is there a double dividend from anti sprawl policies abstract this paper examines the welfare effects of anti sprawl policies such as development tax in a simple spatial explicit urban model with two market failures urban decline at the city core and underprovision of open space amenities at the urban fringe and pre existing distortionary property tax used to fund public services and improvements to mitigate urban decline consistent with prior double dividend literature there is a tax interaction effect that occurs between the development tax and the pre existing property tax however there are two fundamental differences between the tax interaction effect identified here and that of prior literature ours one has two components first there is a cost side tax interaction effect that is spatially concentrated at the urban fringe as only agents at the urban fringe alter their behavior in response to the development tax second there is also a benefit side tax interaction effect as increases in open space at the urban fringe are capitalized into housing prices throughout the city in contrast to prior literature we find that the empirical importance of the combined tax interaction effect is of substantially less importance and as a consequence the likelihood of a double dividend is higher than in prior studies further we show that the development tax should be part of the local tax system even in the absence of open space benefits

tax induced emissions estimating short run emission impacts from carbon taxation under different market structures abstract this article finds that the introduction of a carbon tax increased short run carbon emissions in an imperfectly competitive wholesale electricity market the unique feature of the western australian setting is that the same carbon tax was introduced and later repealed but the market structure differed at each event at the repeal event the dominant firm had less incentive to exercise unilateral market power then the opposite result is observed emissions were lower with the tax i show how the short run impact of pollution taxation in imperfect markets depends on production technologies market structure and the size of the tax

grandmothers and granddaughters this article evaluates the impact of a large cash transfer program in south africa on children s nutritional status and investigates whether the gender of the recipient affects that impact in the early 1990s the benefits and coverage of the south african social pension program were expanded for the black population in 1993 the benefits were about twice the median per capita income in rural areas more than a quarter of black south african children under age five live with a pension recipient estimates suggest that pensions received by women had a large impact on the anthropometric status weight for height and height for age of girls but little effect on that of boys no similar effect is found for pensions received by men this suggests that the efficiency of public transfer programs may depend on the gender of the recipient

pigou meets mirrlees on the irrelevance of tax distortions for the second best pigouvian tax this paper extends the mirrlees 1971 model of optimal income redistribution with optimal corrective taxes to internalize consumption externalities using general utility structures and exploring both linear and non linear taxes it is demonstrated that the optimal second best tax on an externality generating good should not be corrected for the marginal cost of public funds since it equals one in the optimal tax system in the optimum distortions of income taxes are equal to marginal redistributional gains if the government does not have access to a non distortionary marginal source of finance the marginal cost of public funds can be either larger or smaller than one depending on subjective preferences for income redistribution the optimal second best corrective tax is then either higher or lower than the pigouvian level the findings in this paper generalize and amend prior results based on representative agent models shedding new light on the weak double dividend hypothesis and on the welfare gains of recycling revenue from environmental taxes

the drawbacks and opportunities of carbon charges in metropolitan areas a spatial general equilibrium approach in cities there is a variety of economic and spatial forces that may influence to what extent a travel related co2 emission pricing can be an effective instrument to contribute to the achievement of co2 reduction goals therefore we examine the effectiveness and impact of co2 emission charges using a spatial general equilibrium model of an urban economy calibrated according to an average german city our analyses suggest that the imposition of a pigouvian type co2 emission charge on urban passenger travel may be able to reduce emissions by about 1 11 depending on the estimated social damage cost of carbon dioxide such a policy increases urban welfare mainly on account of a reduction of congestion costs however pricing congestion directly not only provides higher urban welfare but also higher emission reductions pricing congestion and co2 emissions simultaneously allows to achieve a wide range of emission reduction goals if however the reduction goal is very ambitious the emission charge must be raised to higher levels then distortions in the urban markets and in spatial travel decisions lower labor supply and thus urban production income of city residents federal tax revenue income of landowners outside the city all together implying losses in welfare

impact of income on nutrient intakes implications for undernourishment and obesity the relationship between income and nutrient intake is explored nonparametric panel and quantile regressions are used engle curves for calories fat and protein are approximately linear in logs with carbohydrate intakes exhibiting diminishing elasticities as incomes increase elasticities range from 0 10 to 0 25 with fat having the highest elasticities countries in higher quantiles have lower elasticities than those in lower quantiles results predict significant cumulative increases in calorie consumption which are increasingly composed of fats though policies aimed at poverty alleviation and economic growth may assuage hunger and malnutrition they may also exacerbate problems associated with obesity

limit pricing and the in effectiveness of the carbon tax we present a theory of limit pricing monopoly in non renewable resource production facing a very inelastic demand an oil monopoly seeks to induce the highest price that does not destroy its demand unlike the conventional hotellian analysis the monopoly tolerates some ordinary substitutes to its oil but deters high potential ones with limit pricing policy induced extraction changes do not obey the usual logic for example oil taxes have no effect on current oil production extraction increases when high potential substitutes are promoted but can be effectively reduced by supporting ordinary substitutes the carbon tax not only applies to oil it also penalizes its ordinary carbon substitutes whose market shares are taken over by the monopoly thus the carbon tax ambiguously affects current and long term oil production and carbon emissions

nonlinear income effects in random utility models random utility models rums are used in the literature to model consumer choices from among a discrete set of alternatives and they typically impose a constant marginal utility of income on individual preferences this assumption is driven partially by the difficulty of constructing welfare estimates in models with nonlinear income effects recently mcfadden 1995 developed an algorithm for computing these welfare impacts using a monte carlo markov chain simulator for generalized extreme value variates this paper investigates the empirical consequences of nonlinear rums in the case of sportfishing modal choice while refining and contrasting the available methods for welfare estimation

second best congestion pricing schemes in the monocentric city abstract this paper considers second best congestion pricing in the monocentric city with endogenous residential density and endogenous labour supply a spatial general equilibrium model is developed that allows consideration of the three way interactions between urban density traffic congestion and labour supply congestion pricing schemes are analysed that are second best by design and not because distortions exist elsewhere in the spatial economy like cordon charging and flat kilometre charges both for cobb douglas utility and for ces utility the analyses suggest that the relative welfare losses from second best pricing compared to first best pricing are surprisingly small

decomposing intergenerational income elasticity the gender differentiated contribution of capital transmission in rural philippines summary using longitudinal data from rural philippines we decompose intergenerational income elasticity ige into five distinct pathways intergenerational transmissions of health education land and spouse education capital plus residual correlation in productivity intergenerational human capital transmissions from mothers are stronger than those from fathers maternal education is the parental capital most strongly associated with ige while naive ige estimates are indistinguishable for sons and daughters the pathways that generate these results differ strikingly for sons ige is entirely explained by parent to child capital transmission by contrast strong income correlation exists between daughters and parents even after controlling for parent and child capital endowments

what happens to diet and child health when migration splits households evidence from a migration lottery program the impact of migration on food security and child health is likely to differ depending on whether children themselves migrate or whether they remain behind while other household members migrate however existing studies have not been able to examine how impacts differ in these two scenarios because parallel data are required for both the sending and receiving country moreover self selection into migration makes unbiased estimation of either impact difficult we overcome these problems by using a unique survey of tongan households that applied to migrate to new zealand through a migrant quota which selects households through a random ballot this survey covers both migrant children in new zealand and non migrant children in tonga with the migration policy rules providing a source of exogenous variation for identifying impacts our estimates of short run impacts show that diets diverge upon migration children who migrate experience improvements while diets worsen for children who remain there is also suggestive evidence of a divergence in health outcomes with increases in weight for age and height for age found for migrant children and decreases found for children who remain behind while other household members migrate

stature and the standard of living research on the standard of living now emphasizes alternatives or supplements to the national income accounts this paper reviews the results of two decades of research using stature as a measure of health aspects of human welfare after comparing and contrasting stature with per capita income i consider height patterns discovered by economic historians that challenge traditional beliefs about the past including long term trends cycles in heights and the dreadfully small stature of slave children that was followed by catch up growth the paper concludes with comparisons to work in development economics and suggestions for research

the lazarus drug the impact of antiretroviral therapy on economic growth abstract does better population health lead to growth in per capita income theory is ambiguous and empirical evidence is very limited in 2001 a steep fall in antiretroviral arv drug prices triggered rapid and massive expansion of arv therapy coverage in lower income countries exploiting the sharp resultant changes in population health i show that arv therapy coverage expansion led to growth in gdp per capita the positive effects on growth most likely persist for around four years arv therapy coverage expansion could explain around a third of the sub saharan african growth miracle

taxation within cournot oligopoly abstract when the production of output causes pollution we often consider taxation as a means to reduce it this paper examines various forms of taxation to control pollution within cournot oligopoly it shows that two commonly used forms can actually increase pollution in contrast both of these forms unambiguously reduce pollution within the competitive model the paper provides conditions in terms of demand and technology that make taxation effective in the cournot oligopoly case another implication of the analysis is that outside the price taking framework asymmetry of cost functions is particularly important and deserves careful attention when we examine the effect of taxation

environment health and human capital in this review we discuss three major contributions economists have made to our understanding of the relationship between the environment and individual well being first in explicitly recognizing how optimizing behavior particularly in the form of residential sorting can lead to nonrandom assignment of pollution economists have employed a wide range of quasi experimental techniques to develop causal estimates of the effect of pollution second economic research has placed a considerable focus on the role of avoidance behavior which is an important component for understanding the difference between biological and behavioral effects of pollution and for proper welfare calculations lastly economic research has expanded the focus of analysis beyond traditional health outcomes to include measures of human capital including labor supply productivity and cognition our review of the quasi experimental evidence on this topic suggests that pollution does indeed have a wide range of effects on individual well being even at levels well below current regulatory standards given the importance of health and human capital as an engine for economic growth these findings underscore the role of environmental conditions as an important factor of production jel i12 i31 j24 q51 q53

child schooling child health and rainfall shocks evidence from rural vietnam abstractwe study the effect of rainfall shocks on child schooling outcomes and on standardised height for age a measure of child health in rural vietnam we find that adverse rainfall shocks during pregnancy adversely affect children s school entry delay and progress through school adverse rainfall shocks in the third year of life adversely affect both schooling and child health these effects differ by region as a result of constraints that reflect regional economic heterogeneity we predict that policies that help rural families smooth income shocks will result in increases in human capital and in substantial cumulative returns over a worker s working life

malnutrition and child labor in pre industrial and developing economies it is common to find i entire families including children working together in family farms or urban factories and ii a positive link between a person s consumption and her productivity this paper argues that there is a natural reason for the concurrence of i and ii as a rule households are characterized by intra household altruism an increase in the income of an individual increases the consumption of all household members hence when an employer pays an adult worker a high wage to enhance her productivity part of it ends up augmenting her children s consumption and productivity one way for the employer to prevent this leakage and internalize the externality is to employ the children as well this explains the higher incidence of family labor in poor societies where ii is more likely to be true

the market evaluation of criminality evidence from the auction of british convict labor in america 1767 1775 approximately 50 000 british convicts were sentenced to servitude and forcibly transported to america between 1718 and 1775 1 this transatlantic market for british convict labor was a vast experiment in privatizing posttrial criminal justice by the early eighteenth century removal of criminals from society was seen as a more effective deterrent to recidivism than physical chastisement removal of noncapital offenders through mass hangings or employment as chain gangs in england was considered too barbaric and too politically risky removal through imprisonment was too expensive given the absence of penitentiaries designed for long term incarceration thus banishment overseas became the preferred policy 2 convict transportees were given one of only three possible sentences namely 7 years 14 years or a lifetime of banishment 74 24 and 2 percent respectively which in turn became the length of their servant contracts in america 3 to minimize the cost of overseas disposal the british government channelled convicts through the existing transatlantic market for voluntary servant labor 4 the government fixed the length of all convict labor contracts prior to embarkation and then turned the convicts over to the private shipping market thereafter government penal policy exerted little direct influence the transportation and disposal of convict labor was handled by the private sector for profit shippers auctioned convicts upon arrival in america to the private employers who bid the highest with the monies received going to defray the shippers transportation expenses the trade was competitive numerous shippers from many british ports transported convicts and auctioned them in populated american markets such as annapolis and baltimore convicts also competed directly with voluntary indentured servants for cargo space on ships leaving britain 5 in addition upon landing in america convict labor competed with european immigrant servant and african department of economics university of delaware newark de 19716 e mail grubbf be udel edu brian golden anne pfaelzer de ortiz and jianmin zhang provided research assistance and anne pfaelzer de ortiz provided editorial assistance preliminary versions were presented at the university of delaware harvard university university lumiere lyon 2 france university pompeu fabra spain the university of virginia and the economic history society meeting bristol u k the author thanks the participants of these seminars and pieter emmer claudia goldin leslie goldstein bernard harris saul hoffman kyle kauffmann john murray ralph shlomowitz and richard steckel for helpful comments 1 they represented roughly a quarter of all british arrivals and half of all english arrivals in this period the 1717 transportation act was passed in response to the crime wave accompanying the end of queen anne s war see a roger ekirch 1987 p 27 peter w coldham 1992a pp 1 6 aaron s fogelman 1998 pp 55 71 2 in the absence of penitentiaries designed for long term incarceration ciiminals were punished by physical chastisement e g whipping branding in the hand or hanging this menu of punishment left little middle ground for adjusting punishment to fit variation in the severity of a given crime forced servitude overseas provided that middle ground for those convicted of noncapital crimes e g larceny mitigating circumstances could lead to a whipping or branding in the hand whereas those considered to deserve less mercy or to be a continuing menace to society were sentenced to 7 or 14 years of servitude overseas for those convicted of capital crimes e g horse or sheep stealing grand larceny murder etc mitigating circumstances could lead to sentences of 7 years 14 years or a lifetime of servitude overseas whereas those considered to deserve no mercy or to be a continuing menace to society were hanged see baltimore j m beattie 1986 3 see table 1 baltimore grubb 2000b the punishment for returning to britain before the completion of one s sentence was hanging 4 in 1697 the british admiralty demanded eight pounds a head to transport convicts to america by contrast the private sector ended up transporting the majority of the convicts for no subsidy whatsoever and the highest subsidy the crown ever paid a shipper to transport convicts was five pounds per head see abbot e smith 1947 pp 105 11316 frederick h schmidt 1976 pp 35 38 89 ekirch 1987 pp 70 74 grubb 2000b 5 many shippers carried both convict and voluntary indentured servants on the same voyage see annapolis baltimore cheston galloway papers grubb 2000b

the labour market impact of body weight in china a semiparametric analysis while a positive wage effect of body mass index bmi is widely observed in low income developing countries a negative wage effect of bmi is often observed in high income developed countries to fill the gap between these previous findings we investigate the relationship between body weight and wages in transition economies we focus on china whose rapid economic growth of the 1990s was followed by a rapid increase in overweight and obesity while still experiencing significant food insecurity and underweight we first use several parametric regression strategies to obtain a consistent estimate of the wage effects of weight second we adopt a semiparametric partially linear model that allows for endogeneity of weight parametric regressions provide mixed results and the sign and magnitude of their estimates are sensitive to the choice of samples and regression strategies semiparametric estimates provide evidence of a wage penalty for very heavy and thin persons among both men and women the wage pena

on revenue recycling and the welfare effects of second best congestion pricing in a monocentric city abstract this paper examines congestion taxes in a monocentric city with pre existing labor taxation when road toll revenue is used to finance labor tax cuts 35 of the optimal road tax in our numerical model does not reflect marginal external congestion costs but rather functions as a ramsey mirrlees tax i e an efficiency enhancing mechanism allowing for an indirect spatial differentiation of the labor tax this adds a quite different motivation to road pricing since welfare gains can be produced even in absence of congestion we find that the optimal road tax is non monotonic across space reflecting the different impacts of labor supply elasticity and marginal utility of income which both vary over space the relative efficiencies of some archetype second best pricing schemes cordon toll flat kilometer tax are high 84 and 70 respectively when road toll revenue is recycled lump sum the optimal toll lies below its pigouvian level extensions in a bimodal framework show that the optimality of using road toll revenue to subsidize public transport depends on the initial inefficiency in public transport pricing

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

inequality measurement for ordered response health data because self reported health status srhs is an ordered response variable inequality measurement for srhs data requires a numerical scale for converting individual responses into a summary statistic the choice of scale is however problematic since small variations in the numerical scale may reverse the ordering of a given pair of distributions of srhs data in relation to conventional inequality indices such as the variance this paper introduces a parametric family of inequality indices founded on an inequality ordering proposed by allison and foster allison r a foster j 2004 measuring health inequalities using qualitative data journal of health economics 23 505 524 which satisfy a suitable invariance property with respect to the choice of numerical scale several key members of the parametric family are also derived and an empirical application using data from the swiss health survey illustrates the proposed methodology

second best road taxes in polycentric networks with distorted labor markets this paper examines the interaction of road taxes with spatially invariant labor taxation in a polycentric network it derives analytical expressions for the network counterparts of the traditional double dividend effects i e pigouvian tax interaction and revenue recycling effects and computes them under different policy regimes the analysis reveals a series of conditions under which a system of cordons around the major nodes of a network might be more efficient than marginal external cost pricing with a high elasticity of labor supply and limited public transport coverage it is shown that the pigouvian tax rule might reduce welfare even when the generated revenue is used to finance labor tax cuts

second best congestion pricing the case of an untolled alternative abstract this paper deals with second best one route congestion pricing in case of an untolled alternative using a two link network simulation model the effects of various demand and cost parameters on the relative efficiency of one route tolling are analyzed it is investigated whether the existence of costs of congestion charging may be a reason for one route tolling to be more overall efficient than two route tolling finally the efficiency of revenue maximizing one route and two route tolling is discussed

cordon pricing and land use regulation this study explores the simultaneous imposition of cordon pricing and land use regulations in a continuous and closed monocentric city with homogeneous households results reveal the optimal level of a single cordon toll and its location and the optimal floor area ratio far regulation clarifying what distortions remain in the existence of cordon pricing and far regulation among other results this paper shows that with an optimal cordon toll far regulation should alternate between a minimum and a maximum regulation both inside and outside the cordon line

comparing the efficiency of alternative policies for reducing traffic congestion abstract this paper compares the efficiency of a single lane toll a uniform congestion tax across freeway lanes a gasoline tax and a transit fare subsidy at reducing congestion there are three conditions for an efficient outcome relating to travel across modes across peak and off peak periods and sorting out drivers with high and low time costs across faster and slower freeway lanes each policy involves some inefficiency indeed the single lane toll gasoline tax and transit subsidy forego at least two thirds of the efficiency gains under an ideal congestion tax that varies across lanes however the uniform congestion tax achieves over 90 of these gains

stature skills and adult life outcomes evidence from indonesia abstractwe investigate the effect of height on earnings occupational choices and a subjective measure of wellbeing among indonesian men we explore the extent to which height captures the effects of endowments set before entry in the labour market physical and cognitive skills co determined with stature early in life do not explain much of the height earnings premium directly yet human capital more broadly including cognition educational attainment and other factors related to childhood conditions explains around half of the height premium and does so through occupational sorting indeed taller workers tend to have more education and educated workers tend to work in more lucrative occupations that require brain and social skills not brawn the unexplained share of the height earnings premium may reflect a specific role of stature on social interaction labour market advantages or self assurance we also find a height premium in happiness half of which simply accounts for the educational and e

worker absence and productivity evidence from teaching a significant amount of work time is lost each year due to worker absence but evidence on the productivity losses from absenteeism remains scant due to difficulties with identification we use uniquely detailed data on the timing duration and cause of absences among teachers to address many of the potential biases from the endogeneity of worker absence our analysis indicates that worker absences have large negative impacts the expected loss in daily productivity from employing a temporary substitute is on par with replacing a regular worker of average productivity with one at the 10th 20th percentile of productivity

is the quantity quality trade off a trade off for all none or some abstract although the theoretical trade off between the quantity and quality of children is well established empirical evidence supporting such a causal relationship particularly on child health is limited we use two measures of child health to assess the quantity quality trade off across the entire distribution using data from the indonesia family life survey and controlling for the potential endogeneity of child quantity we find modest statistically meaningful evidence of a causal trade off

compensating variation and hicksian choice probabilities in random utility models that are nonlinear in income in this paper we discuss hicksian demand and compensating variation in the context of discrete choice we first derive hicksian choice probabilities and the distribution of the random expenditure function in the general case when the utilities are nonlinear in income we subsequently derive exact and simple formulae for the expenditure and choice probabilities under price policy changes conditional on the initial utility level this is of particular interest for welfare measurement because it enables the researcher to compute the distribution of compensating variation in a simple way we also derive formulae for the joint distribution of expenditure the choice before and after a policy change has been introduced

why children work attend school or stay idle the roles of ability and household wealth abstract this paper offers a theoretical and empirical analysis of child labor schooling and idleness neither work nor school with particular emphasis on the roles of child ability and household wealth in determining these decisions we show theoretically that idleness may be chosen optimally by low income households whose child is of low ability using a rich data set from the philippines we find that while other factors including mother s labor supply the presence of a family business and access to good school quality contribute to these decisions child ability and household wealth are the most important determinants of child idleness and the use of child labor an implication of our findings is that any policy aiming to reduce child labor and increase child schooling should also target improvements in child ability and cognitive development through investments in the nutrition and health of poor children

pollution taxes and revenue recycling abstract discussions of environmental policy and the tax system have emphasized the value of pollution tax revenues which can be used to reduce other tax distortions in the economy however by raising private marginal production costs environmental taxes also tend to reduce gdp and exacerbate the welfare costs of conventional taxes for environmental taxes in consumption goods industries the net welfare change from these two effects is negative unless this good is a relatively weak substitute for leisure an estimate for the optimal pollution tax with full revenue recycling is 63 to 78 of marginal environmental damages

estimating the welfare effect of congestion taxes the critical importance of other distortions within the transport system abstract this paper extends the first best analysis of peak period congestion pricing to account for interactions with other distortions within the transport system including congestion on unpriced routes accident and pollution externalities suboptimal transit pricing and gasoline taxes we illustrate how the presence of each of these distortions changes the welfare effect of a congestion tax over a wide range of parameter scenarios in all cases the welfare changes are potentially significant implying that these distortions are important to consider in an economic evaluation of congestion taxes

why not hang them all the virtues of inefficient punishment replacing a criminal punishment with another that both is more severe and has a lower ratio of punishment cost to amount of punishment while reducing the probability of conviction to maintain the same level of deterrence lowers both punishment cost and enforcement cost hence imprisonment is always dominated by execution and both are dominated by fines and other alternatives moden legal systems do not fit that pattern one possible explanation is that the ability enforces to profit by convictions and produce costly rent seeking examples include product liability litigation civil forfeiture and fraudulent prosecution motivated by rewards in eighteenth0 century england the problem was avoided by the use of infficient punishments in the legal system of saga period iceland and the private norms of shasta county california execution while not directly profitable for enforcers facilitates rent seeking through threats leading to out of court settlements

optimal cordon pricing abstract this paper presents a simple spatial model of traffic congestion for a monocentric city to investigate the effects of cordon pricing on trip making and congestion level in each location optimal cordon pricing is obtained as a combination of the cordon location i e distance of the cordon from the cbd and the amount of toll charged there that maximizes the total social surplus in a city under optimal cordon pricing trips originating from locations inside the cordon are under priced those just outside the cordon are over priced and those near the urban fringe are under priced numerical simulations using the parameter values based on japanese data suggest that cordon pricing attains an economic welfare level very close to the first best optimum

village banking and maternal and child health evidence from ecuador and honduras abstract many microcredit institutions bundle credit with health education or other programs this paper reviews arguments on such tie ins and concludes that net benefits are possible but requires empirical testing quasi experimental data from project hope s health banks and credit only village banks are then examined the paper presents evidence that health practices do not improve automatically with greater wealth in honduras results show that health bank participation is robustly associated with reduced subsequent conditional child diarrhea probability but in no specification does credit only bank participation have this effect in ecuador results suggest a larger effect of credit only banks in both countries health bank participation significantly raises subsequent healthcare over credit only participation and at least reduces the tendency to switch from breast feeding to bottle feeding as income rises effects on expenditures are ambiguous there is no clear link between tie ins and bank performance

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

drought of opportunities contemporaneous and long term impacts of rainfall shocks on human capital higher wages are generally thought to increase human capital production particularly in the developing world we introduce a simple model of human capital production in which investments and time allocation differ by age using data on test scores and schooling from rural india we show that higher wages increase human capital investment in early life in utero to age 2 but decrease human capital from age 5 to 16 children switch out of school into productive work when rainfall is higher the opportunity cost of schooling even for fairly young children is an important factor in determining overall human capital investment

child health and conflict in cote d ivoire we examine the impact of the 2002 07 civil conflict in cote d ivoire on children s health status measured by height for age we use pre and post war survey data coupled with information on the location of violent incidents to capture exposure to the conflict of children born during 1997 2007 our results indicate that children from regions more affected by the conflict suffered significant health setbacks compared with children from less affected regions further household level victimization such as war related economic stress health stress and displacement has a large and negative effect on child health in conflict affected regions

causal effects of health shocks on consumption and debt quasi experimental evidence from bus accident injuries abstract endogeneity between health and wealth presents a challenge for estimating causal effects of health shocks using a quasi experimental design comprising exogenous shocks sustained as bus accident injuries in india with controls drawn from travelers on the same bus routes one year later i present new evidence of causal effects on consumption and debt using primary household survey data i find that households faced with shock related expenditures are able to smooth consumption on food housing and festivals with small reductions in educational spending debt was the principal mitigating mechanism households used leading to significantly larger levels of indebtedness

social protection 2 0 exploring issues evidence and debates in a globalizing world abstract this paper reviews the growing literature on social protection while not new the concept evolved remarkably in recent years it is approached from a multitude of perspectives and intersects with broader bodies of literature particularly around public policy pro poor growth rights humanitarian strategies and aid effectiveness as well as feeding into specific programmatic issues e g conditionality targeting and transfer selection this blend of challenges and approaches has often made debates elusive and polarized the paper examines the evolution and definitions of social protection and unbundles critical policy institutional and implementation quandaries taken together these considerations shape a set of context specific models of social protection the paper s five core conclusions may help chart future directions for social protection research and practice

the long term impact of health on economic growth in latin america abstract growth regressions adapted as granger type causality tests give strong evidence of 30 year causality from health to income in 18 latin american countries the health indicator is probability of survival by age and gender groups for 1950 90 a permanent increment of between 0 8 and 1 5 annual income is associated with typical adult and surprisingly old age health improvements the channels of causation from health to income are diverse and need to be identified in microeconomic studies that should however include a wide variety long term phenomena to account for the economic effects of health

health nutrition and economic development the relationship between health and economic development is explored focusing on nutrition based health indicators the spotlight is placed on the inter related feedbacks between the influence of health on productivity on one hand and the influence of income on health status on the other disentangling causality in these relationships has preoccupied much of the literature we evaluate different empirical strategies that have been adopted and assess the results there is now a body of evidence based on careful empirical studies that demonstrates a causal relationship between health and labor productivity there is also evidence that at least among the very poor additional income is spent on improved nutrition there are two issues that have received little attention although we argue they are likely to be very important first measurement of health is discussed in detail evidence is presented on how taking into account differences in the extent of measurement error is critical for interpreting the impact of health on wages the same theme emerges in studies of the effect of income on health specifically calorie intake the key role of non linearities in these relationships is highlighted and we demonstrate that a good deal of the variation in estimates of income elasticities of demand for calories can be ascribed to the role of measurement and functional form authors

congestion land use and job dispersion a general equilibrium model abstract in dispersed cities congestion tolls would drive up central wages and rents and would induce centrally located producers to want to disperse closer to their workers and their customers paying lower rents and realizing productivity gains from land to labor substitution but the tolls would also induce residents to want to locate more centrally in order to economize on commuting and shopping travel in a computable general equilibrium model we find that the centralizing effect of tolls on residences dominates on the decentralizing effect of tolls on firms causing the dispersed city to have more centralized job and population densities under stylized parameters we find that efficiency gains from levying congestion tolls on work and shopping travel are 3 0 of average income about 80 of such gains come from road planning and 20 from tolls

optimal environmental taxation in the presence of other taxes general equilibrium analyses this paper examines the optimal setting of environmental taxes in economies where other distortionary taxes are present we employ analytical and numerical models to explore the degree to which in a second best economy optimal environmental tax rates differ from the rates implied by the pigovian principle according to which the optimal tax rate equals the marginal environmental damages both models indicate contrary to what several analysts have suggested that the optimal tax rate on emissions of a given pollutant is generally less than the rate supported by the pigovian principle moreover the optimal rate is lower the larger are the distortions posed by ordinary taxes numerical results indicate that previous studies may have seriously overstated the size of the optimal carbon tax by disregarding pre existing taxes this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

high quality nutrition in childhood body size and wages in early adulthood evidence from guatemalan workers espanolcausalidad entre salud y productividad no resulta directa de establecer por un lado mayores ingresos pueden trasladarse en una dieta de mejor calidad por el otro es probable que un trabajador saludable sea mas productivo este trabajo analiza el efecto del tamano corporal altura e indice de masa corporal como indicadores de nutricion en salarios los datos provienen del estudio longitudinal realizado en guatemala entre 1969 77 y 2002 04 estimaciones sugieren que la elasticidad tamano del cuerpo en relacion al salario aumenta cuando la heterogeneidad no observable es considerada sin embargo los resultados son mas robustos para los hombres adicionalmente la elasticidad estimada presenta algun grado de disparidad entre quantiles de la distribucion condicional del salario englishestablishing a causal relationship between health and productivity is not straightforward on one hand as income grows people invest in better diets on the other a healthier worker is likely to be more productive this paper focuses on the effect of body size height and body mass index as indicators of nutrition upon wages data comes from a longitudinal study conducted in guatemala during 1969 77 and followed up in 2002 04 body size elasticity increases when unobserved heterogeneity is considered although evidence is stronger for males additionally estimated elasticity shows some degree of heterogeneity at different quantiles of the conditional wage distribution

height skills and labor market outcomes in mexico abstract taller workers are paid higher wages a prominent explanation for this pattern is that physical growth and cognitive development share childhood inputs inducing a correlation between adult height and two productive skills strength and intelligence this paper explores the relative roles of strength and intelligence in explaining the labor market height premium among mexican men while cognitive test scores account for a limited share of the height premium roughly half of the premium can be attributed to the educational and occupational choices of taller workers taller workers obtain more education and sort into occupations with greater intelligence requirements and lower strength requirements suggesting a possible role for cognitive skill

alcohol consumption smoking and wages the good health of an individual is a combination of uncontrollable factors that includes genetics and random events and controllable factors through the regulation of activities such as smoking and drinking since the work of grossman in the 1970s a significant relationship between health and earnings has been predicted in this present paper the 1995 australian national health survey is used to examine simultaneously the effects of drinking and smoking on wages to model the interaction of smoking with alcohol consumption separate models are fitted for smokers and nonsmokers these models account for potential selectivity bias resulting from the decision to smoke and endogeneity arising from a potential causal relationship between earnings and alcohol consumption

access to water women s work and child outcomes abstractpoor rural women in the developing world spend considerable time collecting water do women living in places where more time is needed for water collection tend to participate less in income earning market based activities do the education outcomes of their children tend to be worse we use micro data for nine developing countries to help address these questions our primary aim is to describe the patterns in the data rather than to infer causality although we do treat the household level access to water as endogenous assuming that community level access is exogenous conditional on a wide range of geographic factors better access to water is not found to be associated with greater off farm paid work but is associated with less unpaid work for women in countries where substantial gender gaps in schooling exist both boys and girls enrollments also tend to be better

tax revenue and the marginal cost of public funds in sweden abstract we assess the welfare cost of raising a marginal unit of tax revenue in a balanced budget general equilibrium framework the calculated social cost of an increment of public funds is sensitive to both the specific type of tax increase and the type of public spending used on the margin best guess assumptions on labor supply elasticities yield marginal costs of public funds for different fiscal mixes of between 0 67 and 4 51 at prevailing tax rates in sweden alternative labor supply assumptions well within the range of current estimates substantially affect the results and can imply infinite marginal welfare costs marginal welfare costs are also sensitive to assumptions about both the income and substitution effects of labor supply

roads out of poverty assessing the links between aid public investment growth and poverty reduction the authors develop a macroeconomic framework that captures links between aid public investment growth and poverty public investment is disaggregated into education infrastructure and health and affects both aggregate supply and demand dutch disease effects are captured by accounting for changes in the relative price of domestic goods the authors assess the impact of policy shocks on poverty by linking the model to a household survey they calibrate the model for ethiopia and simulate the changes in the allocation of aid and public investment the authors also calculate the amount by which foreign aid should increase to reach the poverty targets of the millennium development goals

measuring the benefits of greater spatial granularity in short term pricing in wholesale electricity markets hourly generation unit level output levels detailed information on the technological characteristics of generation units and daily delivered natural gas prices to all generation units for the california wholesale electricity market before and after the implementation of locational marginal pricing are used to measure the impact of introducing greater spatial granularity in short term energy pricing the average hourly number of generation unit starts increases but both the total hourly energy consumed and total hourly operating costs for all natural gas fired generation units fall by more than 2 percent after the implementation of locational marginal pricing

income productivity in china on the role of health this study provides empirical evidence regarding the income productivity of health human capital in china we appeal to concepts from human capital theory to support a basic model that treats health as a form of human capital in the income production process our model examines the economic return at the household level from the health of its individual members we estimate this with a longitudinal sample drawn from the china health and nutrition survey chns allowing us to exploit within variation in health and income to address possible unobservables biasing estimates of the impact of health on income in the simple cross sectional setting household income is strongly influenced by the health of its members particularly in rural areas these findings could have important implications for health and economic policy making aimed at reducing the long standing urban rural economic gap and more comprehensively insuring the rural population against health and economic risk

why growth is not enough household poverty dynamics in northeast gujarat india despite high growth rates in gujarat exceeding 9 per cent per year over the decade of the 1990s poverty in 36 villages located in the northeastern part of this state has changed hardly at all in these villages 9 5 per cent of households escaped from poverty over the past 25 years but 6 3 per cent of households became poor at the same time escape and descent are not symmetric different reasons account for escaping poverty than those for declining into poverty growth alone is hardly sufficient to achieve poverty reduction on any significant scale public policies will be needed to address directly the separate causes for descent into poverty

the impact of poor health on total factor productivity a number of recent studies have illustrated the link between health and economic growth this paper argues that a key mechanism through which health affects growth is via total factor productivity tfp we first estimate tfp based on a production function and then estimate the determinants of tfp paying particular attention to three indicators of health that are particularly problematic in developing regions malnutrition malaria and water borne diseases we find the impact of poor health on tfp to be negative significant and robust across a wide variety of specifications

the optimal subsidy on electric vehicles in german metropolitan areas a spatial general equilibrium analysis abstract e mobility and diffusion of electric vehicles have become a major policy issue in many countries for example the german federal government pursues the strategy of achieving one million electric vehicles by 2020 in this paper we examine whether it is optimal to subsidize the use of electric vehicles by granting electric power subsidies and how large the corresponding optimal rate is we first analytically derive the optimal power tax in a spatial model of a city with two zones where commuting carbon emissions endogenous labor supply fuel and power taxes are considered it is shown that in a spatial urban environment the optimal tax rate depends in particular on transport related externalities tax interaction effects and redistribution effects working via the urban land market second we extend the model to a full spatial general equilibrium model and employ simulations to calculate sign and size of the optimal tax subsidy rate this model is calibrated to a typical german metropolitan area the results show that electric vehicles should not be subsidized but taxed the results are robust with respect to changes in the willingness to adopt electric vehicles the costs of driving electric vehicles and even if emissions of electric vehicles are zero

accounting for the effect of health on economic growth i use microeconomic estimates of the effect of health on individual outcomes to construct macroeconomic estimates of the proximate effect of health on gdp per capita i employ a variety of methods to construct estimates of the return to health which i combine with cross country and historical data on height adult survival rates and age at menarche using my preferred estimate eliminating health differences among countries would reduce the variance of log gdp per worker by 9 9 percent and reduce the ratio of gdp per worker at the 90th percentile to gdp per worker at the loth percentile from 20 5 to 17 9 while this effect is economically significant it is also substantially smaller than estimates of the effect of health on economic growth that are derived from cross country regressions

revenue recycling and the welfare effects of road pricing the authors explore the interaction between taxes on work related traffic congestion and preexisting distortionary taxes in the labor market a congestion tax raises the overall costs of commuting to work and discourages labor force participation at the margin when revenues are returned in lump sum transfers the resulting efficiency loss in the labor market can be larger that the pigouvian efficiency gains from internalizing the congestion externality by contrast if congestion tax revenues are used to reduce labor taxes the net impact on the labor supply is positive and the efficiency gain in the labor market can raise the overall welfare gains of the congestion tax by as much as 100 percent recycling congestion tax revenues in public transit subsidies produces a positive but smaller impact on the labor supply in short the authors results indicate that the presence of preexisting tax distortions and the form of revenue recycling can crucially affect the size and possibly even the sign of the welfare effect of road pricing schemes the efficiency gains from recycling congestion tax revenues in other tax reductions can amount to several times the pigouvian welfare gains from congestion reduction

measuring the competitiveness benefits of a transmission investment policy the case of the alberta electricity market transmission expansions can increase the extent of competition faced by wholesale electricity suppliers with the ability to exercise unilateral market power this can cause them to submit offer curves closer to their marginal cost curves which sets market clearing prices closer to competitive benchmark price levels these lower wholesale market clearing prices are the competitiveness benefit consumers realize from the transmission expansion this paper quantifies empirically the competitiveness benefits of a transmission expansion policy that causes strategic suppliers to expect no transmission congestion using hourly generation unit level offer output market clearing price and congestion data from the alberta wholesale electricity market from january 1 2009 to july 31 2013 an upper and lower bound on the hourly consumer competitiveness benefits of this transmission policy is computed both of these competitiveness benefits measures are economically significant which argues for including them in transmission planning processes for wholesale electricity markets to ensure that all transmission expansions with positive net benefits to electricity consumers are undertaken

the impact of chernobyl on health and labour market performance using longitudinal data from ukraine we examine the extent of any long lasting effects of exposure to the chernobyl disaster on the health and labour market performance of the adult workforce variation in the local area level of radiation fallout from the chernobyl accident is considered as a random exogenous shock with which to try to establish its causal impact on poor health labour force participation hours worked and wages there appears to be a significant positive association between local area level radiation dosage and perception of poor health though much weaker associations between local area level dosage and other specific self reported health conditions there is also some evidence to suggest that those who lived in areas more exposed to chernobyl induced radiation have significantly lower levels of labour market performance 20 years on

transport taxes with multiple trip purposes a congestible urban transport system is considered in which cars and buses are used for commuting and non commuting trips commuting is a strict complement to taxable labour supply the optimal tax structure for raising a given amount of government revenue is examined for the cases where differentiation of transport tolls between trip purposes is and is not possible an application to belgian urban environments shows that optimal toll differentiation produces significant efficiency improvements without differentiation reforming transport taxes generates substantial gains only when the labour tax can be reduced