credit constraints and the phenomenon of child labor abstract this paper develops an overlapping generations general equilibrium model where inefficient child labor arises due to credit constraints it derives a positive relationship between inequality in the distribution of income and the incidence of child labor looking at policy implications it shows how trade sanctions against countries using child labor may fail to reduce the incidence of child labor it discusses some alternative policies to reduce the incidence of child labor

remittance effects on child labour evidence from burkina faso abstractthis article explores the effects of remittance receipt on child labour in an african context we focus on burkina faso a country with a high prevalence of child labour and a high rate of migration given the complex relationship between remittance receipt and household time allocation decisions we instrument remittances using economic conditions in remittance sending countries and explore heterogeneous effects across different types of potential remitters while remittances have no significant effect on child labour on average transfers reduce child labour in long term migrant households for whom the disruptive effect of migration is no longer felt we find no gender difference but remittances seem to affect mainly the labour market participation of younger children

the quality effect does financial liberalization improve the allocation of capital abstract we document evidence of a quality effect of financial liberalization on allocative efficiency as measured by dispersion in tobin s q across firms we predict that financial liberalization by equalizing access to credit is associated with reduced variation in expected marginal returns we test this prediction using a new financial liberalization index and firm level data for five emerging markets india jordan korea malaysia and thailand we find robust evidence that financial liberalization rather than financial deepening is associated with improved allocative efficiency

child labor and agricultural shocks this paper examines the relationship between household income shocks and child labor in particular we investigate the extent to which transitory income shocks lead to increases in child labor and whether household asset holdings mitigate the effects of these shocks using data from a household panel survey in tanzania we find that both relationships are significant we investigate mechanisms that could account for these results including buffer stocks and borrowing

exploring the nexus between financial openness and informational efficiency does the quality of institution matter this article examines the empirical link between financial openness and informational efficiency of stock markets in 27 emerging markets improving on earlier papers this study has used world bank s worldwide governance indicators wgi as the proxy of institutional development in dynamic panel data models estimated by generalized method of moments gmm our results show first financial liberalization by itself has no impact on enhancing efficiency of stock market second for countries with high level of institutional development the interaction of trade openness and financial openness become significant third for the same group of countries interaction effect of financial liberalization and institutional development leads to more efficiency in stock market hence our finding demonstrates the utmost importance of institutional development and its role on liberalization our results conclude that institutional development and trade openness are pre requisites for a country to benefit from financi

positive welfare effects of trade barriers in a dynamic partial equilibrium model we develop a simple two region cobweb type dynamic partial equilibrium model to demonstrate the existence of optimal possibly non zero trade barriers a pure comparative statics analysis of our model suggests that a reduction of trade barriers modeled as small but positive import tariffs always enhances welfare however taking a dynamic perspective reveals that nonlinear trade interactions between two regions may generate endogenous price fluctuations which can hamper welfare finally we allow special interest groups such as consumers or producers from these two regions to lobby for a particular level of trade barriers our model predicts that time varying trade barriers may be another channel for market instability

child labor and schooling responses to anticipated income in south africa abstract forward looking unconstrained households make child labor and schooling decisions considering their permanent income and weighing the relative returns to child time in various potential activities the timing of anticipated changes in income should have no effect on child labor and schooling in a setting where households can borrow against permanent income however this study documents large increases in schooling attendance and declines in total hours worked when black south african families become eligible for fully anticipatable social pension income as an explanation the data are most consistent with liquidity constraints for black elder males forcing rural families into less schooling for boys than they would choose absent the constraint perhaps because of schooling costs

the impact of income and non income shocks on child labor evidence from a panel survey of tanzania summary this paper investigates the impact of income and non income shocks on child labor using a model in which the household maximizes utility from consumption as well as human capital development of the child we also investigate if access to credit and household assets act as buffers against transitory shocks our results indicate significant effects of agricultural shocks on the child s overall work hours and agricultural work hours with higher effects for boys crop shocks also have significant adverse effects on school attendance with girls experiencing a more than 70 increase in the probability of quitting schooling the results also indicate that access to a bank account has a buffering effect on the impact of shocks on child hunger having a bank account reduces both male child labor and household work hours of a girl child while assets reduce working hours of girls we do not find it having a significant effect on boys we also do not see assets to act as a buffer against shocks

equilibrium models displaying endogenous fluctuations and chaos abstract this paper surveys current developments in dynamic general equilibrium theory concerned with conditions under which endogenous fluctuations are possible existing contributions are divided into two classes the larger one consists of models with a unique perfect foresight equilibrium while the second includes models where equilibrium is indeterminate and the set of equilibria involving endogenous fluctuations includes sunspots equilibria while the two classes of models involve oscillations of different natures and with different policy implications we show that both are consistent with optimizing behavior and competitive equilibrium

chaos significance mechanism and economic applications imagine a bargaining model say involving diplomats negotiating tariff levels or a disarmament treaty in which each party has been instructed by higher headquarters to respond to each new offer by her opposite number with a counteroffer that is to be calculated from a simple reaction function provided in advance both negotiating parties are prohibited from revealing their own reaction functions to the other if the perfectly deterministic sequence of offers and counteroffers that must emerge from these simple rules were to begin to oscillate wildly and apparently at random the negotiations could easily break down as each party not understanding the source of the problem came to suspect the other side of duplicity and sabotage yet all that may be involved as we will see is the phenomenon referred to as chaos a case that is emphatically not pathological but in which a dynamic mechanism that is very simple and deterministic yields a time path so complicated that it will pass most standard tests of randomness chaos has become a subject of great interest to specialists and nonspecialists alike besides economics it has entered the literature of geometry physics ecology and meteorology it has been written about at length in the new york times magazine and scientific american as well as technical publications this article seeks to describe what it is how it works and what it means for economics

is child labor inefficient we build a model of child labor and study its implications for welfare we assume that there is a trade off between child labor and the accumulation of human capital even if parents are altruistic and child labor is socially inefficient it may arise in equilibrium because parents fail to fully internalize its negative effects this occurs when bequests are zero or when capital markets are imperfect we also study the effects of a simple ban on child labor and derive conditions under which it may be pareto improving in general equilibrium we show that the implications of child labor for fertility are ambiguous

market imperfections and child labor summary this article looks into the relationship between market imperfections and child labor a rural household model shows that households with medium sized plots may increase child labor when the labor market improves contrary to the others we estimate the relationship between child labor and various measures of market imperfections in madagascar controlling for a large set of village characteristics and district fixed effects on average market imperfections increase child labor but the effects are heterogenous by land ownership and consistent with the model an improvement of markets is associated to a decrease in child labor which is suggestive of new policies to fight against child labor

peasant household behaviour with missing markets some paradoxes explained a model of peasant household behavior under varying degrees of household specific food and labor market failures is constructed to show that these structural features can explain several well known patterns of peasant response which have often been attributed to peculiar motives presumed specific to peasants the model explains sluggish response to cash crops prices and high instability in perceived food and labor scarcities the key role of manufactured consumer goods prices in stimulating peasants effort in cash crops production the effectiveness of taxation as opposed to incentives in stimulating cash crops production and the key role of technological change in food production to enhance cash crop production results are obtained analytically in the case of one market failure and by numerical simulation with more than one

time use work and overlapping activities evidence from australia the overlapping of activities is an important dimension of time use that has previously received little attention in economic analysis most time use studies have looked only at primary activities ignoring the fact that individuals often perform two or more activities simultaneously this seriously underestimates the time spent on several economic activities such as childcare and housework which are also performed as secondary activities using a two adult household sub sample from the 1992 national australian time use survey this paper examines the incidence and determinants of overlapping activities among 3 966 adult male and female household members it first shows that inclusion of overlapping activities in time use measurements provides a better estimation of the economic contribution of individuals especially in non market production tobit models are then estimated to examine the effects of economic social and demographic factors on the incidence of overlapped work activity the findings which are found to be robust showed that gender household life cycle and composition education cultural norms employment status and level of income earnings influence the extent to which individuals particularly women perform secondary work activities conclusions are drawn in the final section of the paper copyright 2003 oxford university press

ecological threshold and ecological economic threshold implications from an ecological economic model with adaptation abstract this paper investigates ecological threshold and ecological economic threshold by developing an ecological economic model an extension of a population resource dynamics model developed by brander and taylor 1998 the model reflects three critical issues regarding an ecological economic system system boundary non convexity and adaptation the paper elucidates six main findings ecological economic threshold may come before ecological threshold the ecological economic threshold may exhibit a highly context dependent and dynamic nature which suggests the precautionary principle markets do not respond sufficiently to maintain resiliency under an external shock as prices do not reflect thresholds the system can be restored by intervention even after crossing the ecological economic threshold various transitional paths are possible in restoring the system and adaptation affects resilience to a somewhat significant effect which suggests the importance of better information and education because of the complexity of the model i adopt a system dynamics approach for the development and analysis of the model

thresholds in the process of international financial integration abstract the financial crisis has re ignited the fierce debate about the merits of financial globalization and its implications for growth especially for developing countries the empirical literature has not been able to conclusively establish the presumed growth benefits of financial integration indeed a new literature proposes that the indirect benefits of financial integration may be more important than the traditional financing channel emphasized in previous analyses a major complication however is that there seem to be certain threshold levels of financial and institutional development that an economy needs to attain before it can derive the indirect benefits and reduce the risks of financial openness in this paper we develop a unified empirical framework for characterizing such threshold conditions we find that there are clearly identifiable thresholds in variables such as financial depth and institutional quality the cost benefit trade off from financial openness improves significantly once these threshold conditions are satisfied we also find that the thresholds are lower for foreign direct investment and portfolio equity liabilities compared to those for debt liabilities

migration amongst the batswana the present study undertakes analysis of the effects of employment probabilities and wage alternatives on migration decisions in the context of botswana adopting micro level data both to estimate a multinomial migration function and to develop prediction equations for wages and likelihood of employment data are from the 1978 1979 national migration survey the factors that influence rural batswana adults to remain at home migrate to town on a short or long term basis move to another rural area or emigrate to south africa are examined consideration is given to the effects of employment alternatives on the rate of internal migration and the selectivity of movements with respect to personal household and locational factors excerpt

international financial integration and economic growth abstract this paper uses new data and new econometric techniques to investigate the impact of international financial integration on economic growth and also to assess whether this relationship depends on the level of economic development financial development legal system development government corruption and macroeconomic policies using a wide array of measures of international financial integration for 57 countries and an assortment of statistical methodologies we are unable to reject the null hypothesis that international financial integration does not accelerate economic growth even when controlling for particular economic financial institutional and policy characteristics

risk financial markets and human capital in a developing country this paper explores the link between financial market incompleteness and human capital accumulation we examine how child school attendance responds to seasonal fluctuations in the income of agrarian households using panel data from rural india to pinpoint market imperfections we study responses to aggregate and idiosyncratic as well as to anticipated and unanticipated income shocks our main finding is that seasonal fluctuations in school attendance are a form of self insurance but one which does not result in a substantial loss of human capital on average

will trade sanctions reduce child labour the role of credit markets abstract we examine the interaction between credit markets trade sanctions and the incidence of child labour in a two good two period model with unequally wealthy households both poverty and poor education quality inter alia are important determinants of child labour the incidence of child labour decreases as we move from the case of borrowing constraints to the case in which poor households can borrow freely from rich ones and then to the case of perfect international credit markets trade sanctions can increase child labour especially among poor households a possibility that decreases as their access to credit improves

children and their parents labor supply evidence from exogenous variation in family size although theoretical models of labor supply and the family are well developed there are few credible estimates of key empirical relationships in the work family nexus this study uses a new instrumental variable the sex composition of the first two births in families with at least two children to estimate the effect of additional children on parents labor supply in the united states instrumental variables estimates using the sex mix are substantial but smaller than the corresponding ordinary least squares ols estimates moreover unlike the ols estimates the female labor supply effects estimated using sex mix instruments appear to be absent among more educated women and women with high wage husbands we also find that married women who have a third child reduce their labor supply by as much as women in the full sample while there is no relationship between wives child bearing and husbands labor supply excerpt

school attendance child labor and local labor market fluctuations in urban brazil abstract while the income poverty effect on child labor is long established as a main determinant of child labor there is a growing body of literature considering the pull of the labor market this paper demonstrates that after controlling for household characteristics employment rates for 14 16 year old boys and girls in urban brazil increase as local labor market opportunities improve children are also more likely to leave school as local labor market conditions become more favorable the relationship between children s schooling and work and local labor market conditions changes in years of crisis compared to other years the effects of macroeconomic fluctuations on children s school and work behavior are examined with particular focus on whether the income effect or substitution effect dominates as macroeconomic conditions change over time the study uses data from the pesquisa nacional amostra de domicilios a large household survey that is conducted almost annually by the ibge we use variation in the urban areas of 25 states over 12 years to identify the aggregate effects

child labor and household land holding theory and empirical evidence from zimbabwe summary the relationship between rural household productive assets and child labor in developing countries is complex some empirical evidence shows that child labor tends to increase as land holding increases or there is an inverted u shaped curve relationship between the probability of putting children to work and land holding this paper shows that the relationship between use of children as laborers and land holding is nuanced child labor generally decreases as per capita land holding increases but there can be an upward bump in the relationship between child labor and landholding near the middle of the range of land per capita the bump can be explained theoretically by the relationship between the marginal productivity of a child worker on the farm and the marginal value placed on his her education at different levels of wealth this pattern is repeated in three surveys conducted in zimbabwe in 2001 2007 8 and 2010 11 from the perspective of policy making the policy maker should be alerted that the programs to promote school retention should not necessarily focus only on the poorest households in rural areas there is a high probability that middle wealth households put their children to work and this probability may change by some other factors such as gender of child and agro ecological conditions

the value and allocation of time in rural botswana abstract time use data indicate that there is substantial surplus labor in rural areas of botswana with the incidence of underutilization varying by age sex and asset position time allocations are influenced by economic incentives i e income and productivity effects the more productive capital the household has the more productive work its members perform particularly its children the positive productivity effect of capital on economic work somewhat outweighs its negative income effect time allocations also are constrained by a culturally determined division of labor by age and sex which however shows some flexibility at the margin

financial development and openness evidence from panel data abstract this paper addresses the empirical question of whether trade and financial openness can help explain the recent pace in financial development as well as its variation across countries in recent years utilising annual data from developing and industrialised countries and dynamic panel estimation techniques we provide evidence which suggests that both types of openness are statistically significant determinants of banking sector development our findings reveal that the marginal effects of trade financial openness are negatively related to the degree of financial trade openness indicating that relatively closed economies stand to benefit most from opening up their trade and or capital accounts although these economies may be able to accomplish more by taking steps to open both their trade and capital accounts opening up one without the other could still generate gains in terms of banking sector development thus our findings provide only partial support to the well known rajan and zingales hypothesis which stipulates that both types of openness are necessary for financial development to take place

education and women s time allocation to nonmarket work in an urban setting in india the allocation of time by individuals and households is an important concern of economists the author investigates time allocation to non market work among urban women in madras india estimating the derived demand for certain disaggregated measures of household work and child care hours with the primary goal of examining the responsiveness of non market time allocations to wages and income and to understand the role of education upon time allocations the study also examined the exogeneity assumption upon children and hired help variables which are among the other covariates included in the time allocation functions findings are based upon data collected in a 1980 81 household survey of 244 working women and 422 women who did not participate in labor market work the survey was restricted to nuclear households with or without dependents with married women aged 20 59 and with husband present and employed in the year preceding the survey data on non market work were collected using the recall method the study determined that women in madras city spend a considerable amount of time in home production it may be inferred that as a womans wage increases she will spend less time in home production by withdrawing time spent in teaching children an increase in household assets leads to an increase in time spent teaching children at the expense of other non market activities higher female education reduces the amount of time spent in all non market activities except teaching the children there is therefore an enormous relative reallocation of mothers time to childrens education

labor market opportunities and intrafamily time allocation in rural households in south asia this paper utilizes a time allocation survey of a four year panel of households from six villages in semi arid tropic rural india estimates of the inter relationships between adult male female and child market wage rates and time allocated to the market domestic production leisure and schooling by boys and girls are presented the role of individual unobservable heterogeneity and self selection into activity participation is also accounted for the overall results suggest the importance of the opportunity cost of time in intrafamily time use

child labor and household wealth theory and empirical evidence of an inverted u some studies on child labor have shown that at the level of the household greater land wealth leads to higher child labor thereby casting doubt on the hypothesis that child labor is caused by poverty this paper argues that the missing ingredient may be an explicit modeling of the labor market we develop a simple model which suggests the possibility of an inverted u relationship between land holdings and child labor using a unique data set that has child labor hours it is found that controlling for child household and village characteristics the turning point beyond which more land leads to a decline in child labor occurs around 4 ac of land per household c 2009 published by elsevier b v

capital account liberalization financial development and industry growth a synthetic view this paper synthesizes studies analyzing the effects of capital account liberalization on industry growth while controlling for financial crises domestic financial development and the strength of institutions we find evidence that financial openness has positive effects on the growth of financially dependent industries although these growth enhancing effects evaporate during financial crises further analysis indicates that the positive effects of capital account liberalization are limited to countries with relatively well developed financial systems good accounting standards strong creditor rights and rule of law it suggests that countries must reach a certain threshold in terms of institutional and economic development before they can expect to benefit from capital account liberalization