politically feasible and equitable adjustment some alternatives for ecuador abstract how can a government beholden to agroexporting interests survive while carrying out a stabilization program inimical to other powerful interests how can it reduce the social costs of the program the authors review the ecuadorian experience with these dilemmas and build a real financial cge model to explore alternative approaches to stabilization made necessary by both a reduction in public foreign borrowing and a fall in world oil prices the approaches considered include exchange rate devaluation fiscal austerity directed at current or investment spending and reduced growth of money supply each approach is assessed for its effects on gdp growth on rural and urban poverty and for its political sustainability assessed by changes in utility for politically dominant rural and urban interests the results show that cutting current spending is best for restoring growth and protecting the rural poor but is politically untenable making this approach politically feasible requires complementary economic reforms to increase the flexibility of the economy and raise the share of public investment going to agriculture social programs allowing some leakages in antipoverty transfers toward politically essential nonpoor and political campaigns to increase the relative autonomy of the state lower the social rate of discount whereby the public assesses the outcome of policy and induce the public to compare policy outcomes against the counterfactual scenario of no intervention instead of pre crisis living standards

can falling supply explain the rising return to college for younger men a cohort based analysis although the college high school wage gap for younger u s men has doubled over the past 30 years the gap for older men has remained nearly constant in the united kingdom and canada the college high school wage gap also increased for younger relative to older men using a model with imperfect substitution between similarly educated workers in different age groups we argue that these shifts reflect changes in the relative supply of highly educated workers across age groups the driving force behind these changes is the slowdown in the rate of growth of educational attainment that began with cohorts born in the early 1950s in all three countries

education and health in europe abstractthe productive and allocative theories predict that education has positive impact on health the more educated adopt healthier life styles and use more efficiently health inputs and this explains why they live longer we find partial support for these theories with an econometric analysis on a large sample of europeans aged above 50 documenting a significant and positive correlation among education years life styles health outputs and functionalities we however find confirmation for an anomaly already observed in the united states namely the more educated are more likely to contract cancer our results are robust when controlling for endogeneity and reverse causality in iv estimates with instrumental variables related to quarter of birth and neighbours cultural norms

agricultural dis incentives and food security is there a link using the world bank database distortions to agricultural incentives this paper analyzes the impact that agricultural dis incentives have on food security for a wide sample of countries over the 1990 2010 period we adopt a continuous treatment approach applying generalized propensity score matching to reduce potential biases stemming from differences in observed country characteristics the results provide strong evidence of self selection and heterogeneous food security impacts at different levels of policy intensity estimates of the dose response functions show that both discrimination against agriculture and large support for it lead to poor performance in the availability access and utilization dimensions of food security

the relative quality of foreign educated nurses in the united states we examine the relative quality of foreign educated nurses using wages as a measure of skill philippine educated nurses enjoy a wage premium that is not explained by observed differences in worker or job characteristics we reconcile the results with a roy model featuring endogenous skill acquisition and provide some empirical evidence of double selection into nursing and migration our results suggest that the wage premium is likely driven by strong positive selection into nursing among filipinos resulting from high and heterogeneous returns to the occupation due to active government support for nurse migration in the philippines

the effect of female education on fertility and infant health evidence from school entry policies using exact date of birth this paper uses age at school entry policies to identify the effect of female education on fertility and infant health we focus on sharp contrasts in schooling fertility and infant health between women born just before and after the school entry date school entry policies affect female education and the quality of a woman s mate and have generally small but possibly heterogeneous effects on fertility and infant health we argue that school entry policies manipulate primarily the education of young women at risk of dropping out of school

nutrition information and household behavior experimental evidence from malawi incorrect knowledge of the health production function may lead to inefficient household choices and thereby to the production of suboptimal levels of health this paper studies the effects of a randomized intervention in rural malawi that over a six month period provided mothers of young infants with information on child nutrition without supplying any monetary or in kind resources a simple model first investigates theoretically how nutrition and other household choices including labor supply may change in response to the improved nutrition knowledge observed in the intervention areas we then show empirically that the intervention improved child nutrition household food consumption and consequently health we find evidence that labor supply increased which might have contributed to partially fund the increase in food consumption this paper is the first to study whether non health choices particularly parental labor supply might be affected by parents knowledge of the child health production function

the effect of children on adult demands for health risk reductions we examine patterns in adults willingness to pay for health risk reductions we allow both their marginal utilities of income and their marginal disutilities from health risks to vary systematically with the structures of their households demand by adults for programs which reduce their own health risks is found to be influenced by 1 their parenthood status 2 the numbers of children in different age brackets currently in their households 3 the ages of the adults themselves 4 the latency period before they would fall ill and 5 whether there will still be children in the household at that time for younger adults willingness to pay by parents is greater than for non parents and increases with each additional young child for middle aged adults willingness to pay for corresponding risk reductions falls when teenagers are present and falls further with each additional teenager in the household language en

sit down at the ball game how trade barriers make the world less food secure this paper analyses the impacts of trade policy responses to rising world food prices by carrying out a series of stylised experiments in the wheat market using a world trade model gtap the sequence of events that is modelled comprises a negative wheat supply shock and subsequent implementation of an export tax by a major net exporter and a reduction in import tariffs by a small importer the effects of trade policy responses are contrasted with those of full liberalisation of the wheat market at the core are the opposite effects on producers and consumers as well as the terms of trade and trade tax revenue effects food security is shown to depend crucially on changes in prices but also in incomes that are associated with changes in factor returns the results reveal that major net exporters are generally better off when implementing export taxes for food security purposes large exporting countries export price instability causing world food prices to rise further net importing countries lose out and have limited leeway to reduce tariffs or subsidise imports liberalising wheat trade mitigates rising prices and contributes to food security but to the detriment of production in africa and asia making them more dependent on and vulnerable to changes in the world market concerted action at the wto forum is required notably clarifying and sharpening the rules regarding export measures

the health returns of education policies from preschool to high school and beyond the accessibility of quality schools and educational resources for children are key engines of upward mobility in the united states holding the potential to break the cycle of poverty from one generation to the next inequalities in economic status tend to be correlated across generations in part because of intergenerational correlations in health and education rucker c johnson 2009 residential segregation by race and class that leads to unequal access to quality schools is often cited as a culprit in perpetuating inequality in attainment outcomes over the past four decades three major government interventions have had substantial impacts on the provision of school resources and have narrowed black white differences in access to dimensions of school quality i court mandated school desegregation ii state legislation and legal action aimed to change the distribution and level of school funding and iii the expansion of targeted preschool programs for disadvantaged children through head start court ordered school desegregation has been described as the most controversial and ambitious social experiment of the past 50 years human capital health outcomes and inequality

education choices and returns on the labor and marriage markets evidence from data on subjective expectations in this paper we analyze the role of expected labor and marriage market returns as determinants of the college enrollment decisions of mexican high school graduates moreover we investigate whether the relative weights of these factors differ by gender we use data on individuals expectations regarding future labor market outcomes which we directly elicited from the youths and two different measures of marriage market returns first marriage market returns are proxied by the net supply of potential partners in the youths local marriage markets second we use data which elicits youths beliefs about their future spouse s earnings conditional on their own education level we find that labor market as well as marriage market returns are important determinants of the college enrollment decision however boys and girls preferences differ in terms of the relative role of the two determinants in that the relative weight of labor market versus marriage market returns is larger for boys than for girls

does increasing women s schooling raise the schooling of the next generation the positive cross sectional relationship between the schooling of mothers and their children is substantially biased upward due to correlations between schooling and heritable ability as well as assortative mating an increase in the schooling of women would not have beneficial effects in terms of the schooling of children increased maternal schooling leads to reduced home time for mothers anticipating the consequences of investing in women s schooling requires attention to the role that schooling plays in the marriage market as well as to opportunities in the labor market for women

democratizing access to higher education in russia the consequences of the unified state exam reform this is the first paper that evaluates the effects of a reform requiring russian universities to make admission decisions based on the results of a national high school exam we show the reform led to a threefold increase in geographic mobility rates among high school graduates from small cities and towns to start college this is robust to different techniques samples and specifications the reform was also accompanied by increases in students expectations to attend university parental transfers and educational expenditures there is no evidence the reform affected parental labor supply divorce and employment outcomes of graduates who did not move

is smoking inferior evidence from variation in the earned income tax credit in this paper we estimate the causal income elasticity of smoking participation cessation and cigarette demand conditional upon participation using an instrumental variables iv estimation strategy we find that smoking appears to be a normal good among low income adults higher instrumented income is associated with an increase in the number of cigarettes consumed and a decrease in smoking cessation the magnitude and direction of the changes in the income coefficients from our ols to iv estimates are consistent with the hypothesis that correlational estimates between income and smoking related outcomes are biased by unobservable characteristics that differentiate higher income smokers from lower income smokers

the effect of education on adult mortality and health evidence from britain there is a strong positive and well documented correlation between education and health outcomes in this paper we attempt to understand to what extent this relationship is causal our approach exploits two changes to british compulsory schooling laws that generated sharp across cohort differences in educational attainment using regression discontinuity methods we find the reforms did not affect health although the reforms impacted educational attainment and wages our results suggest caution as to the likely health returns to educational interventions focused on increasing educational attainment among those at risk of dropping out of high school a target of recent health policy efforts jel h52 i12 i21 i28

the relationship between education and adult mortality in the united states prior research has uncovered a large and positive correlation between education and health this paper examines whether education has a causal impact on health i follow synthetic cohorts using successive u s censuses to estimate the impact of educational attainment on mortality rates i use compulsory education laws from 1915 to 1939 as instruments for education the results suggest that education has a causal impact on mortality and that this effect is perhaps larger than has been previously estimated in the literature copyright 2005 wiley blackwell

from the cradle to the labor market the effect of birth weight on adult outcomes lower birth weight babies have worse outcomes both short run in terms of one year mortality rates and longer run in terms of educational attainment and earnings however recent research has called into question whether birth weight itself is important or whether it simply reflects other hard to measure characteristics by applying within twin techniques using an unusually rich dataset from norway we examine the effects of birth weight on both short run and long run outcomes for the same cohorts we find that birth weight does matter despite short run twin fixed effects estimates that are much smaller than ols estimates the effects on longer run outcomes such as adult height iq earnings and education are significant and similar in magnitude to ols estimates

the determinants of mortality mortality rates have fallen dramatically over time starting in a few countries in the 18th century and continuing to fall today in just the past century life expectancy has increased by over 30 years at the same time mortality rates remain much higher in poor countries with a difference in life expectancy between rich and poor countries of also about 30 years this difference persists despite the remarkable progress in health improvement in the last half century at least until the hiv aids pandemic in both the time series and the cross section data there is a strong correlation between income per capita and mortality rates a correlation that also exists within countries where richer better educated people live longer we review the determinants of these patterns over history over countries and across groups within countries while there is no consensus about the causal mechanisms we tentatively identify the application of scientific advance and technical progress some of which is induced by income and facilitated by education as the ultimate determinant of health such an explanation allows a consistent interpretation of the historical cross country and within country evidence we downplay direct causal mechanisms running from income to health

mother s education and the intergenerational transmission of human capital evidence from college openings we examine the effect of maternal education on birth outcomes using vital statistics natality data from 1970 to 1999 we also assess the importance of four channels through which maternal education may improve birth outcomes use of prenatal care smoking marriage and fertility in an effort to account for the endogeneity of education attainment we use data about the availability of colleges in the womans country in her 17th year as an instrument for maternal education we find that higher maternal education improves infant health as measured by birth weight and gestational age it also increases the probability that a new mother is married reduces parity increases use of prenatal care and reduces smoking suggesting that may be important pathways for the ultimate effect on health our results add to the growing body of literature which suggests that estimates of the returns to education which focus only on increases in wages understate the total return

the effect of price shocks on undocumented students college attainment and completion we examine the effect of a price shock caused by the temporary removal of in state tuition benefits on the attainment of undocumented immigrants enrolled in a large urban college system using a difference in differences identification strategy the 113 one semester tuition increase led to an 8 decrease in reenrollment and a similarly sized reduction in credit accumulation for students who had been enrolled at least a year prior to the policy change the price hike caused them to leave college sooner but did not increase their probability of dropping out conversely students who entered college the semester prior to the policy change experienced lasting reductions in attainment including a 22 decrease in degree receipt compared to students with more college experience at the time of the price shock our results suggest that public subsidies that lower college prices can increase degree completion among resource constrained students who have made the decision to enroll in college with larger benefits accruing to those who are early in their college careers

us agricultural exports and labor market adjustments this study empirically investigates the impact of us agricultural exports on farm and nonfarm employment and tests how individuals adjust to agricultural export shocks based on the data from 1991 to 2017 and a bartik style instrument that exploits cross regional variation in agricultural export exposure stemming from initial differences in agricultural specialization and temporal variation in predicted us exports from exogenous tariff reductions we find that a 1 increase in agricultural exports increases farm employment by 0 302 and has no statistically significant impact on nonfarm employment the individual level analysis shows that in response to positive agricultural export demand shocks natives with a college degree are more likely to become self employed and start farm activities and while non natives without a college degree are more likely to become hired farmworkers a back of the envelope calculation based on the estimates of agricultural trade elasticities of employment shows that on balance job gains due to us agricultural exports are slightly larger than job loss due to agricultural imports resulting in a net gain of around 0 24 million farm jobs over 1991 2017

uruguay round commitments on domestic support their implications for developing countries abstract this paper examines the basic provisions of the uruguay round agreement on agriculture on domestic support and their relative importance especially from the perspective of developing countries it gives some indication of the extent to which difficulties may arise from differences in interpretation and implementation of certain provisions which may result in contentious issues in the future further the paper focuses on the implications of the commitments made for food and agricultural policy in developing countries in particular it discusses in some detail the compatability of the new disciplines with agricultural and food policies normally pursued by developing countries although by and large developing countries have provided small amounts of direct price support to agriculture in the past the paper concludes that in general the agreement on agriculture per se is not likely to present serious constraints to them in pursuing their agricultural and food policies on production consumption and domestic market stabilization in most cases constraints are likely to come from budgetary austerity and commitments that countries have made under structural adjustment programmes

why the apple doesn t fall far understanding intergenerational transmission of human capital parents with higher education levels have children with higher education levels however is this because parental education actually changes the outcomes of children suggesting an important spillover of education policies or is it merely that more able individuals who have higher education also have more able children this paper proposes to answer this question with a unique dataset from norway using the reform of the education system that was implemented in different municipalities at different times in the 1960s as an instrument for parental education we find little evidence of a causal relationship between parents education and children s education despite significant ols relationships we find 2sls estimates that are consistently lower than the ols estimates with the only statistically significant effect being a positive relationship between mother s education and son s education these findings suggest that the high correlations between parents and children s education are due primarily to family characteristics and inherited ability and not education spillovers

trade liberalization and food security in nepal among south asian countries nepal liberalized most extensively during the 1980s and 1990s on both domestic and external fronts in south asia nepal has the lowest per capita income highest dependence of population on agriculture and second highest poverty rate at the same time nepal has the lowest average tariffs in south asia and has taken several steps to downsize its public food distribution system and remove a host of agricultural subsidies the outcomes from these policy reforms in nepal are mixed aggregate indicators of food sufficiency and security per capita food availability extent of malnourishment show improvement in nepal since liberalization relative to other south asian countries nepal is doing better on some indicators like extent of undernourished population while on other indicators like stunting of children nepal is actually doing the worst more importantly the gains from liberalization across regions in nepal have been uneven the reason for such an uneven outcome is lack of complementary policies from the government that would lead to spatial integration of markets e g the creation of physical and marketing infrastructure liberalization has in effect reinforced the ex ante hierarchy across regions in nepal the paper then reviews the role and reform of the nepal food corporation nfc within this broader context

inequality at birth some causes and consequences recent research shows that health at birth is affected by many factors including maternal education behaviors and participation in social programs in turn endowments at birth are predictive of adult outcomes and of the outcomes of future generations exposure to environmental pollution is one potential determinant of health at birth that has received increasing attention a large literature outside of economics advocates for environmental justice and argues that poor and minority families are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards i provide new evidence on this question showing that children born to less educated and minority mothers are more likely to be exposed to pollution in utero and that white college educated mothers are particularly responsive to changes in environmental amenities i estimate that differences in exposure to toxic releases may explain 6 of the gap in incidence of low birth weight between infants of white college educated mothers and infants of black high school dropout mothers this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

fair trade or trade fair international food trade and cross border macronutrient flows abstract this study examines global food trade from a nutritional perspective paying particular attention to its implications for food security in low income countries by describing food trade in terms of the quantities of three essential macronutrients carbohydrates lipids and proteins embedded in food the analysis goes beyond a simple description of trade values quantities or caloric content as is common in the literature furthermore the study provides estimates of the implicit price of each macronutrient their evolution over time and their implications in terms of north south food trade the data show that over the 1996 2014 period the volume of macronutrients exchanged on international markets has more than doubled with carbohydrates accounting for over 60 of trade flows but proteins and lipids growing at a faster pace proteins were found to be the most expensive macronutrient followed by lipids and carbohydrates in general macronutrients embedded in animal and processed products are more expensive than those in vegetal and unprocessed food the results also suggest that the participation in international food trade has positive effects on low income countries aggregate food availability and food access two pillars of food security indeed low income countries register a net inflow of all macronutrients and take advantage of nutritional arbitrages available on international food markets due to macronutrients price differentials

the uruguay round and agricultural policies in developing countries and economies in transition abstract this paper reviews changes in the global trade policy environment as a result of the uruguay round agreement on agriculture and their potential impact on developing countries and economies in transition the agreement is except in a few cases not likely to present these countries with major policy adjustment problems in latin america unilateral reforms have proceeded further than required by the agreement in africa countries that have experienced structural adjustment are liberalizing faster than the agreement requires in asia the situation is mixed but in general agricultural trade liberalization appears to be moving more slowly especially when compared to latin america progress in reducing quantitative restrictions has been show in eastern europe and the cis the progression and completeness of liberalization varies widely though gatt notions of tariffication and tariff bindings have strengthened the position of reformers in those countries that are members of the wto while the short term impact of the agreement may be modest the bringing of agriculture under the rules of gatt should help prevent reintroducing non tariff restrictions in the future however given that much of the food imports particularly in parts of asia are still conducted by parastatals if state trading in gatt legal it is hard to anticipate how strong discipline on trade distorting support could be brought about

the twin instrument fertility and human capital investment twin births are often used as an instrument to address selection of women into fertility however recent work shows selection of women into twin birth such that while ols estimates tend to be downward biased twin iv estimates will tend to be upward biased this is pertinent given the emerging consensus that fertility has limited impacts on women s labour supply or on investments in children using data for developing countries and the united states to estimate the trade off between fertility and children s human capital we demonstrate the nature and size of the bias in the twin iv estimator and estimate bounds on the true parameter

the intergenerational effects of parental higher education evidence from changes in university accessibility abstract we examine the causal relationship between the educational attainment of parents and that of their children using quasi experimental variation from changes in parents access to university generated by the geographical expansion of the finnish university system between the late 1950s and early 1970s our results suggest that for the children of parents affected by the changes in university accessibility there is a strong positive spillover effect of around 0 5 from parent s to child s attained years of education our analyses using alternative parental and child outcomes suggest that the effect of parental education is partly driven by assortative mating and may also be related to children s improved school performance

estimating the variance of wages in the presence of selection and unobserved heterogeneity abstract identification of potential wage distributions by education is important to the study of the causal links between education inequality and uncertainty potential wage inequality within an educational group that is the variance in wages if all workers had the same education exceeds the observed statistics because self selected education truncates wage distributions decomposing potential wage inequality into heterogeneity known to the agent making the educational choice and uncertainty unknown to the agent suggests that wage uncertainty does not necessarily rise with education it is unobserved heterogeneity not uncertainty that explains the observed relationship between college graduation and higher wage inequality

does raising family income cause better child health evidence from china abstractfew studies have attempted to identify a causal link between family income and child health especially in developing countries this article takes advantage of an exogenous income shock created by china s rural tax reform between 2000 and 2003 to study the causal impact of household income on child health the analysis finds that an increase in family income significantly raises children s height for age z scores these effects are robust to alternative specifications and a comprehensive set of controls the article also investigates possible mechanisms generating this result we find that with a higher income level better nutritional intake partially accounts for the improvement in child health

food price policy the rationale for government intervention abstract policy makers in the most successful developing countries have not accepted either of the two major schools of thought on food price policy the neo classical school favours free trade to maximize efficiency of resource allocation the structuralist school favours interventions to satisfy goals for income distribution especially in the rapidly growing rice based economies of asia policy makers have been more concerned about stability of domestic prices than their level relative to world prices this concern traditionally dismissed by economists as purely political is justified on economic grounds because of improved macroeconomic and dynamic efficiency from stable food prices the paper identifies both the benefits from food price stability and the costs of achieving it

does trade openness contribute to food security a dynamic panel analysis abstract despite significant progress in the fight against hunger during the last decades food insecurity remains a major problem in many countries especially developing ones in this study we use a large cross country data to investigate the impact of trade openness and other factors on food security measured by dietary energy consumption we employ a system gmm approach to account for unobserved heterogeneity correlated individual effects and potential endogeneity of the explanatory variables the empirical results reveal that trade openness and economic growth exert positive and significant impacts on dietary energy consumption and also contribute to improvements in dietary diversity the results are robust to the inclusion of additional variables capturing specific agro climatic constraints e g weather related and regional country characteristics and to the sample composition most geographical regions are found to have significantly higher food security levels compared to sub saharan africa additional results indicate that besides calorie consumption trade openness also improves dietary diversity and diet quality related aspects of food security

social interactions in high school lessons from an earthquake after an earthquake hit southern italy in 1980 young men from certain towns were exempted from compulsory military service we show that the exemption raised high school graduation rates of boys by more than 2 percentage points we do this by comparing high school graduation rates of young exempt men and older nonexempt men from the least damaged areas and men of the same age groups from nearby towns that were not hit by the quake similar comparisons show that graduation rates of young women in the affected areas also increased since in italy women are not subject to the draft the findings suggest the presence of spillover effects jel i21 j13