer subsidy program this article uses three waves of nationally representative household level panel data from malawi to estimate how a large scale fertilizer subsidy program impacts the agricultural labor market known as ganyu in that country i find that when looking across the entire population of smallholders receiving an additional 100 kg of subsidized fertilizer causes the average household to supply about three fewer days of ganyu the fertilizer subsidy program also has a small positive effect on the probability that a household demands agricultural labor with the results approaching statistical significance in addition a 10 kg increase in the average amount of subsidized fertilizer acquired per household in a community boosts the median agricultural wage rate by 1 4 in that community the increase in wage rates translates to a us 1 40 per year increase in average household income in the years after malawi s subsidy program was scaled up and a us 1 86 per year increase in average household income for those who sold their labor before the subsidy program was scaled up this finding suggests that households who sell their labor off farm may experience some small spillover benefit from the program in the form of higher agricultural wage rates

determinants and effects of income diversification amongst farm households in burkina faso using four years of household data from three agroecological zones in burkina faso sahelian sudanian and guinean the article examines the determinants and effects of household income diversification harvest shortfalls and terms of trade are found to drive diversification but land constraints do not income diversification is associated with higher incomes and food consumption and more stable income and consumption over years

on the costs of food price fluctuations in low income countries abstract conventional welfare measures of the costs of food price fluctuations in low income countries are extended to allow for both economic growth and food security effects the analysis reveals that growth and food security effects may dominate more conventional welfare costs of food price fluctuations although estimating the empirical magnitude of the effects is hampered by the lack of consensus on the extent to which food price fluctuations actually reduce economic growth and food security even if the welfare costs of food price fluctuations are high there are many challenges to the design and successful implementation of price stabilization schemes

how does risk management influence production decisions evidence from a field experiment weather is a key source of income risk especially in emerging market economies this paper uses a randomized controlled trial involving indian farmers to study how an innovative rainfall insurance product affects production decisions the authors find that insurance provision induces farmers to invest more in higher return but rainfall sensitive cash crops particularly among educated farmers this shift in behavior occurs ex ante when realized monsoon rainfall is still uncertain the results suggest that financial innovation can mitigate the real effects of uninsured production risk

migration risk and liquidity constraints in el salvador abstract this article utilizes panel data from el salvador to investigate the use of transnational migration as an ex post risk management strategy i show that adverse agricultural conditions in el salvador increase both migration to the united states and remittances sent back to el salvador i show that in the absence of any agricultural shocks the probability that a household sent members to the united states would have decreased on average by 24 26 i also show that the 2001 earthquakes reduced net migration to the united states a one standard deviation increase in earthquake damage reduced the average probability of northward migration by 37 11 the evidence suggests that the effects of the earthquakes had more to do with households retaining labor at home to cope with the effects of the disaster than with the earthquakes disrupting migration financing

will you marry me a perspective on the gender gap abstract this paper develops a general equilibrium model of the gender wage gap the difference in earnings is a consequence of a demographic regularity that men tend to marry younger women which may limit women s labor mobility and hence their average earnings however couples are always free not to marry and do so only if it is in each s self interest the intrafamily allocation of resources is determined via non cooperative bargaining this leads to interesting interactions between the game played by husband and wife on the one hand and the competitive environment in which they are immersed on the other the predictions resulting from this model s interplay between locational choice and family bargaining are consistent with the observation that the increasing stress put by women on their careers over the past 30 years has been contemporaneous with reductions in both marriage rates and the gender gap the model provides insight into the consequences of this for the relative welfare of men and women as well as exploring its wider economic implications

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

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

income and livelihoods in the war in afghanistan we explore the impact of the insurgency and military deployment on the livelihoods of local communities in afghanistan we use monthly wages and commodity prices at the provincial level over the period 2003 09 and look for their response to conflict events and isaf deployment overall we find that prices are more sensitive to deployment than to attacks commodity prices are not significantly affected by insurgent violence which is consistent with coping strategies already in place on the opposite military deployment is associated with an increase in the levels of wages and commodity prices as isaf is a new source of uncertainty

rearranging the family income support and elderly living arrangements in a low income country this study examines the link between income and living arrangements our identification comes from exploiting a discontinuity in age in the benefit formula for the social pension in south africa in contrast to previous literature we find no association between pension income and elderly independence we do find that potential beneficiaries alter their household structure when they become pension eligible prime working age women depart and the presence of children younger than five and young women of childbearing age increase these shifts in coresidence patterns are consistent with a setting where prime age women have comparative advantage in work away from extended family relative to younger women the additional income from old age support may induce a change in living arrangements to exploit this advantage

decreasing relative risk aversion risk sharing and the permanent income hypothesis this article develops a method for testing the risk sharing hypothesis rsh against various versions of the permanent income hypothesis pih while allowing for heterogeneity in risk preferences across households using 1 year and longer differences in household total nondurable consumption data from indian villages we find evidence that favors the rsh over the pih at the village level

private information and altruism in bidding roscas this article studies how altruism improves allocations in a private information environment where strategic behaviour reduces economic welfare a theoretical analysis establishes that in an environment characterised by uncertainty and private information outcomes of auctions in rotating savings and credit associations roscas are more efficient when bidders preferences are altruistic rather than selfish a semi parametric structural estimation technique for rosca auctions is presented a parametric structural estimation identifies interactions between group characteristics and bidder altruism it is found that effective leadership and intra group diversity are associated with a greater extent of bidder altruism and thus more efficient intra rosca allocations

credit constraints job mobility and entrepreneurship evidence from a property reform in china this paper provides new evidence on the impact of private property rights on entrepreneurship i explore this issue in the context of a housing reform in urban china that allowed state employees renting state owned housing the opportunity to buy their homes at subsidized prices using the reform as an exogenous change in the capital constraints and mobility costs that inuence individuals entry

remittances and portfolio values an inquiry using immigrants from africa europe and the americas summary using a recent spanish database we show that remittances respond to cross country differences in portfolio values behavior consistent with immigrant s access to trans national networks responsiveness to portfolio variables is found to persist regardless of education level there are however differences in the portfolio variables to which immigrants respond as we would expect given migrants diverse backgrounds region of origin and motive for emigrating remitting patterns are found to change with the length of migration spells suggestive that remittances sent for portfolio motives become more likely as the immediate needs of home family are addressed and asset accumulation becomes more important

a two season agricultural household model of output and price uncertainty abstract this paper presents a two season model of a household s production consumption labor supply and storage decisions in an environment of output and price risk the analytical results in this study are markedly different from those of models prevalent in the mainstream of the agricultural household literature the empirical analysis that uses panel data from a village in india provides support for the theoretical results and underscores the seasonal dimension of the farmers choice problems the results also show that ignoring risk or risk averse preferences may introduce substantial downward bias in optimal response estimates

migration family and risk diversification this article proposes a formal model of migration in which workers are heterogeneous and markets are stochastically correlated we derive and characterize the optimal migration pattern of a family we show that migration can take place even when migrants earn less abroad and surprisingly when earnings in the foreign country are riskier for every member of the family moreover it may well be an optimal arrangement to have only dependents migrate thus rationalizing the recent dependent oriented migration flows from places like hong kong and taiwan we provide some evidence in support of our theory

migration and economic mobility in tanzania evidence from a tracking survey this study explores the extent to which migration has contributed to improved living standards of individuals in tanzania using longitudinal data on individuals the authors estimate the impact of migration on consumption growth between 1991 and 2004 the analysis addresses concerns about heterogeneity and unobservable factors correlated with both income changes and the decision to migrate the findings show that migration adds 36 percentage points to consumption growth during a period of considerable growth in consumption these results are robust to numerous tests and alternative specifications unpacking the findings the analysis finds that moving out of agriculture is correlated with much higher growth than staying in agriculture although growth is always higher in any sector if one physically moves economic mobility is strongly linked to geographic mobility the puzzle is why more people do not move if returns to geographic mobility are high the evidence is consistent with models in which exit barriers are set by home communities through social and family norms that prevent migration of certain categories of people

networks in economic development this chapter surveys the implications of some studies in network economics research for economic development we focus on information flow and risk sharing two topics where work in theory empirics and policy analysis have been especially intensive and complementary in analysing information we distinguish models of information diffusion and aggregation highlight how different models imply very different guidance regarding the right way to seed information in discussing risk sharing we look at the key frictions that impede efficient informal insurance and some potential unintended consequences when policymakers intervene to help throughout we stress practical insights that can be used with limited measurement of the details of networks

the economics of exogamous marriage in small scale societies marriage is a core institution in almost every human society including small scale societies based on foraging or subsistence agriculture a crucial dimension of the marriage systems in such societies involves endogamy and exogamy that is the choice of a marriage partner from within one s own community or from an outside community we develop a model in which the exogamy rate is higher when good local matches are scarce due to small community sizes and when productivity differs across communities due to environmental shocks these theoretical predictions are supported by econometric analysis of data from the standard cross cultural sample jel d13 j11 n30 z13

consumption and investment in resource pooling family networks this paper examines a novel motive for resource pooling in family networks in rural economies to relax credit constraints and facilitate investment in non collateralizeable assets for which credit market imperfections are most binding we thus complement established literatures examining risk sharing motives for resource transfers within family networks as well as motives based on kinship tax obligations we do so exploiting the progresa program data in which family networks can be identified households are subject to large exogenous resource inflows and detailed responses on consumption and an array of investments can be tracked in a household panel over five years we find that for every dollar that accrues to the family network through progresa transfers food consumption expenditures increase by around 65c for both households eligible for progresa and ineligible members of the same family network hence the marginal propensity of families to invest save out of every dollar is around 35 and we document how this is channelled towards easing credit constraints poorer network members face in financing non collateralizable investments into their children s human capital we show these consumption and investment benefits of being embedded within a family network are sustained five years after households first experience resource transfers from progresa hence the interplay between resource inflows and resource pooling by family networks can place network members on sustained paths out of poverty this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

female migration for marriage implications from the land reform in rural tanzania summary using the longitudinal household panel data drawn from rural tanzania 1991 2004 this study investigates impacts of the land reform on women s marriage motivated relocation during the period under study several villages that initially banned a widow s land inheritance abolished this discrimination taking a differences in differences approach this study finds that the probability of males marrying in a village increased by altering its customary land inheritance rule in favor of widows in the light of the traditional system favoring exogamous and patrilocal marriage this finding indicates that females relocate at marriage in response to the favorable land tenure system at the destination

climate change and labour allocation in rural mexico evidence from annual fluctuations in weather this paper evaluates the effects of annual fluctuations in weather on employment in rural mexico to gain insight into the potential labour market implications of climate change using a 28 year panel on individual employment we find that years with a high occurrence of heat lead to a reduction in local employment particularly for wage work and non farm labour extreme heat also increases migration domestically from rural to urban areas and internationally to the u s a medium emissions scenario implies that increases in extreme heat may decrease local employment by up to 1 4 and climate change may increase migration by 1 4 this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

the economics of polygyny in sub saharan africa female productivity and the demand for wives in cote d ivoire polygyny is still practiced throughout much of sub saharan africa with important social consequences this paper makes the first attempt to link african polygyny directly to the productivity of women in agriculture using micro data i develop a structural model of the demand for wives that disentangles wealth and substitution effects using a large household survey from cote d ivoire i find that marked geographic diversity in cropping patterns leads to regional variation in female labor productivity i also find that conditional on wealth men do have more wives when women are more productive that is cheaper this substitution effect may explain why polygyny declined in rural areas of cote d ivoire during agricultural development

are remittances a substitute for credit carrying the financial burden of health shocks in national and transnational households summary this paper tests for the assumption that remittances are a substitute for credit by comparing the response to health related shocks among national and transnational households using mexican household panel data while the occurrence of serious health shocks that required hospital treatment doubled the average debt burden of exposed households compared to the control group households with nuclear family members a parent child or spouse in the us did not increase their debts due to health shocks this finding is consistent with the view that remittances respond to households demand for financing emergencies and make them less reliant on debt financing

the economics of consanguineous marriages the institution of consanguineous marriage a marriage contracted between close biological relatives has been a basic building block of many societies in different parts of the world this paper argues that the practice of consanguinity is closely related to the practice of dowry and that both arise in response to an agency problem between the families of a bride and a groom when marriage contracts are incomplete dowries transfer control rights to the party with the highest incentives to invest in a marriage when these transactions are costly however consanguinity can be a more appropriate response since it directly reduces the agency cost the paper s model predicts that dowry transfers are less likely to be observed in consanguineous unions it also emphasizes the effect of credit constraints on the relative prevalence of dowry payment and consanguinity an empirical analysis using data from bangladesh delivers robust results consistent with the predictions of the model

are rainfed agricultural households insured evidence from five villages in vidarbha india there are several studies on risk and insurance in village economies in the developing world however there is a lack of evidence for recent decades in spite of profound changes including structural transformation and widespread market liberalization in most regions in this paper i use primary panel data from five rainfed villages in a high risk region of india and find evidence of considerable exposure as well as vulnerability to idiosyncratic and covariate risks further there is significant wealth differentiated heterogeneity in vulnerability the findings help identify the scope of public policy in improving risk management in rainfed agriculture

collective agricultural production a solution for transition economies abstract the paper examines theoretical reasons and provides examples for productivity differences between agricultural service cooperatives and collectives service cooperatives can utilize economies of scale enhance competitiveness and provide technical information advantages that often outweighed problems of free riding low investment and excessive political intervention agricultural collectives while not adding substantial advantages are in addition associated with problems of supervision and effort supply tendencies to substitute casual workers or mechanization for regular members and low investment incentives while collective forms of organization in transition economies respond to high risk and market imperfections they do so inefficiently policies that create conditions for service cooperatives to compete may lead to large productivity gains

consumption smoothing migration and marriage evidence from rural india a significant proportion of migration in low income countries particularly in rural areas is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage we seek to explain these mobility patterns by examining marital arrangements among indian households in particular we hypothesize that the marriage of daughters to locationally distant dispersed yet kinship related households is a manifestation of implicit interhousehold contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks analysis of longitudinal south indian village data lends support to the hypothesis marriage cum migration contributes significantly to a reduction in the variability of household food consumption farm households afflicted with more variable profits tend to engage in longer distance marriage cum migration the hypothesized and observed marriage cum migration patterns are in dissonance with standard models of marriage or migration that are concerned primarily with search costs and static income gains

an exogeneity test for a simultaneous equation tobit model with an application to labor supply a test of weak exogeneity in the simultaneous equation tobit model is proposed and illustrated using a female labour supply model estimated using cross section data the test statistic can be simply output from any standard tobit maximum likelihood package and is asymptotically efficient the procedure provides consistent estimators for the simultaneous tobit model whose asymptotic covariance matrix is a simple extension of the usual tobit formula we also provide the lagrange multiplier test of weak exogeneity this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

imperfect commitment altruism and the family evidence from transfer behavior in low income rural areas in this paper we examine empirically whether risk pooling is more advantageous among altruistic compared to selfish agents in a framework where individuals cannot make binding commitments in particular we incorporate altuism into a model of risk sharing under imperfect commitment and use simulation methods to establish tests of the roles of both altruism and commitment problems in determining the extent of insurance and the intertemporal movements in interhousehold transfers the tests are carried out using three panel data sets from two countries of rural south asia that provide detailed information on transfers and enable the measurement of income shocks the estimates provide strong support for the notion that imperfect commitment substantially constrains informal transfer arrangements whether kin based or not but also provide evidence that altruism plays an important role in ameliorating commitment constraints and thus in increasing the gains from income pooling

diaspora growth and aggregate remittances an inverted u relationship this paper presents a model in which remittances stem from a decision made jointly by a family coalition of multiple migrants and non migrants allowing two alternative interpretations migrants a

flexibility of household structure child fostering decisions in burkina faso using data i collected in africa this paper examines a household s decision to adjust its size through child fostering an institution where biological parents temporarily send children to live with other families households experiencing negative idiosyncratic income shocks child gender imbalances located further from primary schools or with more good quality network members fewer subsistence farmers and unmarried individuals and more educated members are significantly more likely to send a child results reject an overall symmetric fostering model across senders and receivers but evidence of symmetry is found when the test is restricted to exogenous income shocks and gender imbalances