the impact of social capital on economic attitudes and outcomes abstract this article traces the extant literature on the impact of social capital on economic attitudes and outcomes special attention is paid to clarify conceptual ambiguities measurement techniques channels of influence and identification strategies insights derived from the literature are then used to analyze the marketplace lending industry in china where the size of the peer to peer p2p lending market is larger than that of the rest of the world combined ironically approximately two thirds of these online p2p lending platforms have failed empirical evidence from the monthly operating data of 735 lending platforms and transaction level data from one prominent platform renrendai shows that platforms in provinces with high social capital have low risk of failure and borrowers in provinces with high social capital can borrow at low interest rate and are less likely to default we also provide observations to guide future economic research on social capital

does livestock ownership affect animal source foods consumption and child nutritional status evidence from rural uganda in many developing countries consumption of animal source foods among the poor is still at a level where increasing its share in total caloric intake may have many positive nutritional benefits this paper explores whether ownership of various livestock species increases consumption of animal source foods and helps improve child nutritional status the paper finds some evidence that food consumption patterns and nutritional outcomes may be affected by livestock ownership in rural uganda the results are suggestive that promoting small livestock ownership has the potential to affect human nutrition in rural uganda but further research is needed to estimate more precisely the direction and size of these effects

probability judgment error and speculation in laboratory asset market bubbles in 12 sessions conducted in a typical bubble generating experimental environment we design a pair of assets that can detect both irrationality and speculative behavior the specific form of irrationality we investigate is the probability judgment error associated with lowprobability high payoff outcomes independently we test for speculation by comparing prices of identically paying assets in multiperiod versus single period markets we establish that aggregate irrationality measured in one dimension probability judgment error is associated with aggregate irrationality measured in another bubble formation

thar she bursts reducing confusion reduces bubbles to explore why bubbles frequently emerge in the experimental asset market model of smith suchanek and williams 1988 we vary the fundamental value process constant or declining and the cash to asset value ratio constant or increasing we observe high mispricing in treatments with a declining fundamental value while overvaluation emerges when coupled with an increasing c a ratio a questionnaire reveals that the declining fundamental value process confuses subjects as they expect the fundamental value to stay constant running the experiment with a different context stocks of a depletable gold mine instead of stocks significantly reduces mispricing and overvaluation as it reduces confusion jel c91 d14 g11 g12

gender differences in the allocation of assets in retirement savings plans in 1995 40 percent of working men and 32 percent of working women were covered by a defined contribution dc plan a distinguishing characteristic of these plans is that workers can generally choose how their assets are invested using data from the 1992 and 1995 surveys of consumer finances scf this paper examines whether workers differ systematically by gender in the allocation of assets in dc plans previous researchers have reported that many workers tend to invest their retirement assets too conservatively and in particular that women are less likely than men to invest in risky assets such as stocks in the presence of an equity premium a lower propensity by women to invest in stocks could translate into large differences in the accumulation of financial wealth for retirement we establish that gender differences in investment decisions exist though they are more complicated than previous studies have suggested we show that these differences are not completely explained by differences in individual or household characteristics a few studies have examined gender differences in investment decisions vickie l bajtelsmit and jack l vanderhei 1997 richard p hinz et al 1997 these studies use administrative data and report that women tend to invest their retirement funds in less risky vehicles than men michael haliassos and carol c bertaut 1995 use the 1983 scf to examine why such a large fraction of households do not own any stock they report that gender does not have a significant effect on the probability of owning stock though gender differences are not the focus of their paper what these data sources lack haliassos and bertaut being the exception is a rich set of demographic and other variables on households that theory predicts should affect investment behavior this paper adds to the literature by examining gender differences in investment decisions conditioning on such variables the results highlight the importance of including marital status risk aversion measures and the portfolio of assets held outside dc plans when examining gender differences in investment decisions in these plans

nutrients impacts and determinants understanding the determinants of nutrient intake and the influence of nutrition on performance is critical in designing policies to alleviate hunger and malnutrition a series of studies undertaken by the authors which are synthesized here analyzes the influence of prices income and women s schooling on the nutrient intake of those in developing countries and the effect of nutrition on health productivity wages and fertility these studies suggest that the impact of food price increases may be strong particularly among those with the lowest incomes that the growth of income may be less likely to improve nutrient intake than has been suggested by others and that womzen s schooling is important in improving nutrition these studies also indicate that nutrition exerts a positive influence on wages productivity and fertility our limited knowledge of the role and determinants of nutrition is reflected in the finding of unduly strong effects of seasonalitv on price nutrition relations and the lack of a direct association between nutrition and health the nutrition of poor populations is of substantial interest because of the widespread and plausible presumption that better nutrition improves the welfare of individuals in such populations nutrition also is of interest because of the common conjecture that better nutrition improves productivity a series of our studies have analyzed the relations between nutrition and health labor productivity and fertility and the relations between prices income women s schooling and nutrition intake here we synthesize the results of these studies and address some of the puzzles and policy implications that have arisen

agricultural household models extensions applications and policy this book presents the basic model of an agricultural household that underlies most of the case studies undertaken so far the model assumes that households are price takers and is therefore recursive the decisions modeled include those affecting production and the demand for inputs and those affecting consumption and the supply of labor comparative results on selected elasticities are presented for a number of economies the empirical significance of the approach is demonstrated in a comparison of models that treat production and consumption decisions separately and those in which the decisionmaking process is recursive the book summarizes the implications of agricultural pricing policy for the welfare of farm households marketed surplus the demand for nonagricultural goods and services the rural labor market budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings in addition it is shown that the basic model can be extended in order to explore the effects of government policy on crop composition nutritional status health saving and investment and to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the effects on budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings methodological topics primarily the data requirements of the basic model and its extensions along with aggregation market interaction uncertainty and market imperfections are discussed the most important methodological issues the question of the recursive property of these models is also discussed

determinants of child mortality health and nutrition in a developing country abstract child health and nutrition status are important determinants of adult productivities and earnings and thus are an important channel of intergenerational socioeconomic mobility building upon economic models of household behavior we investigate the determinants of child mortality and health and nutrition status in regions defined by the degree of urbanization in the developing country of nicaragua and offer some policy suggestions our estimates suggest that determinants differ significantly across regions income is not an important factor there is an inverse relation with number of siblings and there are positive associations with calorie intake schooling except in the relatively low income rural areas the availability of refrigeration and the quality of sewage systems

bubbles crashes and endogenous expectations in experimental spot asset markets1 spot asset trading is studied in an environment in which all investors receive the same dividend from a known probability distribution at the end of each of t 15 or 30 trading periods fourteen of twenty two experiments exhibit price bubbles followed by crashes relative to intrinsic dividend value when traders are experienced this reduces but does not eliminate the probability of a bubble the regression of changes in mean price on lagged excess bids number of bids minus the number of offers in the previous period p pt a f b 1 o l supports the hypothesis that a e d the one period expected value of the dividend and that f 0 where excess bids is a surrogate measure of excess demand arising from homegrown capital gains losses expectations thus when bt 1 o goes to zero we have convergence to rational expectations in the sense of fama 1970 that arbitrage becomes unprofitable the observed bubble phenomenon can also be interpreted as a form of temporary myopia tirole 1982 from which agents learn that capital gains expectations are only temporarily sustainable ultimately inducing common expectations or priors tirole 1982 four of twenty six experiments all using experienced subjects yield outcomes that appear to the chart s eye to converge early to rational expectations although even in these cases we get 0 and small price fluctuations of a few cents that invite scalping

are women more risk averse we find that single women exhibit relatively more risk aversion in financial decision making than single men using u s sample data we examine household holdings of risky assets to determine whether there are gender differences in financial risk taking as wealth increases the proportion of wealth held as risky assets is estimated to increase by a smaller amount for single women than for single men gender differences in financial risk taking are also influenced by age race and number of children greater financial risk aversion may provide an explanation for women s lower levels of wealth compared with men s jel j16 d81 g11

determinants of the intrahousehold allocation of food in the rural philippines this study shows that the opportunity cost of time for husbands and wives can affect the intrahousehold distribution of food in a developing country equations which explain the relative allocation of calories within households were estimated for husbands wives and children with data for the rural philippines the estimating equation is derivable from both a joint household utility function and a bargaining model because the same households were included in the four survey rounds the various observations for a given individual were averaged for each variable in the estimation procedure wages were estimated using the heckman approach

gender and competition at a young age gender gaps may be observed in a variety of economic and social environments one of the possible determining factors is that men are more competitive than women and so when the competitiveness of the environment increases the performance of men increases relative to that of women we test this hypothesis in a field study conducted with 9 year old children running on a track they first run alone and then in pairs over a short distance with different gender composition of the pairs the results support the hypothesis that performance in competition varies according to gender when children ran alone there was no difference in performance in competition boys but not girls improved their performance this finding relates to the discussion regarding single sex schools the outcomes of examinations in a mixed sex school can show a gender gap in favor of boys even when this gap does not reflect actual abilities girls who are as talented as boys will end up performing worse just because they are not as competitive and will not achieve as high scores in examinations as boys

judgemental overconfidence self monitoring and trading performance in an experimental financial market we measure the degree of overconfidence in judgment in the form of miscalibration i e the tendency to overestimate the precision of one s information and self monitoring a form of attentiveness to social cues of 245 participants and also observe their behaviour in an experimental financial market under asymmetric information miscalibrated traders underestimating the conditional uncertainty about the asset value are expected to be especially vulnerable to the winner s curse high self monitors are expected to behave strategically and achieve superior results our empirical results show that miscalibration reduces and self monitoring enhances trading performance the effect of the psychological variables is strong for men but non existent for women

gender differences in competitiveness and risk taking comparing children in colombia and sweden we explore gender differences in preferences for competition and risk among children aged 912 in colombia and sweden two countries differing in gender equality according to macro indices we include four types of tasks that vary in gender stereotyping when looking at competitiveness running skipping rope math and word search we find that boys and girls are equally competitive in all tasks and all measures in colombia unlike the consistent results in colombia the results in sweden are mixed with some indication of girls being more competitive than boys in some tasks in terms of performance change whereas boys are more likely to choose to compete in general boys in both countries are more risk taking than girls with a smaller gender gap in sweden

a demand systems analysis of food commodities by u s households segmented by income using the 1987 88 nationwide food consumption survey twelve food commodity groups were analyzed according to household poverty status parameter estimates were used to obtain subsistence expenditures own price elasticities expenditure elasticities and income elasticities own price elasticities were similar between the income groups for most commodities however income elasticities were consistently higher for the lower income group the use of average estimates of price and income elasticities for the population as a whole for the projection of individual commodity demands is not likely to be successful if notable changes are evident in income distribution

the effect of the value of time on food consumption patterns in developing countries evidence from sri lanka this study shows that the opportunity cost of women s time can affect household food consumption patterns in developing countries demand equations for rice bread and the ratio of bread to total cereal consumption are estimated for urban sri lankan households the demand specification which is based on the new household economics includes as explanatory variables the woman s estimated market wage and the household s full income and alternatively observed income wages are estimated using the heckman procedure to correct for sample selection bias

irrationality and beliefs in a laboratory asset market is it me or is it you abstract this paper reports on an experiment designed to examine individual and market outcomes with a mixture of rational and non rational traders using values elicited via auctions we measure a specific form of irrationality the tendency to overweight high payoff low probability events or probability judgment error subjects are classified by their tendency to exhibit errors as well as their beliefs regarding whether others will make errors subjects then participate in a series of double auction markets the results indicate that both probability judgment error and beliefs about other subjects susceptibility to probability judgment error have significant impact on individual and market outcomes

household production in the philippines a non neoclassical approach the starting point of any economic analysis is a microeconomic theory of the decision making unit by providing a set of explicit assumptions regarding individual choices a microeconomic theory lays the necessary foundation for the explanation of economic behavior just as a theory of the firm underlies analyses of market production a theory of the family underlies analyses of household production explanations of long run trends such as fertility decline grow out of assumptions regarding the nature of household decision making developing what they term the economic approach to human behavior gary becker and other neoclassical economists forcefully argue that household behavior is motivated primarily by a collective concern for economic efficiency they assume that households seek to maximize exogenously given joint utility functions and they hypothesize that differences in household behavior represent efficient responses to differences in the prices and incomes which households face this approach provides the foundation for an explanation of fertility decline based on long run changes in relative prices associated with economic development simply stated the argument runs as follows as the rate of return to human capital rises and levels of education increase the cost of rearing children goes up as higher wages draw women out of the household into the labor force the opportunity cost of mothers time goes up further increasing the cost of children the demand for children decreases and fertility levels gradually adjust 2 the assumption that joint utility functions are exogenous constant over time and vary randomly if at all across households is crucial to this argument systematic differences in unobservable joint utility functions could seriously confound the interpretation of observed relationships between changes in household behavior and changes in rela

nonspeculative bubbles in experimental asset markets lack of common knowledge of rationality vs actual irrationality we report the results of an experiment designed to study the role of speculation in the formation of bubbles and crashes in laboratory asset markets in a setting in which speculation is not possible bubbles and crashes are observed the results suggest that the departures from fundamental values are not caused by the lack of common knowledge of rationality leading to speculation but rather by behavior that itself exhibits elements of irrationality much of the trading activity that accompanies bubble formation in markets where speculation is possible is due to the fact that there is no other activity available for participants in the experiment

nutrition health birth order and seasonality intrahousehold allocation among children in rural india abstract nutrients available to children are determined largely by intrahousehold allocations there are a number of reasons why birth order may affect these allocations a model is developed to estimate critical parameters of parental preferences regarding the allocation of nutrients among their children latent variable estimates for rural south india indicate that parental preferences have productivity equity tradeoffs and parents favor older children the productivity equity tradeoff however is much less for the lean season therefore when food is scarcest parents follow more closely a pure investment strategy exposing their more vulnerable children to greater malnutrition tisk

social capital and social quilts network patterns of favor exchange we examine the informal exchange of favors in societies such that any two individuals interact too infrequently to sustain exchange but such that the social pressure of the possible loss of multiple relationships can sustain exchange patterns of exchange that are locally enforceable and renegotiation proof necessitate that all links are supported any two individuals exchanging favors have a common friend in symmetric settings such robust networks are social quilts tree like unions of completely connected subnetworks examining favor exchange networks in 75 villages in rural india we find high levels of support and identify characteristics that correlate with support

strength in numbers networks as a solution to occupational traps the new classical theory states that families in low skill occupations with low levels of human capital can stay poor from one generation to the next while families in high skill occupations with correspondingly high levels of human capital stay wealthy despite being endowed with the same level of ability on average this paper proposes an informal institutional mechanism the community based network through which families belonging to the same neighbourhood or kinship group can bootstrap their way out of such low skill occupational traps the insight from the dynamic model that is developed is that once they form new networks providing mutual support to their members and substituting for inherited parental human capital and wealth will strengthen most rapidly in historically disadvantaged communities generating a correspondingly high level of intergenerational mobility these predictions are successfully tested using unique data from india the analysis in this paper coupled with an emerging empirical literature on networks and migration provides a new perspective on mobility in developing countries with restrictive traditional networks decaying even as new networks supporting collective mobility form and strengthen over time

gender differences in revealed risk taking evidence from mutual fund investors abstract using data from a national survey of nearly 2000 mutual fund investors we investigate whether investor gender is related to risk taking as revealed in mutual fund investment decisions consonant with the received literature we find that women exhibit less risk taking than men in their most recent largest and riskiest mutual fund investment decisions more importantly we find that the impact of gender on risk taking is significantly weakened when investor knowledge of financial markets and investments is controlled in the regression equation this result suggests that the greater level of risk aversion among women that is frequently documented in the literature can be substantially but not completely explained by knowledge disparities

group formation in risk sharing arrangements we study informal insurance within communities explicitly recognizing the possibility that subgroups of individuals may destabilize insurance arrangements among the larger group we therefore consider self enforcing risk sharing agreements that are robust not only to single person deviations but also to potential deviations by subgroups however such deviations must be credible in the sense that the subgroup must pass exactly the same test that we apply to the entire group it must itself employ some self enforcing risk sharing agreement we observe that the stability of subgroups is inimical to the stability of the group as a whole two surprising consequences of this analysis are that stable groups have uniformly bounded size a result in sharp contrast to the individual deviation problem and that the degree of risk sharing in a community is generally non monotonic in the level of uncertainty or need for insurance in the community

the mobilization of women s labor for cash crop production a game theoretic approach in the last decade or so economists have modeled phenomena such as household labor supply fertility behavior and child survival rates using the household as the unit of analysis this paper presents data that call into question the assumption that the household is a joint decision making unit which maximizes a neoclassical household utility function the data come from a study of the mobilization of women s labor by their husbands for irrigated rice production in north cameroon the first section of this paper describes briefly the massa rice and sorghum farming system and then considers the relationship between the amount of compensation women receive from their husbands for their labor on rice production and the amount of labor they allocate to rice production the findings suggest that a bargaining model may describe the intrahousehold relations of production and distribution better than the neoclassical model the second section specifies a nash bargaining model and contrasts it with the neoclassical model of the household using the bargaining framework the third section explores in more detail possible explanations of the allocative inefficiency which seems to characterize many of the rice cultivating households

household behaviour and nutrition in developing countries abstract this article reviews some of the recent major research findings concerning the effect of household behaviour on food consumption and nutrition important extensions to the understanding of household behaviour have been made in the areas of the impact of income and price changes agricultural households the effects of agricultural commercialization the new household economics and particularly the effect of time as a scarce economic resource the intrahousehold allocation of food and the determinants of nutritional status this knowledge is important because the response by households affects the final impact of economic changes and government actions on the nutritional status of the population

reciprocity in groups and the limits to social capital robert putnam defines social capital as features of social organization such as networks norms and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation putnam 1995 67 such networks are typically associated with norms that promote coordination cooperation and reciprocity for the mutual benefit of network members these norms coupled with the appropriate use of sanctions in case of noncompliance are often thought to enable these groups to deal smoothly and effectively with multiple social and economic issues at the same time some authors have noted that strongly bonded groups may have adverse consequences for others see for instance alejandro portes and patricia landolt 1996 or even for themselves see for instance george akerlof 1976 or kaushik basu 1986 it is this latter aspect that we wish to emphasize in these notes

is financial instability male driven gender and cognitive skills in experimental asset markets abstract the hypothesis that price stability would reliably increase with the fraction of women operating in financial markets has been frequently suggested in policy discussions to test this hypothesis we conducted 10 male only 10 female only and 10 mixed gender experimental asset markets and compared the effects of gender composition confidence risk attitude and cognitive skills male and female markets have comparable volatility and deviations from fundamentals whereas mixed gender markets are substantially more stable on the other hand higher average cognitive skills of the group are associated with reduced market volatility individual level analysis shows that subjects with higher cognitive skills trade at prices closer to fundamental values and earn significantly higher profits similarly mixed markets exhibit lower mispricing particularly for traders with lower cognitive skills our results are demonstrated to hold in other experimental asset market studies suggesting that a mixed gender composition reduces mispricing across different types of asset markets

under pressure gender differences in output quality and quantity under competition and time constraints gender gaps in income and level of position in the workplace are widespread one explanation for this inequality is that the genders perform dierently under competi tive conditions as previous experimental studies have found a signi cant gender gap in competitive tasks that are perceived to favor men in this paper we use a verbal task that is perceived to favor women and nd no gender dierence under competition per se we also reject the hypothesis that a stereotype threat explains the inability of women to improve performance under competition we propose an alternative expla nation for gender inequality namely that women and men respond dierently to time pressure with reduced time pressure competition in verbal tasks greatly increases the performance of women such that women signi cantly outperform men this eect appears largely due to the fact that extra time in a competition improves the quality of women s work leading them to make fewer mistakes on the other hand men use this extra time to increase the quantity of work which results in a greater number of mistakes

a review of bubbles and crashes in experimental asset markets this paper discusses the literature on bubbles and crashes in the most commonly used experimental asset market design introduced by smith et al it documents the main findings based on the results from 41 published papers 3 book chapters and 20 working papers

performance in competitive environments gender differences even though the provision of equal opportunities for men and women has been a priority in many countries large gender differences prevail in competitive high ranking positions suggested explanations include discrimination and differences in preferences and human capital in this paper we present experimental evidence in support of an additional factor women may be less effective than men in competitive environments even if they are able to perform similarly in non competitive environments in a laboratory experiment we observe as we increase the competitiveness of the environment a significant increase in performance for men but not for women this results in a significant gender gap in performance in tournaments while there is no gap when participants are paid according to piece rate this effect is stronger when women have to compete against men than in single sex competitive environments this suggests that women may be able to perform in competitive environments per se

commercialization of smallholder agriculture policy requirements for the malnourished poor abstract the nutritional impact of increased commercialization of smallholder agriculture in developing countries while generally positive may in certain circumstances be unfavourable adverse policies tend to be the problem in these circum stances the international food policy research institute has conducted re search to identify the key factors in this process and in march 1989 conducted a workshop in guatemala for researchers and policy makers this report summarizes the findings and policy recommendations that emerged

gender and job performance evidence from wall street this study concerns the relationship between gender and job performance among brokerage firm equity analysts women s representation in analyst positions dropped from 16 percent in 1995 to 14 percent in 2005 the study found significant gender based differences in performance on various dimensions for example women cover roughly 9 stocks on average as compared with 10 for men and women s earnings estimates tend to be less accurate than men s estimates but the study also found that women are significantly more likely than men to be designated as all stars which indicates that they outperform men in other aspects of job performance