does microfinance change informal lending in village economies evidence from bangladesh this paper examines how availability of microfinance influences households borrowing from informal sources in village economies it uses a unique household level panel data set which spans more than two decades 1987 2008 from rural bangladesh we find that households access to microfinance reduces the incidence of borrowing from informal sources but not the amount of borrowing we find that less poor households benefit more in terms of reducing their reliance on informal borrowing and that the benefit accrues over time we also find that having access to microfinance increases women s informal borrowing for small consumption usage without facilitating access to new business opportunities

international bank lending channel of monetary policy abstract how does domestic monetary policy in systemic countries spillover to the rest of the world this paper examines the transmission channel of domestic monetary policy in the cross border context we use exogenous shocks to monetary policy in systemically important economies including the u s and local projections to estimate the dynamic effect of monetary policy shocks on bilateral cross border bank lending we find robust evidence that an increase in funding costs following an exogenous monetary tightening leads to a statistically and economically significant decline in cross border bank lending the effect is weakened during periods of high uncertainty in contrast the effect is found to not vary according to the degree of borrower country riskiness further weakening support for the international portfolio rebalancing channel

why has u s inflation become harder to forecast we examine whether the u s rate of price inflation has become harder to forecast and to the extent that it has what changes in the inflation process have made it so the main finding is that the univariate inflation process is well described by an unobserved component trend cycle model with stochastic volatility or equivalently an integrated moving average process with time varying parameters this model explains a variety of recent univariate inflation forecasting puzzles and begins to explain some multivariate inflation forecasting puzzles as well

consumer demand and the life cycle allocation of household expenditures the purpose of this paper is to estimate the parameters of household preferences that determine the allocation of goods within the period and over the life cycle using micro data in doing so the authors are able to identify important effects of demographics labor market status and other household characteristics on the intertemporal allocation of expenditure they test the validity of the life cycle model using excess sensitivity tests and find that controlling for demographics and labor market status variables can largely explain the excess sensitivity of consumption to anticipated changes in income

welfare analysis and intertemporal substitution abstract this paper explores the structure of welfare comparisons when direct utility is weakly separable over time the lifetime welfare effect of a reform is then the sum of atemporal hicksian variations and intertemporal variations reflecting intertemporal substitution these latter are shown to be of only second order importance in lifetime welfare comparisons approximations to the intertemporal variations when preferences are intertemporally additive are derived pointing to the welfare significance in this context of not only the intertemporal elasticity of substitution but also within period income effects numerical examples illustrate the analysis and suggest possible orders of magnitude

labor market performance as a determinant of migration in a comparison of migrants with nonmigrants both observed and unobservable productivity factors are relevant this paper focuses more on the unobservable factors and their correlation between places of origin and destination a human capital model of migration demonstrates that more productive workers at the origin would choose to migrate only if the correlation between origin and destination factors is strongly positive longitudinal data drawn from the cote d ivoire living standards survey 1985 86 are used to examine the pattern of migration in the light of labor market performance both of wage employees and non farm self employed workers it is found that indeed the more productive workers migrate furthermore the general direction of migration is toward cities the conclusion is therefore that rural areas lose their productive workers and that urban areas may gain in productivity from the geographical shifts in population

the impact of microcredit on the poor in bangladesh revisiting the evidence abstractwe replicate and reanalyse the most influential study of microcredit impacts m m pitt s r khandker s the impact of group based credit on poor households in bangladesh does the gender of participants matter published in the journal of political economy 106 1998 that study was celebrated for showing that microcredit reduces poverty a much hoped for possibility though one not confirmed by recent randomised controlled trials we show that the original results on poverty reduction disappear after dropping outliers or when using a robust linear estimator using a new program for estimation of mixed process maximum likelihood models we show how assumptions critical for the original analysis such as error normality are contradicted by the data we conclude that questions about impact cannot be answered in these data

countercyclical safety nets for the poor and vulnerable abstract relatively little is known about how government safety net programs insure against low consumption and stabilize asset bases compared to what is known about their role in transferring income the insurance function requires a flexible budget that can be scaled up rapidly to meet unanticipated circumstances safety nets serving an insurance function also differ from other transfer programs in their targeting they need to determine transitory need rather than more chronic correlates of poverty moreover insurance safety nets need a more flexible implementation strategy than do more permanent programs this paper reviews these issues from the perspective of low income countries

transfer benefits from public works employment evidence for rural india current knowledge provides little guidance on one of the key questions in evaluating public employment schemes aimed at directly reducing poverty what are the net income gains to participating workers this paper offers an answer for rural public employment in two villages in the state of maharashtra in india a model of intrahousehold time allocation is proposed and estimates are made using household data over six years the empirical implementation indicates that the projects induce significant behavioral responses transfer benefits are large and are greatly underestimated using prevailing market wage rates for similar work to estimate forgone incomes copyright 1994 by royal economic society

the relationship between hours of work and labor force participation in four models of labor supply behavior this article analyzes the relationship between hours of work and labor force participation lfp in heckman s model cogan s fixed cost model moffitt s minimum hours constraint model and a generalized version of heckman s model first the parameter restrictions between the lfp and reduced form hours of work equations are compared the models are then estimated and the results support the weakening of the link between the lfp and hours of work decisions one implication of the analysis is that heckman s model overstates the standard labor supply elasticities because it confounds the direct effect on labor supply with the participation effect

low inflation pass through and the pricing power of firms abstract recently there has been a significant decline in the degree to which firms pass through changes in costs to prices a decline that is frequently characterized as a reduction in the pricing power of firms the decline appears to be associated with the decline in inflation in many countries the decline has important implications for monetary policy because it affects both forecasts of inflation and the effects of changes in monetary policy on inflation some have argued that the decline in pricing power helped to keep inflation low in the face of apparently strong demand pressures in the united states in the late 1990s this paper puts forth the view that the decline in pass through or pricing power is due to the low inflation environment that has recently been achieved in many countries first a microeconomic model of price setting is used to show that lower pass through is caused by lower perceived persistence of cost changes evidence is then presented showing that inflation is positively correlated with persistence of inflation suggesting that the low inflation itself has caused the low pass through an economy wide model consistent with the micromodel is then presented to illustrate how such changes in pricing power affect output and inflation dynamics in favorable ways but can disappear quickly if monetary policy and expectations change

non linearities and equivalence scales this paper focuses on the estimation and testing of equivalence scales in the context of a demand system with nonline ar logarithmic expenditure effects in its budget share equations the authors show that such nonlinearity enables one to identify the scal es without demographic separability restrictions on preferences and to avoid false rejection of the hypothesis that the scales are independ ent of the base utility level the empirical analysis is based on micro data drawn from the u k family expenditure survey copyright 1993 by royal economic society

a life cycle consistent empirical model of family labour supply using cross section data this paper estimates a utility maximising model of the joint determination of male and female labour supplies using a sample of married couples from the u k family expenditure survey the emphasis is on the estimation of within period preferences that are consistent with intertemporal two stage budgeting under uncertainty however the approach we adopt provides an alternative method of estimating certain aspects of life cycle behaviour to the fixed effects constant approach of heckman and macurdy 1980 macurdy 1981 and browning deaton and irish 1985 moreover it relaxes some of the underlying restrictions that are implicit in these constant models under uncertainty

contemporaneous and intertemporal child costs equivalent expenditure vs equivalent income scales abstract parents may provide for their children by drawing on savings or borrowing as well as by reducing current consumption this means that child costs may be partly paid from reducing consumption in periods when the children themselves are not in the family static comparisons of consumption costs between households with and without children are therefore affected by the extent to which parents are willing and able to meet child costs through intertemporal transfers this paper analyses the implications of this argument for the estimation of adult equivalent scales and provides empirical illustrations using individual household data

oil price pass through into inflation abstract this paper uses data from 19 industrialized countries to investigate oil price pass through into inflation across countries and over time a time varying pass through coefficient is estimated and the determinants of the recent declining effects of oil shocks on inflation are investigated the appreciation of the domestic currency a more active monetary policy in response to inflation and a higher degree of trade openness are found to explain the decline in oil price pass through

high noon for microfinance impact evaluations re investigating the evidence from bangladesh recently microfinance has come under increasing criticism raising questions of the validity of iconic studies which have justified it such as pitt and khandker chemin applied propensity score matching to the pitt and khandker data finding different impacts but does not disaggregate by gender of borrower we first replicate chemin and extend his analysis in two ways we test the robustness of propensity score matching results to selection on unobservables using sensitivity analysis and we investigate propensity score matching estimates of impacts by gender of borrowers the mainly insignificant impacts of microfinance differ greatly by gender of borrower but are all vulnerable to selection on unobservables we are therefore not convinced that the relationships between microfinance and outcomes are causal with these data

farm earnings educational attainment and role of public policy some evidence from mexico abstract using real household survey data from mexico this study evaluates 1 a the impact of schooling on farm earnings through the direct and allocative effects of human capital 2 b the household demand for children s schooling 3 c using macro level data the association between children s school participation and some policy variables the overall rate of return to household heads schooling is estimated at 25 and for wives 19 the allocative effect of schooling of household heads dominates over the direct effect mother s schooling and farm size exercise significantly positive effects on household demand for schooling while in the macro model policy variables government expenditure and pupil teacher ratio appear strong determinants of children s attainment of primary schooling

working wives and food away from home the box cox double hurdle model household expenditures on food away from home are analyzed with the use of the bls 1989 consumer expenditure survey parameterization and distributional assumptions of cragg s double hurdle model are generalized for this purpose and the resulting model outperforms the more traditional ones results suggest households with working wives and those with higher income are more likely to consume food away from home and also to consume more than others wife s age and household size increase the conditional level of consumption education has conflicting effects on probability and conditional level of consumption

how has microcredit supported agriculture evidence using panel data from bangladesh improving agricultural productivity has received a greater attention in recent years amid concerns about rising food insecurity population pressures and climate change many believe that better access to institutional credit spanning microcredit as well as commercial and agricultural banks can help rural households smooth risks and access inputs and other technology to modernize agriculture and improve farm nonfarm linkages we use recently augmented household panel data spanning over 20 years in bangladesh to examine the effects of rural credit expansion both microcredit and formal bank channels on outcomes for agricultural households we find that microcredit has benefited households with lower landownings raising agricultural income from activities such as livestock rearing that require less land as well as nonfarm income diversification for all households but with the strongest effect for landless or near landless households we do not find effects of microcredit on crop income but do however find that reported supply side credit constraints significantly lower crop income borrowing by both men and women has contributed to nonfarm income growth for marginal farmers but only men s borrowing has contributed to nonfarm income growth among higher landowning groups

how access to credit affects self employment differences by gender during india s rural banking reform abstract household survey data for 1983 2000 from india s national sample survey organisation are used to examine the impact of credit on self employment among men and women in rural labour households results indicate that credit access encourages women s self employment as own account workers and employers while it discourages men s self employment as unpaid family workers ownership of land a key form of collateral also serves as a strong predictor of self employment among the lower castes in india self employment is less likely for scheduled castes prone to wage activity but more likely for scheduled tribes prone to entrepreneurial work

the contributions of the economics of information to twentieth century economics in the e eld of economics perhaps the most important break with the past one that leaves open huge areas for future work lies in the economics of information it is now recognized that information is imperfect obtaining information can be costly there are important asymmetries of information and the extent of information asymmetries is affected by actions of e rms and individuals this recognition deeply affects the understanding of wisdom inherited from the past such as the fundamental welfare theorem and some of the basic characterization of a market economy and provides explanations of economic and social phenomena that otherwise would be hard to understand i introduction the century coming to a close has seen vast changes in economics in both ideas and methodology upon ree ection it is remarkable however how many of the seeds of advances in this century were sowed in the previous i would argue that perhaps the most important break with the past one that leaves open huge areas for future work lies in the economics of information the recognition that information is imperfect that obtaining information can be costly that there are important asymmetries of information and that the extent of information asymmetries is affected by actions of e rms and individuals has had profound implications for the wisdom inherited from the past and has provided explanations of economic and social phenomena that otherwise would be hard to understand in this essay i wish to argue that information economics has had directly and indirectly a profound effect on how we think about economics today eighteenth and nineteenth century antecedents to be sure marshall and other nineteenth century economists talked about problems of imperfect information but with one exception discussions of information were obiter dicta caveats at the end of the analysis they were never at the center

is consumption growth consistent with intertemporal optimization evidence from the consumer expenditure survey in this paper we show that some of the predictions of models of consumer intertemporal optimization are in line with the patterns of nondurable expenditure observed in u s household level data we propose a flexible specification of preferences that allows multiple commodities and yields empirically tractable equations we estimate preference parameters using the only u s micro data set with complete consumption information we show that previous rejections can be explained by the simplifying assumptions made in previous studies we also show that results obtained using good consumption or aggregate data can be misleading

revisiting the effect of household size on consumption over the life cycle abstract although the link between household size and consumption has strong empirical support there is no consistent way in which demographics are dealt with in standard life cycle models we study the relationship between the predictions of the single agent model the standard in the literature versus a simple model extension the demographics model where deterministic changes in household size and composition affect optimal consumption decisions we show theoretically that the demographics model is conceptually preferable to the single agent model as it captures economic mechanisms ignored by the latter however our quantitative analysis demonstrates that differences in predictions for consumption are negligible across models when using standard calibration strategies this suggests that it is largely irrelevant which model specification is used

a comparison of national saving rates in the uk us and italy abstract we develop the approach of gokhale kotlikoff and sabelhaus 1996 understanding the postwar decline in us saving a cohort analysis brookings papers on economic activity 0 315 390 based on the life cycle model of savings to decompose the differences in the national saving rates between the uk us and italy our work suggests that the us saving rate is lower principally because americans on average retire later in contrast the italian saving rate is higher predominantly because italians are credit constrained particularly when young we also found that demography and the different tax and benefit systems are able to explain little of the cross sectional differences in saving rates the study accounts for the possible importance of inter generational private transfers in determining saving rates

credit programmes for the poor and seasonality in rural bangladesh this article examines the effect of group based credit used to finance self employment by landless households in bangladesh on the seasonal pattern of household consumption and male and female labour supply this credit can help smooth seasonal consumption by financing new productive activities whose income flows and time demands do not seasonally covary with the income generated by existing agricultural activities the results based upon 1991 92 survey data strongly suggest that an important motivation for credit programme participation is the need to smooth the seasonal pattern of consumption and male labour supply it is only the extent of lean season consumption poverty that selects household into these programmes in addition the largest female and male effects of credit on household consumption are during the lean season

life cycle expenditure allocations and the consumption costs of children abstract in this paper we assess whether it is changing needs or intertemporal substitution that dominate household expenditure responses to the presence of children over the life cycle we construct lifetime expenditure paths for households with different demographic profiles and consider the shape of these paths and some possible implications for welfare measures simulated expenditure paths based on consistent single period and multi period models indicate that it is indeed changing needs that dominate such paths in periods when children are present in the household however allowing for intertemporal substitution is still shown to be important since it can introduce new information relevant to the calculation of household welfare

effect of flood on agricultural wages in bangladesh an empirical analysis summary this paper analyzes the effects of riverine floods on agricultural wages in bangladesh drawing upon the district wise monthly data over 1979 2000 we model wages as a dynamic process we find that floods have positive implications for wages in the long run in flood months however agricultural wages decline in the inundated districts we obtain difference in difference estimates to show that the magnitude of impact of flood depends on the relative flood proneness of a district and the relative severity of flood conditions our results indicate that favorable demand and supply conditions in the agricultural labor market can mitigate the impact of disasters on wages in bangladesh

portfolio choices firm shocks and uninsurable wage risk assessing the importance of uninsurable wage risk for individual financial choices faces two challenges first the identification of the marginal effect requires a measure of at least one component of risk that cannot be diversified or avoided moreover measures of uninsurable wage risk must vary over time to eliminate unobserved heterogeneity secondly evaluating the economic significance of risk requires knowledge of the size of all the wage risk actually faced existing estimates are problematic because measures of wage risk fail to satisfy the non avoidability requirement this creates a downward bias which is at the root of the small estimated effect of wage risk on portfolio choices to tackle this problem we match panel data of workers and firms and use the variability in the profitability of the firm that is passed over to workers to obtain a measure of uninsurable risk using this measure to instrument total variability in individual earnings we find that the marginal effect of uninsurable wage risk is much larger than estimates that ignore endogeneity we bound the economic impact of risk and find that its overall effect is contained not because its marginal effect is small but because its size is small and the size of uninsurable wage risk is small because firms provide substantial wage insurance

equivalence scales and the costs of disability abstract the impact of disability on household welfare is estimated by equivalence scales using data from the 1986 1987 fes disability survey three methods of identifying scales from cross section data are considered these imply a series of restrictions that are tested on quadratic logarithmic engel curves the results indicate that there are substantial consumption costs associated with physical disability

cross country differences in the effects of oil shocks abstract we compare the macroeconomic consequences of several types of oil shocks across a set of industrialized countries that are structurally very diverse with respect to the role of oil and other forms of energy in the economy the results crucially depend on the underlying source of the oil price shift when a rise in oil prices is caused by increased global economic activity or a rise in oil specific demand almost all countries experience respectively a temporary increase and transitory decline of real gdp the role of oil and other forms of energy cannot explain the differences in the effects of both shocks across countries in contrast this role is very important to explain asymmetries in the effects of exogenous oil supply shocks whereas net oil and energy importing countries typically face a permanent fall in economic activity the impact is insignificant or even positive in net energy exporting countries in addition countries that improved their net energy position the most over time became less vulnerable to oil supply shocks relative to other countries

inflation responses to commodity price shocks how and why do countries differ this paper relates the inflationary impact of commodity price shocks across countries to a broad range of structural characteristics and policy frameworks over the period 2001 2010 using several approaches the analysis suggests that economies with higher food shares in cpi baskets fuel intensities and pre existing inflation levels were more prone to experience sustained inflationary effects from commodity price shocks countries with more independent central banks and higher governance scores seem to have contained the impact of these shocks better the effect of the presence of inflation targeting regimes however appears modest and not evident during the 2008 food price shock the evidence suggests that trade openness financial development dollarization and labor market flexibility do not significantly influence the way in which domestic inflation responds to international commodity price shocks

household equivalence scales and welfare comparisons abstract the ratio of cost functions of different households facing the same prices and attaining the same utility level is a true cost of demographic characteristics index this index is independent of a base level of income or utility ib if and only if it equals a ratio of household equivalence scales that are themselves ib applied cost index and equivalence scales specifications are usually ib this paper describes the general restrictions on cost functions and social welfare functions required for ib scales and for their use in welfare analysis

evaluating seasonal food storage and credit programs in east indonesia abstract predictable annual lean seasons occur in many rural areas including west timor in indonesia imperfections in savings and credit markets make it difficult for staple farmers to convert harvest season output into lean season consumption we conduct a randomized evaluation of a seasonal food storage program and a food credit program by providing improved ways to transfer assets across seasons each program functions as a subsidy on lean season consumption we find that neither program had effects on staple food consumption the storage program increased non food consumption the credit program increased reported income and reduced seasonal gaps in consumption our results are consistent with positive income effects through the expansion of budget sets but suggest that the average household could be close to staple food satiation

real wage determination in bangladesh agriculture an econometric investigation thsi paper develops and estimates a real wage model for the agricultural sector in bangladesh for the period 1973 2 1985 4 the model is developed within the framework of the market theory of labour demand and labour supply the empirical results are supportive of the market theory of wages

oil price shocks and u s economic activity abstract our understanding of the sources of oil price fluctuations and their effects on the u s economy has undergone important transformations in the last decades first several studies have demonstrated the importance of identifying the causes of oil price fluctuations whether they are driven by demand or supply shocks instead of assuming that oil price changes are exogenous to the evolution of the world s economic activity second new methodologies have allowed researchers to re evaluate the functional form of the relationship between oil prices and u s gdp its components and job flows third significant advances have been made in understanding the relationship between oil price uncertainty news economic policy uncertainty and aggregate economic activity finally investigations into the time varying nature of oil price macroeconomy relationship have provided important insights into the reasons why unexpected increases in oil prices appear to shock less now than in the 1970s this paper reviews the studies that have contributed to these different aspects of the literature

non linearities in returns to participation in grameen bank programs abstract this paper studies the benefits of participation in micro finance programs where benefits are measured in terms of the ability to smooth the effect of seasonal shocks that cause consumption fluctuations it is shown that although membership in these programs is an effective instrument in combating inter seasonal consumption differences there is a threshold level of length of participation beyond which benefits begin to diminish returns from membership are modelled using an euler equation approach fixed effects non linear least squares estimation of parameters using data from 24 villages of the grameen bank suggests that returns to participation as measured by the ability to smooth seasonal shocks begin to decline after approximately two years of membership this implies that membership alone no longer has a mitigating marginal effect on seasonal shocks to per capita consumption after four years of participation such patterns suggest that the ability to smooth consumption as a function of l

household equivalence scales theory versus policy researchers agree that household equivalence scales are intended to measure the variation in income needed to bring households of different composition to the same welfare level researchers do not agree however about how the term household welfare is to be defined this article traces the historical and philosophical development of three distinct definitions when the conceptual bases of several popular methods for the estimation of equivalence scales are explored it becomes clear that advances in theoretical rigor have not always worked to bring the literature closer to answering questions of policy concern

rural wages labor supply and land reform a theoretical and empirical analysis land reform is one of the most mentioned of the theoretical policy instruments discussed in the development literature yet relatively little attention has been paid to the wage rate consequences of such a program despite the fact that perhaps more than one half of rural families in a developing country receive a substantial proportion of their income from wage earnings in agriculture one reason for this lacuna may be that the determination of wages and family labor supply in the agricultural sector of ldcs has also been somewhat neglected particularly in the context of a heterogeneous labor force 2 the subsistence or institutional wage models of w arthur lewis john fei and gustav ranis and gerald rodgers for instance offer no theory of how rural wage levels or differentials are set and thus provide little guidance on how wage rates would be affected by changes in land ownership patterns more recently pranab bardhan and t n srinivasan david newbery and clive bell and pinhas zusman who formulate general equilibrium market or bargaining models determining endogenously the rental share paid by tenant sharecroppers have assumed that agricultural wage rates are exogenous or determined only by nonagricultural factors all of these models assume that rural labor is homogeneous another reason why the potential wage impact of a land reform program may have received little attention is that models of peasant family behavior such as those of a k sen dipak mazumdar and robert mabro typically embody two restrictive assumptions which would tend to make the equalization of landholdings appear wage augmenting although this implication has never been formally derived these assumptions are that 1 agriculture is dualistic with small farm families facing lower shadow prices of labor leisure than large farm landlords because of impediments to labor mobility and 2 agricultural households are dichotomous small farmers employ family labor and maximize utility while large farms only utilize wage labor and maximize profits data from a 1970 71 allindia survey of over 5 000 households collected by the national council of applied economic research3 indicate however that almost all cultivator households large and small participate actively in the labor market as either buyers or sellers of labor services with almost 88 percent of households cultivating a gross cropped area less than 1 5 acres utilizing some hired labor seventynine percent of these small farm households associate professor yale ujniversity the research embodied in this paper was supported in part by a grant from the ford and rockefeller foundations program in support of social science and legal research on population policy and with funds from the u s agency for international development under order no aid otr 1432 helpful suggestions and comments were provided by james l mccabe mark gersovitz an anonymous referee the managing editor and members of the economic growth center yale university i am also grateful to the members of the research program in development studies princeton university for the use of their facilities research assistance was provided by james devine anne morgan and roberta robson inotable exceptions are r albert berry mark gersovitz and m a rahman all of these authors however employ geometric analyses with differing assumptions leading to wholly different predictions regarding wage effects none consider the heterogeneity of agricultural labor pay attention to questions of stability or attempt to apply their models to data 2lnformation on the differential impact of alternative agricultural policies including land reform on sex or age specific wage rates is not only important in settling income distribution and equity issues but as suggested in an article by the author and robert evenson may have significant implications for population growth and schooling as well 3for a more detailed discussion of these data see the author

is economic recovery a myth robust estimation of impulse responses we estimate the impulse response function irf of gdp to a banking crisis using an extension of the local projections method we demonstrate that though robust to misspecifications of the data generating process this method suffers from a hitherto unnoticed bias which increases with the forecast horizon we propose a correction to this bias and show through simulations that it works well applying our corrected local projections estimator to the data from a panel of 99 countries observed between 1974 and 2001 we find that an average banking crisis yields a gdp loss of just under 10 in 10 years with little sign of recovery like the original local projections method our extension of it is widely applicable

the impact of group based credit programs on poor households in bangladesh does the gender of participants matter this paper estimates the impact of participation by gender in the grameen bank and two other group based micro credit programs in bangladesh on labor supply schooling household expenditure and assets the empirical method uses a quasi experimental survey design to correct for the bias from unobserved individual and village level heterogeneity we find that program credit has a larger effect on the behavior of poor households in bangladesh when women are the program participants for example annual household consumption expenditure increases 18 taka for every 100 additional taka borrowed by women from these credit programs compared with 11 taka for men

children and household economic behavior this paper looks at some of the methodological issues that arise in modeling the effects of children on household behavior and presents some estimates for selected areas for our purposes household behavior will be taken to refer to household decisions on labor supply the allocation of expenditure to different periods and the decision as to what to do with the difference between income and expenditure i shall be concerned mainly with the effects of dependent children and i restrict attention largely to western societies excerpt

health shocks and consumption smoothing in rural households does microcredit have a role to play abstract this paper estimates using a large panel data set from rural bangladesh the effects of health shocks on household consumption and how access to microcredit affects households response to such shocks households appear to be fairly well insured against health shocks our results suggest that households sell livestock in response to health shocks and short term insurance is therefore attained at a significant long term cost however microcredit has a significant mitigating effect households that have access to microcredit do not need to sell livestock in order to insure consumption microcredit organizations and microcredit therefore have an insurance role to play an aspect that has not been analyzed previously

inflation target and a symmetries in the oil price pass through to inflation in this paper we employ state space models to estimate the pass through of oil price changes to consumer prices for a large sample of countries from 1970 to 2017 by controlling for self selection bias and endogeneity and allowing for different responses to positive and negative price changes we asses the differences between explicit inflation targeting it countries and a control group surprisingly perhaps our results suggest that the pass through is higher for it countries our main contribution is to show that these is mainly due to it countries having a significant higher pass through than non it countries when the oil price decreases a 10 drop in oil price leads about a 0 11 drop in inflation in iters of which 4pp are explained by the monetary regime importantly we show that adopting it reduces the asymmetry of the pass through we run several robustness checks and conclude that falling oil prices are more welcomed by the central banks with an it framework in particular during deflationary episodes or when inflation is above the target jel classification e31 e42 q43

seasonality of income and poverty in bangladesh abstract seasonal food deprivation in bangladesh locally known as monga sometimes rises to the level of famine during the pre harvest period of aman rice an analysis of household income and expenditure survey data shows that income and consumption are lower during monga than in other seasons and that seasonal income greatly influences seasonal consumption econometric estimates reject the hypothesis of perfect consumption smoothing in the northwestern region of greater rangpur rural households suffer disproportionately from monga seasonal differences in poverty across regions are due mainly to differences in household specific seasonality of income and consumption income diversification explains the lower incidence of income seasonality observed in non rangpur regions to contain seasonal hunger in greater rangpur public policies should promote rural income diversification together with seasonal migration a flexible microfinance scheme that provides both production and consumption loans on flexible repayment terms could help diversify income and reduce seasonality of income and poverty

the intertemporal allocation of expenditure on non durables services and durables this paper presents estimates of the parameters of a consumption function for u s quarterly seasonally unadjusted data on non durables services and durables the theoretical novelty in the approach we present is in the derivation of the consumption function from an underlying many goods allocation problem applying this model with an appropriate estimator to the data we find i the homogeneity restrictions suggested by theory are not rejected ii there is no evidence of excess sensitivity to income iii there is no evidence to suggest that agents cannot adjust their durable stocks as they would wish and iv the intertemporal substitution elasticity is not well determined

output spillovers from fiscal policy in this paper we estimate the cross country spillover effects of government purchases on output for a large number of oecd countries following the methodology in auerbach and gorodnichenko 2012a b we allow these multipliers to vary smoothly according to the state of the economy and use real time forecast data to purge policy innovations of their predictable components we also consider the responses of other key macroeconomic variables our findings suggest that cross country spillovers have an important impact and also confirm those of our earlier papers that fiscal shocks have a larger impact when the affected country is in recession

what do we learn about consumer demand patterns from micro data the aim of this paper is to assess the importance of using micro level data in the econometric analysis of consumer demand to do this we utilize a time series of repeated cross sections covering some 4 000 households in each of 15 years employing a number of different aggregation procedures we conclude that aggregate data alone are unlikely to produce reliable estimates of structural price and income coefficients however once certain aggregation factors as well as trend and seasonal components are included an aggregate model is not necessarily outperformed across all demand equations in terms of forecasting ability jel d12 c52 c31 the purpose of this paper is to develop a complete consumer demand system based on a time series of individual household data and to use it to measure the biases introduced into the study of consumer de mand behavior when aggregate data are used in place of the appropriate microeco nomic data we assess the suitability of ag gregate data through the impact on income and price elasticities and by evaluating the ability of both micro and aggregate based models to forecast aggregate consumer de mand the biases introduced by the use of aggregate data depend upon the way that household characteristics interact with in come and price effects and on departures of demand systems from linearity we explore the structure of microeconomic demand sys tems and the role of household characteris tics in the behavior of consumer demand both for the light this may shed on the pattern of future demands and for the im plications this behavior has for issues of aggregation consumer demand patterns typically found in micro data sets vary considerably across households with different household characteristics and with different levels of income we model this variability by making intercept and slope parameters in the budget share equations of our demand sys tem depend on household characteristics and by allowing for nonlinear total log expenditure terms in fact in theory consistent demand systems it is total ex penditure rather than disposable income that is allocated across goods we find that this general framework leads to a well specified data coherent demand system which is a quadratic extension of the popu lar almost ideal model of angus s deaton and john muellbauer 1980 the micro level estimates are shown to be sensitive to the treatment of endogeneity of total expen diture and to the specification of interaction terms with household characteristics in ad dition this specification is also shown to possess many attractive features for the evaluation of aggregate models

oil prices and inflation dynamics evidence from advanced and developing economies abstract we study the impact of fluctuations in global oil prices on domestic inflation using an unbalanced panel of 72 advanced and developing economies over the period from 1970 to 2015 we find that a 10 increase in global oil inflation increases on average domestic inflation by about 0 4 percentage points on impact with the effect vanishing after two years and being similar between advanced and developing economies we also find that the effect is asymmetric with positive oil price shocks having a larger effect than negative ones the impact of oil price shocks however has declined over time due in large part to a more credible monetary policy and less reliance on energy imports we further examine the transmission channels of oil price shocks on domestic inflation during the recent decades by making use of a monthly dataset from 2000 to 2015 the results suggest that the share of transport in the cpi basket and energy subsidies are the most robust factors in explaining cross country variations in the effects of oil price shocks during the period

temporary and permanent changes in consumption growth this paper examines whether demographic variables and other household characteristics are more likely to affect the intercept of the euler equation or the intertemporal elasticity of substitution ise of the household analysis of british data suggests that demographics affect the growth rate of consumption in a purely transitory way while the educational level and the employment status of the wife appear to have a significant effect on the ise the effect of the employment status of the head is more uncertain after taking these differences into account the hypothesis of no excess sensitivity cannot be rejected for households with two earners

seasonal hunger and its mitigation in north west bangladesh seasonal hunger may result from seasonality of agriculture when households fail to smooth income and consumption using household survey data from the northwest region of bangladesh this paper examines alternative measures of seasonal hunger and provides some evidence to support policies and programs needed to mitigate seasonal hunger the results suggest that a large majority of food vulnerable households are the perpetual poor as opposed to a small percentage of households who are subject to food deprivation only during the lean period findings suggest that government safety net programs and microcredit provide a cushion for the poor to stave off seasonal hunger

an exogeneity test for a simultaneous equation tobit model with an application to labor supply a test of weak exogeneity in the simultaneous equation tobit model is proposed and illustrated using a female labour supply model estimated using cross section data the test statistic can be simply output from any standard tobit maximum likelihood package and is asymptotically efficient the procedure provides consistent estimators for the simultaneous tobit model whose asymptotic covariance matrix is a simple extension of the usual tobit formula we also provide the lagrange multiplier test of weak exogeneity this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item