commodity price shocks and civil conflict evidence from colombia how do income shocks aect armed con ict theory suggests two op posite eects if labor is used to appropriate resources violently higher wages may lower con ict by reducing labor supplied to appropriation this is the opportunity cost eect alternatively a rise in contestable income may increase violence by raising gains from appropriation this is the rapacity eect our paper exploits exogenous price shocks in inter national commodity markets and a rich dataset on civil war in colombia to assess how dierent income shocks aect con ict we examine changes in the price of agricultural goods which are labor intensive and natural resources which are capital intensive we focus on coee and oil the two largest exports we nd that a sharp fall in coee prices in the 1990s increased violence dierentially in regions growing more coee by lower ing wages and the opportunity cost of joining armed groups in contrast a rise in oil prices increased violence dierentially in the oil region by in creasing municipal revenue siphoned through rapacity this pattern holds in several other agricultural and natural resource sectors providing robust evidence that price shocks aect con ict in opposite directions depending on the factor intensity of the commodity

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

women s schooling home teaching and economic growth the hypothesis that increases in the schooling of women enhance the human capital of the next generation and thus make a unique contribution to economic growth is assessed on the basis of data describing green revolution india estimates are obtained that indicate that a component of the significant and positive relationship between maternal literacy and child schooling in the indian setting reflects the productivity effect of home teaching and that the existence of this effect combined with the increase in returns to schooling for men importantly underlies the expansion of female literary following the onset of the green revolution

women s work and economic development using a cross country dataset and microdata from india and thailand we examine how women s work status changes with economic development several clear patterns emerge women s labor force participation first declines and then rises with development women move from work in family enterprises to work as paid employees fertility declines and gender gaps in education narrow women s education levels and those of their spouses appear to be important determinants of women s labor market activities broad welfare indicators such as mortality rates and education levels indicate that women s well being improves on average with development both in absolute terms and relative to men

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

india s missing girls biology customs and economic development we review the evidence on the sex ratio among children below the age of six international evidence shows that the sex ratio at birth is slightly biased towards boys but boys suffer greater mortality a pattern consistent with darwinian evolution with economic development the male bias in the child sex ratio increases south and east india show levels and trends in the child sex ratio that are consistent with this evidence however unbalanced sex ratios in the northern and western states since the first censuses indicate discrimination against girls technological developments permitting sex selective abortions have seriously aggravated the imbalances in these states economic modelling of parental choice regarding a child s gender suggests that gender imbalances may be consistent with individual maximization and marriage market equilibrium nevertheless these choices have adverse welfare consequences which will be aggravated by the decline in population growth and consequent relaxation of the marriage squeeze

rain and the democratic window of opportunity according to the economic approach to political transitions negative transitory economic shocks can give rise to a window of opportunity for democratic change we examine this hypothesis using yearly rainfall variation over the 1980 2004 period in 41 sub saharan african countries we find that a 25 drop in rainfall increases the probability of a transition to democracy during the following two years by around 3 percentage points a 5 fall in income due to low rainfall raises the probability of democratization by around 7 percentage points we also find that rainfall does not affect transitions from democracy to autocracy

poverty and public policy the problem of poverty is particularly acute in india with 14 of the world s population we have the misfortune of having almost twice as large a share of the world s poor indeed as i shall presently underline the question of poverty and its amelioration has been at the center of our concerns from the beginning of our planning efforts almost four decades ago little therefore can be said on it that some distinguished indian economist has not already said in some ways therefore to talk on the design of public policy for poverty to an indian audience is to carry coal to newcastle or as the old saying goes to teach your grandmother how to suck eggs nonetheless i hope to provide a fresh perspective by putting the problem into an explicit analytical framework that permits alternative policy designs to be sharply defined and contrasted i also intend to draw on international experience to put our efforts and problems into both historical and comparative perspectives

income shocks and gender gaps in education evidence from uganda abstract this paper uses exogenous variation in rainfall across districts in uganda to estimate the causal effects of household income shocks on children s enrollment and academic performance conditional on gender i find negative deviations in rainfall from the long term mean to have negative and highly significant effects on female enrollment in primary schools and the effect grows stronger for older girls i find no effect of rainfall variation on the enrollment of boys and young girls moreover i find that when schooling is free of charge and both marginal boys and girls are enrolled a negative income shock has an adverse effect on the test scores of female students while boys are not affected the results imply that households respond to income shocks by varying the amount of schooling and resources provided to girls while boys are to a large extent sheltered a finding consistent with a model where parents values of child labor differ across sexes

technical change and intra household welfare a case study of irrigated rice production in south sulawesi indonesia in this article the effect of an agricultural technical change on intra household welfare is discussed existing theories of the household suggest that the distribution of resources within the household is a function of household members employment the differences in male and female employment levels under rainfed and irrigated rice production are investigated in a case study of two villages in south sulawesi indonesia it is concluded that the pattern of labour allocation in the irrigated area involves higher absolute labour requirements for both men and women compared to the rainfed area but that women s agricultural labour relative to men s is lower furthermore women s participation in the cash economy is relative to men s lower in the irrigated than in the rainfed area it is argued that these differences can be seen as a response to the different agricultural production technologies being used this suggests that the levels of inequality within the household are greater in the irrigated than

the logic of political violence this paper offers a unified approach for studying political violence whether it emerges as repression or civil war we formulate a model where an incumbent or opposition can use violence to maintain or acquire power to study which political and economic factors drive one sided or two sided violence repression or civil war the model predicts a hierarchy of violence states from peace via repression to civil war and suggests a natural empirical approach exploiting only within country variation in the data we show that violence is associated with shocks that can affect wages and aid as in the theory these effects are only present where political institutions are non cohesive

intrahousehold resource allocation in rural pakistan a semiparametric analysis we estimate semiparametric engel curves for rural pakistan using a large household survey this allows us to obtain consistent estimates of the effects of household size and composition on consumption patterns even when these demographic variables are correlated with an unknown function of income the coefficients on the household composition variables are used to infer patterns of intrahousehold allocation while there is little evidence of gender bias amongst children adult males appear to get more than adult females there is a tendency amongst males for workers to get more than dependents there is no evidence of differential treatment of the elderly and higher birth order children we identify substantial economies of size in food consumption we also find that engel curces for food adult goods and child goods are nonlinear which suggests that the piglog class of demand models in inappropriate

the impact of development on women a specific factors analysis abstract the specific factors model is employed in this paper as a means of explaining how economic development may serve to diminish women s welfare three changes associated with the development process are analyzed for their effect on women s real and relative wage 1 an expansion of trade induced by an improvement in the terms of trade 2 technological change and 3 an increase in female labor force participation

a population macroeconomic growth model for currently developing countries abstract this paper constructs a theoretical model that predicts as observed in some currently developing countries that the average school enrollment ratio may fall even when the average fertility rate declines unlike existing models the current analysis indicates that economic growth may slow down when a fertility transition starts asymmetric behavior with respect to fertility and education between households stemming from income inequality plays an important role in generating this result we examine the implications of an education subsidy policy contrary to intuition in some circumstances this policy may decrease the average school enrollment ratio and future economic growth

conflict and deterrence under strategic risk we examine the determinants of cooperation and the effectiveness of deterrence when fear is a motive for conflict we contrast results obtained in a complete information setting with those obtained in a setting with strategic risk where players have different information about their environment these two strategic settings allow us to identify and distinguish the role of predatory and preemptive incentives as determinants of cooperation and conflict in our model weapons unambiguously facilitate peace under complete information in contrast under strategic risk we show that increases in weapon stocks can have a nonmonotonic effect on the sustainability of cooperation we also show that under strategic risk asymmetry in military strength can facilitate peace and that anticipated peacekeeping interventions may improve incentives for peaceful behavior

intra household gender disparity in school choice evidence from private schooling in india abstractthis paper explores gender inequality within households in the decision of private versus government school choice in india using a three period longitudinal dataset on rural households from uttar pradesh a northern state of india this paper estimates a household fixed effects model and finds that there is an intra household gender bias of 6 percentage points in private school enrolment among children aged 6 16 years contrary to the trend in overall enrolment the gender gap in private school choice is rising over time and is more pronounced in villages with a larger cost difference between private and government schooling this finding remains robust even after controlling for average school quality and considering potential endogeneity of the cost variables

an analysis of childhood malnutrition in rural india role of gender income and other household characteristics there are controversies regarding the role of individual and household characteristics in childhood nutritional status measured by anthropometric indicators using a nutrition index based on weight for age of children in rural india the paper re examines this issue ordered probit estimates of nutritional status suggest female literacy improves the nutritional status of boys at the cost of girls while higher per capita current income improves that of both boys and girls though the impact is higher for boys however effect of income is not robust when we use instruments of longer run income but more income and literacy give more ways to discriminate between boys and girls

input choices in agriculture is there a gender bias summary this paper examines evidence of gender biases in the decisions of agricultural households utilizing data from international crops research institute for the semi arid tropics s village level studies in india 1975 85 the main empirical finding is that households with a high proportion of boys tend to use some agricultural inputs including fertilizers and irrigation services more intensively than households with girls this pattern is more pronounced among wealthier households but does not appear to be driven solely by bequest motives or male child labor productivity

glass slippers and glass ceilings an analysis of marital anticipation and female education abstract this paper studies how marital anticipation affects female schooling in the presence of gender wage inequality and private benefits of education gender wage inequality induces a marital division of labour that creates i a marginal disincentive to girls schooling and ii a tradeoff between consumption and education facing females in marriage markets we show that in the presence of the last effect an increase in the market wage can have negative consequences for the education of females who specialise in housework

optimal dynamic capital budgeting i study optimal design of a dynamic capital allocation process in an organization in which the division manager with empire building preferences privately observes the arrival and properties of investment projects and headquarters can audit projects at a cost under certain conditions a budgeting mechanism with threshold separation of financing is optimal headquarters 1 allocate a spending account to the manager and replenish it over time 2 set a threshold such that projects below it are financed from the account while projects above are financed fully by headquarters upon an audit further analysis studies when co financing of projects is optimal and how the size of the account depends on past performance of projects

is it better to be a boy a disaggregated outlay equivalent analysis of gender bias in papua new guinea the demographic evidence of gender bias in many countries has provided an impetus for finding ways to study the status of women in developing countries because of the lack of accurate intra household data deaton 1989 introduced a method for using household expenditure data to infer discrimination in the allocation of goods between boys and girls few studies of discrimination using the method however have detected bias even though alternative indicators suggest it is a serious problem in this paper we study the case of papua new guinea a country in which there are many indicators of severe gender bias discrimination in the allocation of goods between boys and girls within households in papua new guinea is examined using deaton s outlay equivalent ratio method adding a boy to the household reduces expenditure on adult goods by as much as would a nine tenths reduction in total outlay per member but girls have no effect on adult goods expenditure the hypothesis of haddad and reardon 1993 that

the effects of sons and daughters on men s labor supply and wages in this paper we estimate the effects of children and the differential effects of sons and daughters on men s labor supply and hourly wage rates the responses to fatherhood of two cohorts of men from the psid sample are examined separately and we use fixed effects estimation to control for unobserved heterogeneity we find that fatherhood significantly increases the hourly wage rates and annual hours of work for men from both cohorts most notably men s labor supply and wage rates increase more in response to the births of sons than to the births of daughters

nash bargained household decisions reply pierre andre chiappori s 1988 claim that the nash bargaining model is of weak empirical relevance and neither convenient nor really restrictive is incorrect nash bargained household behavior implies a rich set of empirical implications extending well beyond the pareto efficiency of intrafamily distributions by systematically accounting for the impact of opportunities outside the family on resource distribution within the family nash bargained demand theory considerably expands the scope of neoclassical demand theory such expansion can elucidate issues ranging from the impact of alimony and child support laws in developed societies to the intrafamily distribution of nutrition in less developed countries copyright 1990 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

program interventions intrahousehold distribution and the welfare of individuals modelling household behavior abstract in this essay the implications for the intrahousehold distribution of resources derived from economic models of household behavior that treat the household as maximizing a single welfare function are reviewed particular attention is paid to the within family allocation of time and food and to the effects of these resources on the schooling earnings and health status of individuals as they are affected by direct food intervention and female employment schemes and price altering policies empirical applications are provided from data sets from india indonesia and the philippines to illustrate the power and limitations of such models for illuminating household interventions and for placing restrictions on data

hidden child labor determinants of housework and family business work of children in 16 developing countries summary two forms of hidden child labor housework and family business work are studied for 178 000 children in 16 african and asian countries about 30 of african children and 11 of asian children work over 15 h a week in hidden child labor girls are more involved in housework and boys more in family business work but this division is not strict most 80 90 of variation is due to household factors children work less in urban less traditional and more educated areas gender differences are larger in asia probably due to a stricter form of patriarchy

lifetime earnings and the vietnam era draft lottery evidence from social security administrative records errata the randomly assigned risk of induction generated by the draft lottery is used to construct estimates of the effect of veteran status on civilian earnings these estimates are not biased by the fact that certain types of men are more likely than others to service in the military social security administrative records indicate that in the early 1980s long after their service in vietnam had ended the earnings of white veterans were approximately 15 percent less than the earnings of comparable nonveterans copyright 1990 by american economic association

real income equivalence among one earner and two earner families in an earlier paper we proposed a technique for making income comparisons across various household sizes in this paper we employ a modified version of that method to convert nominal income to some real equivalent comparable across families of a given size but with one or two family earners we begin with a discussion of some of the conceptual difficulties involved in making cross family size or structure comparisons in income we then describe spending pattern differences between one and two earner families the final section discusses our effort to convert nominal income into comparable real income units we conclude that nominal income differences between two and one earner families far overstate differences in standards of living excerpt

does increased access increase equality gender and child health investments in india increases in access to social services are often thought to decrease inequality in the level of these services between advantaged and disadvantaged groups this is an issue in the developing world where policy makers often argue that increasing the level of health care for example will decrease gender inequality however increases in access to services often have empirically ambiguous eects on inequality increasing it in some cases and decreasing it in others this paper argues that this is not surprising and simple economic theory suggests that we should expect a non monotonic relationship between access and inequality at low levels of access to investments there is no investment for either the advantaged or disadvantaged group producing equality increases in access increase investment for the advantaged group rst generating inequality further increases in access increase investment in the disadvantaged group decreasing inequality i test the predictions of this theory using data on the availability of health camps or distance to health centers and gender dierences in vaccinations in india i nd strong support for a non monotonic relationship between access and gender equality

birth order and the intrahousehold allocation of time and education this paper develops a model of intrahousehold allocation with endogenous fertility which captures the relationship between birth order and investment in children it shows that a birth order effect in intrahouse hold allocation can arise even without assumptions about parental preferences for specific birth orders of children or genetic endowments varying by birth order the important contribution is that fertility is treated as endogenous a possibility that other models of intrahousehold allocation have ignored the implications of the model are that children with higher birth orders that is who are born later have an advantage over siblings with lower birth orders and that parents who are inequality averse will not have more than one child the model furthermore shows that not taking account of the endogeneity of fertility when analyzing intrahousehold allocation may seriously bias the results the effects of a child s birth order on its human capital accumulation are analyzed using a longitudinal

gender bias credit constraints and time allocation in rural india this paper examines the impact of a child s gender on the time allocation of rural indian households for the five year period subsequent to its birth a theoretical model generates predictions for the effect of the birth of a boy relative to a girl i e the gender shock on household behaviour when the household is liquidity constrained and when it is not the results from the empirical analysis are consistent with the case in which poorer households are liquidity constrained and less poor households are not the interpretation of the finding that women in both groups of households work less subsequent to the birth of a boy relative to a girl differs in these two cases

out of the ashes into the fire the consequences of u s weapons sales for political violence abstract we examine the effect of u s weapons purchases on political violence in 191 countries during the period 1970 2008 our identification strategy exploits exogenous shifts in the cost of purchasing u s commercial weapons through a combination of time variation in u s inflation and cross sectional variation in a country s historical frequency of purchases we find that weapons purchases reduce the likelihood of political repression but increase the likelihood of onset of civil war in purchasing countries the results suggest that state investment in military capability incites civil war in countries where state repression of an aggrieved opposition would have otherwise prevailed

civil war and u s foreign influence we study how foreign interventions affect civil war around the world in an infinitely repeated game we combine a gambling for resurrection mechanism for the influencing country with the canonical bargaining model of war in the influenced country to micro found sudden shifts in power among the domestic bargaining partners which are known to lead to war due to commitment problems we test two of our model predictions that allow us to identify the influence of foreign intervention on civil war incidence i civil wars around the world are more likely under republican governments and ii the probability of civil wars decreases with the u s presidential approval rates these results withstand several robustness checks and overall suggest that foreign influence is a sizable driver of domestic conflict

parental preference heterogeneity and human capital inequality abstract in this article i provide an empirical account of the human capital investment behavior of parents in the face of endowment differences among siblings the data set used contains a three wave panel of 4 030 individuals the article presents a rare case in which endowments are measured explicitly health endowments are estimated from dynamic health production functions while educational endowments are obtained from test scores the simple score of the standard raven s colored progressive matrix cpm test is used to measure educational endowments i use estimation procedures that combine an instrumental variables method with panel data estimators to control for endogeneity and heterogeneity the results suggest that parents compensate for initial differences in health but reinforce initial educational differences among siblings hence an educational subsidy aimed at reducing inequality may end up reinforcing the inequality that might exist in the absence of such subsidy when parents invest mor

the retirement health nexus a new measure of an old puzzle traditional empirical models of retirement which use a self assessed health measure have often found that the wage rate has a surprisingly small effect on retirement using both a self reported health measure and one not based on self report subsequent mortality experience in a more general reduced form joint demand framework we test the importance of the interaction effects of health and retirement our findings are consistent with a joint determination of health and retirement the wage elasticity using either health measure is about equal to that found in a single equation model when a mortality measure is used but all three elasticities are five times greater than one found using self reported health in a traditional single equation model

type of work matters women s labor force participation and the child sex ratio in turkey abstract province level census data for 1985 and 1990 from turkey are used to examine the effect of the economic value of women on the 0 9 cohort population sex ratio the sex ratio is interpreted as an indicator of the relative life chances of girls reflecting their relative neglect in the household we test two hypotheses women s labor force participation lowers the sex ratio and women s gainful work outside is more effective than the not directly remunerative work in an integrated family production system in lowering the sex ratio we find an inverse relationship between women s labor force participation and the sex ratio but this effect is present only where women engage in unpaid family labor

aggregate return on investment for investments under uncertainty abstract this paper deals with capital budgeting decisions under uncertainty we present an aggregate return on investment aroi obtained as the ratio of total undiscounted cash flow to total invested capital and show that it is a genuine rate of return which compared with the risk adjusted cost of capital correctly signals wealth creation for choosing between two mutually exclusive projects we derive an incremental aroi and an incremental risk adjusted cost of capital by means of which two unequal risk projects can be correctly compared iterating the incremental procedure we show that the aroi approach correctly ranks any bundle of different risk competing projects relations with other criteria such as modified internal rate of return average irr cash multiple and profitability index are provided theoretically the aroi approach constitutes a link between arbitrage choice theory and corporate investment theory and shows that explicit discounting is not necessary for measuring economic profitability practically the aroi is a user friendly easy to compute rate of return derived from the same set of data required by the net present value npv also it does not incur the difficulties met by the internal rate of return irr in particular it is unique and it is based on economically significant capital values i e market driven values as such the aroi significantly expresses the efficiency of the project s invested capital

selection on observed and unobserved variables assessing the effectiveness of catholic schools in this paper we measure the effect of catholic high school attendance on educational attainment and test scores because we do not have a good instrumental variable for catholic school attendance we develop new estimation methods based on the idea that the amount of selection on the observed explanatory variables in a model provides a guide to the amount of selection on the unobservables we also propose an informal way to assess selectivity bias based on measuring the ratio of selection on unobservables to selection on observables that would be required if one is to attribute the entire effect of catholic school attendance to selection bias we use our methods to estimate the effect of attending a catholic high school on a variety of outcomes our main conclusion is that catholic high schools substantially increase the probability of graduating from high school and more tentatively attending college we find little evidence of an effect on test scores

an empirical study of capital budgeting practices for strategic investments in cim technologies abstract in recent years an increasing number of companies have been struggling to justify strategic technology investments using traditional capital budgeting systems the existing accounting based decision models such as discounted cashflow are said to be no longer adequate to help evaluate investments in technological innovation mainly because of the strategic intangible nature of the benefits involved as a result traditional capital budgeting methods have been heavily criticized of discouraging the adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies and thus undermining the competitiveness of western firms some authors would argue that the only alternative is to exempt these strategic investments from the control of accounting systems others have developed sophisticated methods for performing an integrated strategic and financial investment analysis at this point however it is still unclear which approach is prevalent in practice and which factors contribute to effective investment decisions this empirical study attempts to shed some light on the problem by examining the capital budgeting practices of firms with regard to strategic investments in computer integrated manufacturing cim technologies questionnaire data are used to provide a better insight into the ways in which manufacturing firms go about controlling major investments in new process technologies in addition tentative findings are presented about hypothesized relationships between characteristics of the investment decision making process and the perceived ex post financial performance of cim investments

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

food aid and adult nutrition in rural ethiopia insight into the role of safety nets that contribute to adult nutrition is an important component to understanding the dynamics of poverty in developing countries this article uses panel data from rural ethiopia on individual nutritional status to test for an effect of public transfers on adult body mass index bmi results show that among adult household members male members are the primary beneficiaries of food aid as male and female aid recipients tend to invest aid receipts in male household members these results are consistent with a theory in which additional resources are allocated to members of the household whose market returns are higher or those who engage in activities that expend higher levels of energy for high asset households female household members benefit if the aid recipient is a female women in low asset households appear to be adversely affected by aid receipts and evidence suggests that women with little bargaining power suffer the most the results suggest that aid receipts are useful in mitigating fluctuations in adult bmi over a short time period

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

fertility and the household s economic status a natural experiment using indian micro data abstract we model fertility as endogenous to the family s economic status because poor households choose to have large families in the absence of adequate social insurance because of a strong son preference in india having two girls first can proxy an exogenous increase in fertility and is therefore a good instrument for fertility in determining poverty of rural households the 1993 1994 indian quinquennial survey data shows that even though poverty rates are comparable 74 per cent of two girl families have a third child compared to 63 per cent of other families fertility significantly positively affects poverty when treated as exogenous but vanishes once endogenised these results are robust to omitting states with skewed sex ratios and to proxying economic status by expenditures

traditional vs modern production systems price and nonmarket considerations of cacao producers in northern ecuador many factors besides profit maximization such as nonmarket ecological and social benefits influence smallholder households to adopt a specific agricultural production system or sell in a particular market thus different analytical techniques are needed that take into consideration more than monetary income to fully capture these additional benefits to better understand the production decisions of smallholder farmers we build on previous work on the household model and shadow wage estimation to develop a shadow wage for ecuadorian cacao producers that includes these nonmarket benefits we found that the shadow wage correctly indicated that on average these households would prefer to use an agroforestry production system instead of the more profitable modern system because of the nonmarket benefits received from the former system

the strategic determinants of u s human rights reporting evidence from the cold war this paper uses a country level panel data set to test the hypothesis that the united states biases its human rights reports of countries based on the latters strategic value we use the differenc

parental altruism and the value of avoiding acute illness are kids worth more than parents abstract a model describing parents preferences to relieve their own and their children s acute illnesses is estimated using stated preference data estimated marginal rates of substitution mrs between child and parent illness are about two indicating that parents value children s illness attributes twice as highly as their own the mrs is larger for younger children falls toward unity as the child approaches adulthood and appears to reflect parental altruism rather than parent child differences in initial health or illness costs intra family allocations may compensate for chronic health impairments parents willingness to pay to avoid own or child illness increases with income declines with fertility increases at a decreasing rate with duration and number of symptoms and depends on perceived discomfort and activity restrictions current methods of assessing morbidity benefits of environmental regulations may understate substantially the value of children s health particularly in african american families

decomposing the gender gap in cognitive skills in a poor rural economy girls lag markedly behind boys in education in many developing countries which may slow economic growth and increase inequity this paper uses indicators of the output of the education production process cognitive skills to characterize and to investigate the determinants of the large educational gender gap in rural pakistan local school availability accounts for about a third of the total cognitive achievement gender gap and over two fifths of that in numeracy which implies that policies that increased local school availability for girls could reduce substantially the gender gaps in cognitive skills to further reduce these gender gaps will require policies that focus on the demand side of the market where our results suggest the response to modest changes in incentives may be high

birth spacing and sibling inequality asymmetric information within the family this paper formulates a dynamic model of birth spacing incorporating uncertainty about and heterogeneity in birth outcomes and joint production to assess how the spacing of children responds to exogenous shocks in birth outcomes estimation technics are developed that use assumptions about the constraints on the information available to parental decision makers associated with the sequential nature of childbearing ignored in static models of intra household behavior section 1 examines the technology of birth spacing and its consequences for the level and distribution of child outcomes and resources in section 2 the model compares alternative estimation technics in section 3 data from a probability sample of us white married couples are used to describe intrafamily variation in birth outcomes and spacing and to test for heterogeneity bias the results in section 4 suggest that across family heterogeneity bias may be less important than within family heterogeneity bias in estimates of the effects of birth order and timing patterns of births on health results from family fixed effect of sibling models of child quality determination that ignore intrafamily substitution may be misleading section 5 estimates how birth outcome endowments and information on gender are used to estimate how differences in them affect subsequent birth timing decisions and sibling inequality results suggest that 1 the birth of 1st born children tends to be delayed among families with high income husbands highly educated parents superior health endowment or high tastes for health investments 2 the proximity of the birth of the 2nd child to that of the 1st child is a positive function of the quality of the 1st born and 3 the spacing and existence of a 3rd child is significantly related to the birth outcomes sex composition and sex ordering of the 1st and 2nd children

war and local collective action in sierra leone abstract we study the brutal 1991 2002 sierra leone civil war using nationally representative household data on conflict experiences postwar economic outcomes local politics and collective action individuals whose households directly experienced more intense war violence are robustly more likely to attend community meetings more likely to join local political and community groups and more likely to vote tests using prewar controls and alternative samples suggest that selection into victimization is unlikely to be driving the results more speculatively the findings could help partially explain the rapid postwar political and economic recoveries observed in sierra leone and after several other recent african civil wars

child gender and parental borrowing evidence from india discrimination against girls is well documented especially in asia we show that women try to level the playing field for their daughters by taking on debt but wealth asymmetry between mothers and fathers perpetuates gender inequality across generations

gender and poverty issues and policies with special reference to asian developing countries abstract recent years saw the outpouring of a theoretical and empirical literature exploring the nexus between gender and poverty in developing countries this paper which provides a critical review of the literature examines the conceptual basis for a gender focused approach to poverty alleviation reviews the relevant empirical studies and data drawn principally but not exclusively from asian developing countries and explores the role of public policies to redress gender disparity the present review argues that the conceptual basis for many gender focused policies is far from well established the empirical foundations of many conventional wisdoms as well as of popular policies remain fragile due to the dearth of reliable gender segregated data and rigorous empirical studies the paper underscores the need for more careful empirical analyses as an input to formulating sound public policy with regard to gender and poverty

aid under fire development projects and civil conflict we estimate the causal effect of a large development program on conflict in the philippines through a regression discontinuity design that exploits an arbitrary poverty threshold used to assign eligibility for the program we find that barely eligible municipalities experienced a large increase in conflict casualties compared to barely ineligible ones this increase is mostly due to insurgent initiated incidents in the early stages of program preparation our results are consistent with the hypothesis that insurgents try to sabotage the program because its success would weaken their support in the population

literacy sharing assortative mating or what labour market advantages and proximate illiteracy revisited abstract this paper explores the relationship between household literacy and the labour market outcomes of illiterate household members which basu narayan and ravallion 2002 report using household income and expenditure data from bangladesh bnr attribute a considerable wage premium for proximate illiterate women in off farm employment to labour productivity gains from intra household literacy sharing this wage premium also suggests that women may be more efficient recipients of literacy externalities than men we propose that any such relationship might not be due to higher labour productivity but may have other explanations such as systematically different and unobserved attributes of illiterate females married into literate households we also pay attention to the negative selection of illiterate females into non farm wage employment which contrary to received wisdom suggests that household literacy may not be unambiguously progressive for females we propose that the widely reported finding that

evaluating familial support for the elderly the intrahousehold allocation of medical expenditures in rural pakistan introduction in this article i examine the determinants of medical expenditures on the elderly in rural pakistani households analyzing in particular the dependence of such expenditures on the economic contribution of the elderly to household income the results for older males are contrasted with those for younger males improved life expectancies in the south asian economies as in other developing economies have generated new policy interest in the economic status of the elderly there is however little empirical evidence on this topic while the scant research on the elderly in south asia undoubtedly reflects the fact that they represent one of the smallest demographic groups in these economies it also reflects the widespread belief that they are well provided for by the intergenerational households where the vast majority of them reside with their adult children however this assumption has been questioned by a number of scholars who find that medical expenditures on the elderly are closely correlated with the elderly s individual incomes and wealth household data from pakistan support such claims data on individual medical expenditures and days of illness are available from two household surveys a panel data set collected by the international food policy research institute ifpri and from the pakistan living standards measurement survey lsms both data sets reveal a strong correlation between the number of days of illness reported by adult males and age leading one to expect a similarly strong correlation between medical expenditures and age instead the ifpri data yield a correlation that is less than one would expect given the relationship between illness and age the lsms data set which provides information on many more

gender of children bargaining power and intrahousehold resource allocation in china abstract based on the prevalent son preference in china this paper proposes a new measure of relative bargaining power within the household using data from china health and nutrition survey we show that a woman with a first born son has a 3 9 percentage points greater role in household decision making than a woman with a first born daughter having a first born son improves the mother s nutrition intakes and reduces her likelihood of being underweight while thinking of these impacts as being channeled through intrahousehold bargaining power we cannot fully rule out other possible direct effects of a first born son on the outcomes

alimony rights and intrahousehold allocation of resources evidence from brazil can family policy affect well being of individuals without altering the resources available to their families this article examines the extension of alimony rights and obligations to cohabiting couples in brazil for women in intact relationships alimony rights upon dissolution should improve outside options strengthening their negotiating positions and increasing their influence over intrahousehold allocation of resources robust econometric evidence indicates that more decision power in the hands of women impacts hours worked by female adults and investments in the education of children this suggests that family policy and models of family decision making should take intrahousehold heterogeneity of preferences into account

why governments should invest more to educate girls abstract women and men often receive the same percentage increase in their wage rates with advances in schooling because these returns decline with more schooling the marginal returns for women will tend to exceed those for men especially in countries where women are much less educated the health and schooling of children are more closely related to their mother s education than father s more educated women work more hours in the market labor force broadening the tax base and thereby potentially reducing tax distortions these three conditions it is argued justify the disproportionate allocation of public expenditures toward women s education

reverse gender gap in schooling in bangladesh insights from urban and rural households this paper documents a reverse gender gap in secondary schooling outcomes in bangladesh drawing upon several rounds of nationally representative household survey data in terms of enrolment status and years of schooling completed boys are found to lag behind girls in the rural as well as in the urban area within the urban sample the gender gap is widest in the non metropolitan area these findings are robust to extensive control for demand and supply side determinants of schooling and remain unchanged even when we use a within household estimator we consider one hypothesis namely gender differentiated response to a conditional cash transfer program to reconcile the findings of this reverse gender gap

does child labour displace schooling evidence on behavioral responses to an enrollment subsidy this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled does child labour displace schooling evidence on behavioral responses to an enrollment subsidy conducted between 1995 and 1996 in bangladesh the study observed that the subsidy increases schooling but its effect on child labour is ambiguous the subsidy increased schooling by far more than it reduced child labour substitution effects helped protect current incomes from the higher school attendance induced by the subsidy substitution effects helped protect current incomes from the higher school attendance induced by the subsidy the reduction in the incidence of child labour by boys girls represents about one quarter eighth of the increase in their school enrollment rate

the empirical content of nash bargained household behavior in households whose allocation decisions can be represented as nash bargained household decisions extrahousehold environmental parameters eeps serve as pure shifters of the threat points the comparative statics of changes in demands due to changes in these eeps are given these are incorporated into a comprehensive statement of the empirical content of nash bargained household behavior including a nash generalization of barten s 1966 fundamental matrix equation of the theory of consumer demand estimation and data requirements are discussed along with nested testing of the following structure the neoclassical model is nested in the nash bargained model which in turn is nested in an unrestricted model of household demands emphasized throughout is the enriched menu of explanatory variables for demand analysis provided by the nash model as well as the model s ability to jointly analyze i household formation and ii intrahousehold allocation decisions

intrahousehold inequalities in child rights and well being a barrier to progress this paper uses unicef s multiple indicators cluster surveys cross country data to shed light on unequal investments in the wellbeing of children boys and girls within the household the paper proposes a new methodology to measure the extent of gender intrahousehold inequality and its contribution to overall levels of inequality using an l theil index decomposition the individual and joint distribution of inequality in four key indicators of child wellbeing is analyzed stunting birth registration school attendance and time spent on work and chores working hours in the search for evidence of gender bias evidence from various separate county studies had shown that the direction of the gender bias is not universal such conclusion holds when using a consistent methodology and comparable cross country datasets this paper shows that disparities inside households do not follow the same bias toward one or the other gender in all countries and the direction of the bias is not the same across indicators of wellbeing while progress in improving child wellbeing has occurred in many countries inequalities remain intrahousehold inequalities might still be considered a priority in an agenda focused on closing these progress gaps

us food aid and civil conflict we study the effect of us food aid on conflict in recipient countries our analysis exploits time variation in food aid shipments due to changes in us wheat production and cross sectional variation in a country s tendency to receive any us food aid according to our estimates an increase in us food aid increases the incidence and duration of civil conflicts but has no robust effect on interstate conflicts or the onset of civil conflicts we also provide suggestive evidence that the effects are most pronounced in countries with a recent history of civil conflict jel d74 f35 o17 o19 q11 q18 we are unable to determine whether our aid helps or hinders one or more parties to the conflict it is clear that the losses particularly looted assets constitutes a serious barrier to the efficient and effective provision of assistance and can contribute to the war economy this raises a serious challenge for the humanitarian community can humanitarians be accused of fueling or prolonging the conflict in these two countries medecins sans frontieres amsterdam 1

repression or civil war perhaps the crowning achievement of mature democracies is the peaceful acceptance of the ballot box as the primary instrument for deciding who should hold power in society we do not have to go far back in the history of most democratic states however to find a distinct role for political violence moreover many inhabitants of the globe still remain at risk of falling prey to widespread violence in the struggle for political office forms of political violence differ a great deal we focus on two important manifestations repression and civil war distinguished by whether violence is one sided or two sided we present a unified approach to studying these forms of political violence with common roots in poverty natural resource rents and weak political institutions first we lay out rudimentary model to analyze whether violence will occur and if so manifest itself as repression or civil war three regimes peace repression and civil war emerge as alternative equilibrium outcomes in the interaction between an incumbent government and an opposition group moreover the theory suggests a natural ordering of these regimes we then construct empirical measures of repression and civil war which we map into ordered variables as suggested by the theory we investigate how the regime depends on economic and political variables using an ordered logit model defined over the three regimes our estimation results indicate a strong correlation between low incomes weak political institutions and both forms of political violence

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

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

an existence theorem on the stationary state of income distribution and population growth through a utility maximizing process individuals derive their optimal fertility and bequest decisions both as functions of their initial socioeconomic backgrounds the combination of these two decisions form a multi type galton watson process under weak assumptions it is proved that the economy will converge to a unique stationary state which implies both a constant population growth rate and a time invariant income distribution as such this paper extends the becker willis static micro level fertility demand model to a dynamic macro level population growth model alternatively our model can be viewed as a generalization of laitners stochastic income theory where no differential fertility is allowed excerpt

demand for insurance and within kin group marriages evidence from a west african country abstract we ask whether parents have incentives to marry their children to a member of the kin group in order to better insure against adverse idiosyncratic income shocks exploiting original panel data from a household survey collected in senegal in 2006 2007 and 2011 2012 we find that daughters within kin group marriage helps their parents household to better smooth food consumption when a parent has fallen ill this better smoothing is notably driven by the fact that households having married a daughter within the kin group receive relatively more transfers our results indicate that parents demand for insurance can explain part of their demand for marrying within the kin group their daughter and extend the literature on inter linkages between marriage decisions and demand for insurance

do parents favor boys in an optimizing model of parental allocation systematic differences in human capital investments betwen the sexes may originate in at least 3 ways 1 parents may respond to expected gender wage differentials 2 parents may respond to systematic differences by gender in the price of human capital investments 3 parental preferences may favor girls or boys in the sense that they value identical outcomes at the same cost more highly for one sex than for the other this paper analyzes the role of parental preferences in general and unequal concern in particular in the allocation of human capital investments among children the authors generalize their earlier model of the human capital investments among children to incorporate the possibility that the returns to such investments may include not only the childs own ecpected earnings but also the expected earnings of his or her spouse thus the model assumes that parents may value returns that accrue trough the marriage market as well as through education the relevant returns to education may include marrying a spouse with higher expected earnings the empirical analysis indicates that gender wage differentials like endowment differentials are mildly reinforced by the parental allocation of human capital investments marriage market outcomes are significant determinants of the allocation of human capital investments among children there is no evidence that parental preferences favor boys this study shows that parental preferences either exhibit equal concern or slightly favor gils

towards a theory of famine relief policy abstract this paper examines how famine mortality is related to the distribution of food consumption a theoretical model is proposed of how individual survival chances are affected by changes in consumption uncertainty in survival prospects arises from the errors made by any observer in assessing health at given current consumption the theory is used to explore two policy issues in famine relief the choice of budgetary rules for allocating emergency aid and the case for price stabilization policies during famines applications to data for two famines in south asia suggest that successful price stabilization would have had substantial benefits in reducing mortality

missing women and the price of tea in china the effect of sex specific earnings on sex imbalance economists have long argued that the sex imbalance in developing countries is caused by underlying economic conditions this paper uses exogenous increases in sex specific agricultural income caused by post mao reforms in china to estimate the effects of total income and sex specific income on sex differential survival of children increasing female income holding male income constant improves survival rates for girls whereas increasing male income holding female income constant worsens survival rates for girls increasing female income increases educational attainment of all children whereas increasing male income decreases educational attainment for girls and has no effect on boys educational attainment