the economics of export performance requirements this paper analyzes the resource allocation and welfare effects of export performance requirements imposed on foreign investors it argues that a satisfactory analysis must consider the presence of tariff distortions and oligopolistic behavior in host country markets these create a second best environment in which an evaluation of the welfare effects of such requirements is no longer straightforward it is concluded that export requirements can improve home welfare by reducing payments to foreign capital reducing the output of commodities which are being overproduced and shifting profits toward domestically owned firms

export performance and export import linkage requirements this paper examines the resource allocation effects of two policies widely employed by developing countries to improve their trade balances compared to free trade both export performance and export import linkage policies may actually worsen the balance of trade unless they are coupled with an import barrier on final goods even with such barriers an export import linkage policy still may not cause the trade balance to improve the effects of both policies on a number of domestic variables are discussed profit and output of domestic exporters can increase under trade performance policies

voluntary export restraints and foreign investment abstract this paper develops a model in which both voluntary export restraints vers and foreign investment can be considered we investigate the welfare effect of additional foreign investment under vers it is demonstrated that if the commodity subject to vers is more intensive in capital in the importing country which is assumed to be a debtor country additional foreign investment into that country raises its welfare

infrastructure quality and the subsidy trap abstract electricity and water are often subsidized in developing countries to increase their affordability for low income households ideally such subsidies would create sufficient demand in poor neighborhoods to encourage private investment in their infrastructure instead many regions receiving large subsidies have precarious distribution networks supplying users who never pay using a structural model of household electricity demand in colombia i predict the change in consumption and profits from upgrading low quality electricity connections i show that the existing subsidies which provide greater transfers to areas with unreliable supply deter investment to modernize infrastructure finally i analyze alternative programs with stronger investment incentives jel h23 h54 l94 l98 o12 o13

media exposure and internal migration evidence from indonesia abstract this paper investigates the impact of television on internal migration in indonesia we exploit the differential introduction of private television throughout the country and the variation in signal reception due to topography to estimate the causal effect of media exposure our estimates reveal important long and short run effects an increase of one standard deviation in the number of private tv channels received in the area of residence as an adolescent reduces future inter provincial migration by 1 7 2 7 percentage points and all migration inter and intra provincial by 3 9 6 8 percentage points short run effects are similar in magnitude we also show that respondents less exposed to private television are more likely to consider themselves among the poorest groups in society as we discuss in a stylized model of migration choice under imperfect information these findings are consistent with indonesian citizens over estimating the net gains from internal migration when access to television is limited

divorce abortion and the child sex ratio the impact of divorce reform in china abstract this paper estimates the effect of china s pro women divorce reform on sex selection behavior within marriages the 2001 reform liberalized divorce in favor of women and secured women s property rights after separation the paper applies a regression discontinuity analysis on the child sex ratio and finds that the likelihood of having a son after a firstborn daughter decreased by 8 1 percentage points amounting to a reduction of 11 7 compared with the prior proportion of male children further analyses provide evidence in support of the hypothesis that improved divorce options empower women within marriage and enable them to avoid health damaging sex selective abortion the effect of the divorce reform is stronger in provinces where divorce is comparatively viable because of more lenient family planning policies governing fertility in the next marriage the effect is also stronger among women who face higher health costs of abortion

misperceived social norms women working outside the home in saudi arabia we show that the vast majority of young married men in saudi arabia privately support women working outside the home wwoh and substantially underestimate support by other similar men correcting these beliefs increases men s costly willingness to help their wives search for jobs months later wives of men whose beliefs were corrected are more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job outside the home in a recruitment experiment with a local company randomly informing women about actual support for wwoh leads them to switch from an at home temporary enumerator job to a higher paying outside the home version of the job

do contingent valuation estimates pass a scope test a meta analysis abstract this paper considers the scope test proposed to judge the internal consistency of contingent valuation estimates the test is shown to be quite sensitive to the maintained hypotheses required to derive fairly precise expectations for the properties of wtp functions and therefore a different approach may be needed in gauging the reliability of cv this paper describes an approach that relies on a weight of the evidence criterion and uses meta analysis to develop a systematic appraisal of what the economic values of changes in amenity resources are the approach is illustrated for the case of estimating people s willingness to pay for improving or maintaining visibility at the national parks

pattern of trade between underemployed economies in this paper the authors analyze the factors determining the pattern of trade between underemployed economies they find among other things that a low wage land abundant country exports the land using labor intensive product to a high wage capital abundant country the authors also find conditions under which a high wage capital rich country may export the labor intensive product the leonteif paradox copyright 1990 by the london school of economics and political science

gender poverty and demography much has been written on gender inequality and how it affects fertility and mortality outcomes as well as economic outcomes what is not well understood is the role of gender inequality embedded in the behavior of the family the market and society in mediating the impact of demographic processes on economic outcomes this article reviews the empirical evidence on the possible economic impacts of gender inequalities that work by exacerbating demographic stresses associated with different demographic scenarios and reducing the prospects of gains when demographic conditions improve it defines four demographic scenarios and discusses which public policies are more effective in each scenario in reducing the constraints that gender inequality imposes on poverty reduction

electoral contributions and the cost of unpopularity when considering electoral campaigns candidates receiving contributions from relatively unpopular industries should be regarded less favorably by voters that have information on the sources of funding to offset this unpopularity effect politicians may either demand more money for campaign advertising from these industries in order to persuade less informed voters or shy away from unpopular contributors to avoid losing the support of the informed electorate our model predicts that the first effect dominates and electoral contributions are increasing in industry unpopularity by using u s house elections data and different identification strategies we provide robust evidence in favor of our predictions jel d72 p16

gender neutral inheritance laws family structure and women s status in india this paper examines whether economic empowerment of women improves their autonomy within their marital household and investigates the mechanism by exploiting variation from a legal reform aimed at improving women s inheritance rights in india results suggest that the reform increased women s participation in decision making but at the expense of the older generation of household members and not at the expense of their husbands two channels are proposed to explain this phenomenon first this can be driven by a shift in the family structure from traditional joint families to nuclear households such a change is consistent both with the increase in women s decision making authority which they can exert to move out of the joint household as well as with men s incentives since men have weaker financial links with their parents post reform second even within joint families the amendments empowered young couples at the expense of the older generation of household members

financing renewable energy in africa key challenge of the sustainable development goals abstract given the challenge of offering a development perspective to a rapidly growing population it might be tempting for africa to pursue a strategy of fueling growth with the cheapest source of energy available and take care of the environment later such an approach however would disregard the social cost of fossil fuels which the population would have to bear using the sustainable development goals as a benchmark for inclusive and sustainable growth we identify the synergy effects provided by renewable energy already substantial efforts of financing the additional cost of re are under way an analysis of possible leverage points available instruments and involved actors shows that there remains a large additional potential

news media and crime perceptions evidence from a natural experiment abstract in democracies voters rely on media outlets to learn about politically salient issues this raises an important question how strongly can media affect public perceptions this paper uses a natural experiment the staggered introduction of the digital tv signal in italy to measure the effect of media persuasion on the perceptions individuals hold we focus on crime perceptions and combining channel specific viewership and content data we show that the reduced exposure to channels characterized by high levels of crime reporting decreases individual concerns about crime the effect is driven by individuals aged 50 and over who turn out to be more exposed to television while using other sources of information less frequently finally we provide evidence about the effect of the digital introduction on public policies closely related to crime perceptions and on voting behaviour

tariff protection and taxation of foreign capital the welfare implications for a small country abstract this paper extends recent studies by deriving sufficient conditions for tariff immiserization in a small country in the presence of internationally mobile sector specific capital the returns of which are taxed or subsidized necessary conditions for a welfare augmenting tariff are also discussed and the analysis is extended to the welfare implications of changes in the tax or subsidy rate on the earnings of migrating capital

variable returns to scale urban unemployment and welfare the proposition that free trade is superior to no trade has a classical ancestry adam smith and ricardo were amongst the first proponents of free trade samuelson 26 proved and it is held by economists today that free trade is the optimal policy in the presence of standard paretoconditions it is also generally agreed amongst economists that lower trade intervention is superior to higher trade intervention given competitive conditions in a small country these propositions do not hold however in the presence of factor market imperfections such as wage differentials in a small country and therefore production or wage subsidies improves social welfare the two models which are generally used to investigate the positive as well as normative aspects of trade theory in the presence of unemployment are the uniform real minimum wage model which is based on the assumption of general rigidity of real wage in one or two sectors of production and the sector specific minimum wage model which focuses on the phenomenon of rural urban migration in the face of large scale urban unemployment these two models are commonly utilized by trade theorists to analyze trade and unemployment specifically studies by haberler 13 johnson 16 batra and seth 3 findlay 12 and brecher 6 7 investigate the consequences of rigid factor prices for a small country whereas the normative as well as positive aspects of sector specific unemployment have been explored by harris and todaro 15 bhagwati and srinivasan 4 5 and more recently by batra and naqvi 2 das 10 and kahn 19 it has been correctly observed that the introduction of an exogenously specified real minimum wage among other things generates unorthodox results concerning unemployment and gains from trade a large body of research has also been concerned with the welfare implications of different commercial policies in the context of variable returns to scale kemp and negishi 20 have pointed out the beneficial effects of trade in the presence of variable returns to scale production subsidy and consumption taxes eaton and panagariya 11 have analyzed the question of gains from trade in the presence of variable returns to scale and in the context of pareto welfare criterion whereas choi and yu 8 have examined the welfare implications of tariffs and consumption taxes as well as the welfare rankings of these policies under variable returns to scale while panagariya and succar 25 have modified the necessary and sufficient conditions for stability under increasing returns to scale in urban sector

export share requirements and unemployment the case of quota trade restrictions such as import tariffs have been a common practice for protecting domestic import competing industries in most less developed countries ldcs foreign firms may however circumvent such protection through direct investment in the host countries this is the well known tariff jumping direct foreign investment which has been examined by brecher and diaz alejandro 7 they show that the foreign capital inflow leads to overproduction of the output of tariff protected sectors and hence results in welfare reduction recently rodrik 17 demonstrates that export share requirements when applied to the output produced by foreign capital may offset the negative effect of foreign direct investment through the contraction of tariffprotected overproduced sectors thus an increase in such a requirement may actually improve welfare this result contradicts the earlier finding of davidson matusz and kreinin 11 which is obtained from a partial equilibrium framework the existing literature on export share requirements remains deficient in two respects first the full employment models have been deployed ignoring the fact that most ldcs suffer from massive unemployment second the analysis has been confined by and large to tariff protection thereby neglecting quantitative trade restrictions e g import quotas it is noteworthy that it is quotas rather than tariffs which constitute a major constraint on imports by developing countries 2 the purpose of this paper is thus to remedy these two shortcomings by developing a sectorspecific unemployment general equilibrium model with quota restrictions on imports as noted by richardson 16 export performance requirements operate in a second best environment import

the meaning of failed replications a review and proposal the welcome rise of replication tests in economics has not been accompanied by a consensus standard for determining what constitutes a replication a discrepant replication in current usage of the term can signal anything from an unremarkable disagreement over methods to scientific incompetence or misconduct this paper proposes a standard for classifying one study as a replication of some other study it is a standard that places the burden of proof on a study to demonstrate that it should have obtained identical results to the original a conservative standard that is already used implicitly by many researchers it contrasts this standard with decades of unsuccessful attempts to harmonize terminology and argues that many prominent results described as replication tests should not be described as such adopting a conservative standard like this one can improve incentives for researchers encouraging more and better replication tests

financial incentives in health new evidence from india s janani suraksha yojana this paper studies the health effects of one of the world s largest demand side financial incentive programmes india s janani suraksha yojana our difference in difference estimates exploit heterogeneity in the implementation of the financial incentive programme across districts we find that cash incentives to women were associated with increased uptake of maternity services but there is no strong evidence that the jsy was associated with a reduction in neonatal or early neonatal mortality the positive effects on utilisation are larger for less educated and poorer women and in places where the cash payment was most generous we also find evidence of unintended consequences the financial incentive programme was associated with a substitution away from private health providers an increase in breastfeeding and more pregnancies these findings demonstrate the potential for financial incentives to have unanticipated effects that may in the case of fertility undermine the programme s own objective of reducing mortality

transitory shocks and birth weights evidence from a blackout in zanzibar abstract do transitory economic shocks affect neonatal outcomes i show that an unexpected month long blackout in tanzania caused a sharp but temporary drop in work hours and earnings for workers in electricity dependent jobs using records from a maternity ward i document a reduction in birth weights for children exposed in utero to the blackout and an increase in the probability of low birth weight the reduction is correlated with measures of maternal exposure to the blackout the blackout also increased fertility for teenage and first time mothers but selection into pregnancy cannot fully explain the drop in weights

urban unemployment terms of trade and welfare it is generally accepted prior to 1970 that a deterioration in the terms of trade results in lower social welfare in particular prebisch 11 and singer 12 have expressed the basic concern with the terms of trade the secular deterioration in the terms of trade facing less developed countries ldcs leads to income and welfare losses batra and pattanaik 2 nevertheless shows that a deterioration in the terms of trade in the presence of an intersectoral wage differential may raise welfare bhagwati and brecher 5 demonstrate that a decline in the terms of trade can improve real income if capital is mobile internationally recently anam 1 obtains a similarly interesting result for an economy engaging in quota induced rent seeking activities it is notable that none of these studies considers a key feature inherent in a typical ldc namely the existence of substantial urban unemployment thus the purpose of this paper is to examine the welfare impacts of terms of trade losses for ldcs plagued by pervasive urban unemployment the well known harris todaro 7 framework of sector specific unemployment is utilized in addition we derive and contrast various welfare effects of a change in the terms of trade when a ldc pursues alternative import substitution policies i e tariffs vs quotas over the short vs the long run the paper is organized as follows section ii develops the model and provides the transformation relation between urban and rural outputs section iii examines the welfare effects of an exogenous shift in the terms of trade for a tariff or quota distorted economy in the short run as well as in the long run finally concluding remarks are set out in section iv

explaining the performance of contract farming in ghana the role of self efficacy and social capital abstract self efficacy is the belief of an individual to have the ability to be successful in a given domain social capital is the economic value of a person s relationships in the context of this study self efficacy is the belief of a farmer to be able to improve her income with contract farming which increases her actual ability social capital increases the ability of the farmers through social support we surveyed 400 smallholder pineapple farmers and find that both self efficacy and social capital are decisive for their successful integration into contract farming to identify causal effects we use two instruments which are also of interest on their own the historical presence of 1 cocoa cooperatives and 2 christian missionary schools during ghana s colonial period the british established cocoa cooperatives which differed in their performance as a function of biogeographic factors and thus persistently shaped the self efficacy of the farmers roughly at the same time christian missionaries established missionary schools which impacted the traditional societies so that social capital decreased the finding that self efficacy and social capital are still shaped by historic variables could indicate that these variables are only slowly changing or that they only do so in the absence of policy intervention the latter raises the possibility that effective policies could benefit from strong reinforcing feedbacks once self efficacy and social capital improve

multinational firms and the theory of international trade and investment tinational corporation in the arena of economic activity and political influence trade theorists have either ignored it or expressed unguarded skepticism at the ability of the conventional trade models to successfully capture and analyze the features of this new phenomenon the purpose of this paper is twofold first by building upon the contribution by richard caves we will show that the traditional trade models can be adapted in a way that preserves most if not all of the attributes introduced by international firms 2 second we will conduct a comparative statics analysis to explore the implications of tariffs and taxes for resource allocation and international capital movements our results here confirm what has already been well established in myriad empirical studies that maturation of the international firm has vastly increased economic interdependence among trading countries and that few nations can eschew the ripples caused by economic policies of other nations 3

does a picture paint a thousand words female entrepreneurship is low in many developing economies partly due to constraints on women s time and mobility often reinforced by social norms we analyze a marketing experiment designed to encourage female uptake of a new microcredit product a brochure with two different covers was randomly distributed among male and female borrowing groups one cover featured 5 businesses run by men while the other had identical businesses run by women we find that both men and women respond to psychological cues men who are not themselves business owners have lower measured ability and whose wives are less educated respond more negatively to the female brochure as do women business owners with low autonomy within the household women with relatively high levels of autonomy shown the male brochure have a similar negative response while there is no effect on female business owners with autonomy shown the female brochure overall these results suggest that women s response to psychological cues such as posit

arrival of young talent the send down movement and rural education in china this paper estimates the effects on rural education of the send down movement during the cultural revolution when about 16 million urban youth were mandated to resettle in the countryside using a county level dataset compiled from local gazetteers and population censuses we show that greater exposure to the sent down youths significantly increased rural children s educational achievement this positive effect diminished after the urban youth left the countryside in the late 1970s but never disappeared rural children who interacted with the sent down youths were also more likely to pursue more skilled occupations marry later and have smaller families than those who did not

do labor market opportunities affect young women s work and family decisions experimental evidence from india do labor market opportunities for women affect marriage and fertility decisions we provided three years of recruiting services to help young women in randomly selected rural indian villages get jobs in the business process outsourcing industry because the industry was so new at the time of the study there was almost no awareness of these jobs allowing us in effect to exogenously increase women s labor force opportunities from the perspective of rural households we find that young women in treatment villages were significantly less likely to get married or have children during this period choosing instead to enter the labor market or obtain more schooling or postschool training women also report wanting to have fewer children and to work more steadily throughout their lifetime consistent with increased aspirations for a career copyright 2012 oxford university press

media and polarization this paper provides an economic framework to explain the impact of the media on political polarization we start from a context where media environments characterized by their levels of accessibility and ideological content variety aect citizens ideological views and political motivation from this we derive comparative statics in a model of electoral competition with endogenous turnout in which politicians react to those media inuenced attitudes we identify two channels the ideology eect whereby a decrease in media ideological variety leads to convergence in citizens views and hence to lower polarization and the composition eect whereby a lowering of barriers to media accessibility increases turnout and hence aects the composition of the electorate as the inow of new citizens who turn out are relatively more moderate we show that the composition eect aects the extensive and intensive margins for political parties chasing voters so that its ultimate direction depends on the political system lower polarization in majoritarian systems but higher polarization under proportional representation we test the model s predictions in the us context of the introduction of broadcast tv in the 1940s and 1950s and radio in the 1920s and 1930s consistent with our model the evidence shows that tv decreased polarization and exposure to radio was associated with lower polarization the evidence suggests that the composition eect predominated in the case of radio while the ideology eect was more important in the case of tv

the inadvertent consequences of al qaeda news coverage abstract this paper explores the consequences of al qaeda news coverage related to i subsequent al qaeda attacks ii the group s popularity and iii radicalization i construct a daily index of al qaeda news coverage in the us from cnn nbc cbs fox news the nyt and the wapo to isolate causality i employ an instrumental variable strategy based on disaster deaths everything else equal the us media reports less on al qaeda when more people are dying from disasters worldwide at its mean al qaeda coverage is suggested to cause 0 2 0 3 attacks per day in the upcoming 1 4 weeks i find no evidence that attacks are merely rescheduled because of diminished media exposure rather the total number of attacks increases with coverage this effect is driven by easy to plan attack types and by al qaeda attacks in iraq results are robust to an array of alternative specifications and consistent when considering news coverage on al jazeera al qaeda coverage also increases the group s online popularity and search topics that are potentially indicative of radicalization such as jihad and al qaeda s magazine inspire are receiving more attention on google nevertheless these results should be interpreted carefully as it remains difficult to fully disentangle online interest in al qaeda and sympathy with the group s mission

urban unemployment and the gains from trade a welfare ranking of alternative commercial policies is constructed for the mobile capital harris todaro economy it is sh own that despite the presence of unemployment most noninterventioni st policies suggested by the competitive model of gains from trade ca rry over to the mobile capital harris todaro economy yet in contradi ction to the competitive model it is shown that all forms of trade i ntervention are not detrimental to welfare only those that reduce th e volume of trade are the export promotion policies so copiously fol lowed by developing countries are vindicated but their import substi tution policies are shown to be without justification copyright 1987 by the review of economic studies limited

media attention and betting markets this paper investigates whether biased media attention affects perceptions about future events we use data on world cup tournaments in alpine skiing for the period of 1992 2014 and exploit close races as a source of randomness for ranking positions since the allocation of media attention is skewed towards the winner and athletes on the podium we can estimate the causal effect of media attention our results document that ranking schemes generate sharp discontinuities in media attention even in close competitions however both regression discontinuity and instrumental variables estimates reveal that biased media attention neither affects prices nor quantities in the betting market we conduct a series of robustness tests to explore the sensitivity of our results

behavioral foundations of microcredit experimental and survey evidence from rural india microcredit is an innovative financial tool designed to reduce poverty and fix credit market imperfections we use experimental measures of time discounting and risk aversion for villagers in south india to highlight behavioral features of microcredit conditional on borrowing from any source women with present biased preferences are more likely than others to borrow through microcredit institutions microcredit contracts require loan repayments in regular fixed installments and they harness peer pressure to encourage discipline these innovations mirror mechanisms highlighted in behavioral approaches to saving suggesting that microcredit s popularity stems partly from modes of encouragement and self discipline absent in typical lending mechanisms

paradoxical impacts of electricity on life in a rural south african village abstract debates on the nexus between energy and development emphasise that access to modern energy carriers such as electricity improve development outcomes this paper discusses the impacts of electrification on educational outcomes gender and power relations income generation feelings of inclusion and exclusion and health in the village of tsilitwa in the rural eastern cape south africa it is based on an ethnographic grounded theory study conducted in 2009 the paper shows that the impacts of electricity may not match the benefits cited in the literature and are not experienced in the same way by everyone in the community the study uncovers the weakness of ignoring individual and group agency and the complexity of social settings when advocating interventions to improve quality of life the paper recommends that researchers and policymakers consider using ethnographic methods to complement other methods and reveal context and its implications on the energy development nexus that other methods may not capture

does a picture paint a thousand words evidence from a microcredit marketing experiment female entrepreneurship is low in many developing economies partly because of constraints on women s time and mobility which are often reinforced by social norms this paper analyzes a marketing experiment designed to encourage women to adopt a new microcredit product a brochure with the same content but two different covers was randomly distributed among male and female borrowing groups one cover featured five businesses run by men while the other showed identical businesses run by women men and women responded to psychological cues among men who were not business owners had lower measured ability and whose wives were less educated the responses to the female brochure were more negative as did female business owners with low autonomy within the household women with relatively high levels of autonomy had a similar negative response to the male brochure while there was no effect on female business owners with autonomy overall these results suggest that women s response to psychological cues such as positive role models may be affected by their level of autonomy at home and more intensive interventions may be required for more disadvantaged women

gender poverty and demography an overview much has been written on gender inequality and how it affects fertility and mortality outcomes as well as economic outcomes what is not well understood is the role of gender inequality embedded in the behavior of the family the market and society in mediating the impact of demographic processes on economic outcomes this article reviews the empirical evidence on the possible economic impacts of gender inequalities that work by exacerbating demographic stresses associated with different demographic scenarios and reducing the prospects of gains when demographic conditions improve it defines four demographic scenarios and discusses which public policies are more effective in each scenario in reducing the constraints that gender inequality imposes on poverty reduction

media freedom and gender equality a cross national instrumental variable quantile analysis we investigate the impact of media freedom on gender equality in education for a sample of 63 countries taken over the period 1995 2004 our analysis is motivated by the idea that the impact of media freedom on gender equality may differ over the conditional distribution of the response variable using instrumental variable quantile regression to control for endogeneity in per capita income we find that greater freedom of the media improves gender equality only in the 0 25 and 0 50 quantiles of the conditional distribution countries with the greatest disparities in gender outcomes experience no significant impact of media freedom

a tear in the iron curtain the impact of western television on consumption behavior this paper examines the impact of exposure to foreign media on the economic behavior of agents in a totalitarian regime we study private consumption choices focusing on former east germany where differential access to western television was determined by geographic features using data collected after the transition to a market economy we find no evidence of a significant impact of previous exposure to western television on aggregate consumption levels however exposure to western broadcasts affects the composition of consumption biasing choices in favor of categories of goods with high intensity of pre reunification advertisement the effects vanish by 1998

analysis of perfonnance standards for direct foreign investments within the framework of a duopolistic model we investigate the impact of foreign investment standards on welfare output and employment minimum local content and export requirements reduce world output world welfare and the source country s welfare under certain conditions the decline in host country s consumer surplus resulting from diminished competition outweighs the shift of monopoly rent from the source country s firm to the host country s firm minimum content standards can increase host country s employment but only to a point marginal increases in the content requirement can actually reduce employment as the magnitude of foreign investment declines

tariffs quotas and voluntary export restraints with and without internationally mobile capital this paper presents a general framework for comparing the effects of tariffs quotas and vers voluntary export restraints both with and without international capital mobility expressions for the shadow price of foreign exchange and the shadow price of capital under each type of trade restriction are derived and it is shown that although international capital mobility raises the welfare cost of tariff protection it lowers the welfare cost of quantitative restrictions in most cases the effects of exogenous shocks in the presence of quotas are intermediate between those in the presence of tariffs and those in the presence of vers tarifs douaniers contingentements et restrictions volontaires d l exportation quand le capital est ou n est pas mobile internationalement l auteur presente un cadre general d analyse qu il utilise pour comparer les effets de tarifs douaniers de contingentements et de restrictions volontaires a l exportation dans des contextes ofu le capital est ou n est pas mobile internationalement l auteur derive le prix fictif du change etranger et le prix fictif du capital sous l un et l autre types de restrictions au commerce et montre que meme si la mobilite internationale du capital augmente le cofut en terme de bien etre de la protection tarifaire elle reduit le cofut en terme de bien etre des restrictions sur les quantites echangees dans tous les cas les effets de chocs exogenes quand des contingentements existent sont toujours dans la fourchette entre ceux qu on observe quand des tarifs douaniers existent et ceux qui prevalent quand des restrictions volontaires i l exportation existent

do it service centers promote school enrollment evidence from india abstract globalization has changed job opportunities in much of the developing world in india outsourcing has created a new class of high skill jobs which have increased overall returns to schooling existing evidence suggests education may broadly respond to this change we use microdata to evaluate the impact of these jobs on local school enrollment in areas outside of major it centers we merge panel data on school enrollment from a comprehensive school level administrative dataset with detailed data on information technology enabled services ites center location and founding dates using school fixed effects we find that introducing a new ites center causes a 5 increase in the number of children enrolled in primary school this effect is localized to within a few kilometers we show the effect is driven by english language schools consistent with the claim that the impacts are due to changes in returns to schooling and is not driven by changes in population or income resulting from the ites center supplementary survey evidence suggests that the localization of the effects is driven by limited information diffusion

home computer use and the development of human capital this paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of home computers on child and adolescent outcomes by exploiting a voucher program in romania our main results indicate that home computers have both positive and negative effects on the development of human capital children who won a voucher to purchase a computer had significantly lower school grades but show improved computer skills there is also some evidence that winning a voucher increased cognitive skills as measured by raven s progressive matrices we do not find much evidence for an effect on non cognitive outcomes parental rules regarding homework and computer use attenuate the effects of computer ownership suggesting that parental monitoring and supervision may be important mediating factors

fertility and rural electrification in bangladesh we use a household level panel dataset from bangladesh to examine the household level relationship between fertility and the access to electricity we find that the household s access to electricity reduces the change in the number of children by about 0 1 to 0 25 children in a period of five years in most estimates this finding also applies to retrospective panel data and is robust to the choice of covariates and estimation methods our finding passes falsication test and corroborates with the predictions of our theoretical model on the households time use and consumption pattern

gender inequality endogenous cultural norms and economic development this research focuses on the role played by cultural norms in the long run persistence of gender inequalities cultural norms about gender roles are considered to be endogenous and can generate gender inequality and low development traps indeed when the gender gap is internalized it leads to inegalitarian views about gender roles due to these inegalitarian beliefs boys receive more education and the initial gender gap is reinforced the existence of gender inequality traps is pointed out by the world bank as a major obstacle for economic development wdr 2006 the present article allows for a better understanding of the persistence of such traps and the means to escape

the impact of household structure on female autonomy in developing countries abstractjoint household structures in which several generations co reside in a single house are common across developing countries such households may confer benefits on all the family members through household public goods with the patriarch exercising greater control over resources therefore the household structure may affect the bargaining power of its members this paper estimates the effect of joint versus nuclear household structure in india on the autonomy of women and their labour force participation and the heterogeneity in the effects by income caste and region i use an instrumental variable approach and find that women living in nuclear households have greater decision making power

the power of tv cable television and women s status in india cable and satellite television have grown rapidly throughout the developing world the availability of cable and satellite television exposes viewers to new information about the outside world which may affect individual attitudes and behaviors this paper explores the effect of the introduction of cable television on gender attitudes in rural india using a three year individual level panel dataset we find that the introduction of cable television is associated with improvements in womens status we find significant increases in reported autonomy decreases in the reported acceptability of beating and decreases in reported son preference we also find increases in female school enrollment and decreases in fertility primarily via increased birth spacing the effects are large equivalent in some cases to about five years of education in the cross section and move gender attitudes of individuals in rural areas much closer to those in urban areas we argue that the results are not driven by pre existing differential trends these results have important policy implications as india and other countries attempt to decrease bias against women authors

market opportunities genetic endowments and intrafamily resource distribution child survival in rural india the authors examine how intrafamily resource allocations respond to changes in economic conditions and to genetic differences in children by estimating the determinants of variations in the sex specific survival differentials of rural indian children based on standard census and household survey data they explore in particular the hypothesis that such differences are related to the relative returns to survival with households selectively allocating resources to children in response to variation in sex differences in their expected earnings opportunities as adults data are from the 1961 census and a 1971 household survey excerpt

media influences on social outcomes the impact of mtv s 16 and pregnant on teen childbearing this paper explores the impact of the introduction of the widely viewed mtv reality show 16 and pregnant on teen childbearing our main analysis relates geographic variation in changes in teen childbearing rates to viewership of the show we implement an instrumental variables iv strategy using local area mtv ratings data from a pre period to predict local area 16 and pregnant ratings the results imply that this show led to a 4 3 percent reduction in teen births an examination of google trends and twitter data suggest that the show led to increased interest in contraceptive use and abortion jel d12 j13 j16 l82 z13 it is a longstanding and open question how exposure to media images affects viewers behavior policy advocates and cultural observers worry in particular about the impact of exposure to sexual and violent content on adolescent behaviors in some circles the idea that teenagers respond to media content is a foregone conclusion but determining whether media images themselves cause teens to behave in certain ways is a difficult empirical task 1 this paper examines the impact of the mtv show 16 and pregnant on teen childbearing this show purports to show the difficult reality of becoming a teen mother as we document below 16 and pregnant has drawn large audiences among relevant subpopulations could exposure to these media images of pregnant teens and very young new moms have had an impact on how teens behave leading to changes in the likelihood of becoming teen mothers themselves