do conditional cash transfers for schooling generate lasting benefits a five year followup of progresa oportunidades conditional cash transfer cct programs link public transfers to human capital investment in hopes of alleviating current poverty and reducing its intergenerational transmission however little is known about their long term impacts this paper evaluates longer run impacts on schooling and work of the best known cct program mexico s progresa oportunidades using experimental and nonexperimental estimators based on groups with different program exposure the results show positive impacts on schooling reductions in work for younger youth consistent with postponing labor force entry increases in work for older girls and shifts from agricultural to nonagricultural employment the evidence suggests schooling effects are robust with time

indirect effects of an aid program how do cash transfers affect ineligibles consumption cash transfers to eligible households indirectly increase the consumption of ineligible households living in the same villages this effect operates through insurance and credit markets ineligible households benefit from the transfers by receiving more gifts and loans and by reducing their savings thus the transfers benefit the local economy at large looking only at the effect on the treated underestimates the impact one should analyze the effects of this class of programs on the entire local economy rather than on the treated only and use a village level randomization rather than selecting treatment and control subjects from the same community

the impact of progresa on food consumption abstract in this article we used data from the mexican poverty alleviation program called progresa programa de educacion salud y alimentacion to examine whether eligibility for a cash transfer provided by the program conditional on children s regular school attendance and regular visits to health centers is also associated with increased consumption of food we used a longitudinal sample of approximately 24 000 households from 506 communities a distinguishing characteristic of this sample was that some of the communities were randomly selected for participation in progresa while the rest were introduced into the program at later phases exploiting this feature in our analysis we found that eligible households in the villages covered by progresa increased caloric acquisition compared with eligible households not receiving these benefits by november 1999 median beneficiary households in treatment localities obtained 6 4 more calories than did comparable households in control localities perhaps eve

ethnicity neighborhoods and human capital externalities the socioeconomic performance of today s workers depends not only on parental skills but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the parents generation or ethnic capital this paper investigates the link between the ethnic externality and ethnic neighborhoods the evidence indicates that residential segregation and the external effect of ethnicity are linked partly because ethnic capital summarizes the socioeconomic background of the neighborhood where the children were raised ethnicity has an external effect even among persons who grow up in the same neighborhood when children are exposed frequently to persons who share the same ethnic background copyright 1995 by american economic association

the international food policy research institute ifpri and the mexican progresa anti poverty and human resource investment conditional cash summary the mexican progresa oportunidades anti poverty and human resource conditional cash transfer cct program has influenced considerably policies in many countries the mexican government engaged the international food policy research institute ifpri to undertake the initial evaluation of progresa oportunidades this paper considers 1 was the progresa program design influenced by prior ifpri research 2 why was ifpri chosen to undertake the initial impact evaluation of progresa 3 how did the ifpri evaluation of progresa contribute to the program 4 were there spillovers of the ifpri evaluation of progresa it concludes that estimated benefit cost ratios of ifpri s evaluation of progesa considerably exceed one

beauty and the labor market the authors examine the impact of looks on earnings using interviewers ratings of respondents physical appearance plain people earn less than average looking people who earn less than the good looking the plainness penalty is 5 to 10 percent slightly larger than the beauty premium effects for men are at least as great as for women unattractive women have lower labor force participation rates and marry men with less human capital better looking people sort into occupations where beauty may be more productive but the impact of individuals looks is mostly independent of occupation suggesting the existence of pure employer discrimination copyright 1994 by american economic association

a healthier start the effect of conditional cash transfers on neonatal and infant mortality in rural mexico abstract conditional cash transfer programs seek to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty by building the human capital of poor children despite their popularity throughout the developing world relatively little is known about their effect on children s health outcomes this paper evaluates the impact of the mexican conditional cash transfer program progresa on two important health outcomes infant and neonatal mortality it exploits the phasing in of progresa over time throughout rural mexico to identify the impact of the program the paper shows that progresa led to a large 17 decline in rural infant mortality among the treated but did not reduce neonatal mortality on average the benefit cost ratio is between 1 3 and 3 6 tests for heterogeneity show larger declines for some groups including those municipalities whose pre program levels of mortality were above the median and those that prior to the program had higher illiteracy rates and less access to electricity

assessing the rate of replication in economics we assess the rate of replication for empirical papers in the 2010 american economic review across 70 empirical papers we find that 29 percent have 1 or more citation that partially replicates the original result while only a minority of papers has a published replication a majority 60 percent have either a replication robustness test or an extension surveying authors within the literature we find substantial uncertainty over the number of extant replications

is the allocation of resources within the household efficient new evidence from a randomized experiment i study whether households make pareto efficient intrahousehold resource allocation decisions combining randomized variation in women s income generated by the evaluation of the mexican progresa program with variation attributable to localized rainfall shocks as distribution factors in the collective model i find evidence favoring pareto optimality more specifically female specific income changes have positive effects on children s goods expenditures whereas changes due to rainfall shocks have a smaller influence on household public goods expenditures the evidence is consistent with female partners having greater sensitivity to own income changes and norms that oblige women to devote their earnings to meet collective consumption needs

targeting the poor in mexico an evaluation of the selection of households into progresa abstract in this paper we conduct an evaluation of the targeting method used by health education and nutrition program progresa of mexico to identify beneficiary households we address two key questions a how well does progresa s targeting perform and b how does the program perform in terms of its impact on poverty alleviation relative to other feasible methods and transfer schemes the first question is accomplished by comparing progresa s method to an alternative selection method based on household consumption which is our preferred measure of welfare we employ the concepts of undercoverage and leakage and find that progresa selection method is more effective in identifying the extremely poor localities or households but less so when it comes to distinguishing among localities or households in the middle of the scale to address the second question we compare the potential impact of progresa on poverty alleviation against uniform transfers that involve no targeting at all targeting based on consumption and geographic targeting i e targeting at the locality level rather than at the household level we find that progresa s method of targeting households outperforms uniform coverage and targeting at the locality level in terms of reducing the poverty gap and severity of poverty indices even after taking into account the economic costs of targeting but the closeness of progresa s performance to what could be achieved by geographic targeting alone raises some serious questions about the costs and benefits associated with the practice of household targeting within poor localities

viewpoint replication in economics this examination of the role and potential for replication in economics points out the paucity of both pure replication checking on others published papers using their data and scientific replication using data representing different populations in one s own work or in a comment several controversies in empirical economics are used to illustrate how and how not to behave when replicating others work the incentives for replication are examined and proposals aimed at journal editors and authors are advanced that might stimulate an activity that most economists applaud but few perform

estimates of the economic returns to schooling from a new sample of twins this paper uses a new survey to contrast the wages of genetically identical twins with different schooling levels multiple measurements of schooling levels were also collected to assess the effect of reporting error on the estimated economic returns to schooling the data indicate that omitted ability variables do not bias the estimated return to schooling upward but that measurement error does bias it downward adjustment for measurement error indicates that an additional year of schooling increases wages by 12 to 16 percent a higher estimate of the economic returns to schooling than has been previously found copyright 1994 by american economic association

deception and misreporting in a social program we investigate empirically the extent of misreporting in a poverty alleviation program in which self reported information followed by a household visit is used to determine eligibility in the model we propose and estimate underreporting may be due to a deception motive and overreporting to an embarrassment motive we find that underreporting of goods and desirable home characteristics is widespread and that overreporting is common with respect to goods linked to social status larger program benefits encourage underreporting and discourage overreporting we also estimate the costs of lying and embarrassment for different goods and show that the embarrassment cost for lacking a good is proportional to the percentage of households who own the good jel d01 i32 i38 c25

replication in labor economics evidence from data and what it suggests examining the most heavily cited publications in labor economics from the early 1990s i show that few of over 3000 articles citing them directly replicates them they are replicated more frequently using data from other time periods and economies so that the validity of their central ideas has typically been verified this pattern of scholarship suggests beyond the currently required depositing of data and code upon publication that there is little need for formal mechanisms for replication the market for scholarship already produces replications of non laboratory applied research

a proposal to organize and promote replications we make a two pronged proposal to i strengthen the incentives for replication work and ii better organize and draw attention to the replications that are conducted first we propose that top journals publish short replication reports these reports could summarize novel work replicating an existing high impact paper or they could highlight a replication result embedded in a wider scope published paper second we suggest incentivizing replications with the currency of our profession citations enforcing a norm of citing replication work alongside the original would provide incentives for replications to both authors and journals

job security provisions and employment european countries have enacted various job security provisions over the last 30 years employers are required to pay workers on separation or to give advance notice of termination in anything less than a perfectly functioning market there are effects of the provisions on employment incumbents are more likely to retain their jobs but new workers are less likely to be hired an examination of the european data suggests that severance pay requirements reduce employment

intra household resource allocation an inferential approach if household income is pooled and then allocated to maximize welfare then income under the control of mothers and fathers should have the same impact on demand with survey data on family health and nutrition in brazil the equality of parental income effects is rejected unearned income in the hands of a mother has a bigger effect on her family s health than income under the control of a father for child survival probabilities the effect is almost twenty times bigger the common preference or neoclassical model of the household is rejected if unearned income is measured with error and income is pooled then the ratio of maternal to paternal income effects should be the same equality of the ratios cannot be rejected there is also evidence for gender preference mothers prefer to devote resources to improving the nutritional status of their daughters fathers to sons

do school subsidies promote human capital investment among the poor we investigate the hypothesis that conditioning transfers to poor families on school attendance leads to a reallocation of household resources which enhances the human capital of the next generation via the effect of the conditionality on the shadow price of human capital and possibly via the effect of the transfers on household bargaining we introduce a model to study the effects of conditional transfers on intra household allocations and provide suggestive evidence of the importance of price effects using data from a conditional transfer program in mexico

conditional cash transfers the case of progresa oportunidades conditional cash transfer cct programs innovate by conditioning transfers to poor families on investments in the human capital of children and other family members the mexican cct program progresa oportunidades began in 1997 and has served as a model for many of the now over sixty countries with ccts around the world in large part due to its initial evaluation with an experimental design and numerous follow up studies this article reviews the literature on the development evaluation and findings of progresa oportunidades summarizing what is known about program effects taking into account corrections for multiple hypothesis testing

managing valuable knowledge in weak ip protection countries although knowledge assets provide multinational corporations mncs with competitive advantages in foreign markets it can be difficult for firms to protect their knowledge in foreign countries especially countries with weak intellectual property ip protection building on and extending the knowledge management institutional theory and expatriate literatures this article explores whether home country expatriates can substitute for weak ip protection and drive an increase in more and more valuable knowledge transfers to foreign operations located in weak ip protection countries because of their ties to headquarters knowledge of parent firm assets priorities and routines and activities in local operations i argue that home country expatriates can transform the local operation to offer higher protection for parent firm knowledge in weak ip countries in ways that local managers cannot the results from a comprehensive panel of us multinationals suggest that home country expatriates can substitute for weak ip protection but that this effect is contingent on the manufacturing and knowledge capabilities of foreign operations for higher value parent firm knowledge transfers overall this article extends our understanding of the global management and protection of knowledge by mncs by exploring how organizational practices can buffer country level institutional deficiencies for firm knowledge

social interactions and schooling decisions abstract the aim of this paper is to study whether a child s schooling choices are affected by the schooling choices of other children identification is based on a randomized targeted intervention that grants a cash subsidy conditional on school attendance to a subgroup of eligible children within small rural villages in mexico progresa this policy change spills over to ineligible children if social interactions are relevant results indicate that the eligible children tend to attend school more frequently and the ineligible children acquire more schooling when the subsidy is introduced in their local village moreover the overall effect of progresa on eligible children is the sum of a direct effect due to cash transfers and an indirect effect due to changes in peer group schooling interestingly the social interactions effect is almost as important as the direct effect