education poverty and terrorism is there a causal connection the paper investigates whether there is a connection between poverty or low education and terrorism we review evidence on hate crimes which are closely related to terrorism the occurrence of hate crimes is largely independent of economic conditions we analyze data on support for attacks against israeli targets from public opinion polls conducted in the west bank and gaza strip support for violent attacks does not decrease among those with higher education and higher living standards the core contribution of the paper is a statistical analysis of the determinants of participation in hezbollah militant activities having a living standard above the poverty line or a secondary or higher education is positively associated with participation in hezbollah we also find that israeli jewish settlers who attacked palestinians in the west bank in the early 1980s were overwhelmingly from high paying occupations although our results are tentative and exploratory they suggest that neither poverty nor education has a direct causal impact on terrorism

why and when does the gender gap reverse diversity goals and the pay premium for high potential women abundant research has documented a gender pay gap women earn less than men all else being equal against the backdrop of an overall female penalty we propose that the widespread adoption of dive

a system comparison approach to distinguish two nonseparable and nonnested agricultural household models this study distinguishes two nonseparable agricultural household models for a self employed farm household one assumes heterogeneity of farm and nonfarm labor and a competitive market for nonfarm labor the other assumes homogeneity of the two types of labor and a restricted market for nonfarm labor we compare demand systems that are derived from them which have different dependent variables and different numbers of equations we apply a cox type test to compare these complicated nonnested systems results show clearly that the former is better for japanese rice farming households comparison of price elasticities for those models verifies the importance of that test copyright 2008 oxford university press

poverty and the forward falling labor supply function a microeconomic analysis abstract existing subsistence efficiency target income and limited aspiration theories impose a backward bending labor supply behavior on poor workers in less developed countries recent empirical studies of worker behavior in the unorganized sectors of ldcs contradict this view and report evidence of both a forward falling and an upward rising labor supply this study formulates an increasing elasticity of substitution utility function model to analyze the observed behaviors the function displays both nonhomotheticity and variable elasticity properties and is capable of generating labor supply curves with forward falling and upward rising segments while the upward rising supply is considered to be usual worker behavior the forward falling segment represents a below subsistence distress sale phenomenon and the subsistence income of the worker is implied to occur at the turning point joining the two segments of the supply curve econometric estimates of the utility and the labor supply functions provide support to the theoretical results

structural changes in the demand for food in asia empirical evidence from taiwan many asian countries are expected to undergo structural transformations in their economies and rapid urbanization over the next 25 years the changes in tastes and lifestyles engendered by urban living are likely to have significant influences on food demand changes in marketing systems and occupational changes closely linked with increasing gnp per capita also may influence the demand for food in this paper estimates presented for taiwan demonstrate that structural changes in food demand as distinguished from changes due to income and price effects have been significant factors driving the rapid changes in dietary patterns seen in east asia over the past three decades because most previous demand studies have ignored the possible influence of structural shifts which are highly correlated with increases in per capita income over time the effects of income on food demand have been overestimated

blind ambition the effects of social networks and institutional sex composition on the job search outcomes of elite coeducational and women s college graduates in this paper i develop a perspective on women s career attainment focused on how employers salary offers may be constructed based on their assumptions regarding women s access to comparative salary information therefore although the use of social networks in job search may enhance women s actual knowledge of prevailing wages i hypothesize that institutional characteristics that employers could assume to constrain women s networks and concomitant access to salary information will directly affect salary offers as well as moderating the influence of network ties on pay to test this perspective job search outcomes of women attending elite coeducational and women s colleges were examined regarding the number of offers obtained women who consulted with proportionally more male peer and employed adult male advice ties received significantly more job offers than women using fewer male advice contacts with regard to salary offers this study reveals an institutional sex composition effect women exiting single sex institutions i e women s colleges received significantly lower salary offers than women from coeducational schools even after accounting for human capital job characteristics and institutional reputation the effects of social networks on pay were moderated by institutional sex composition such that women exiting women s colleges received lower returns in the form of salary to their cross gender advice ties than did women from a matched coeducational institution implications of these results for theories of social capital and women s occupational attainment are discussed

introduction aid and development the debate on the impact of aid on the economies of developing countries is a rapidly evolving one early studies by e g papanek 1972 reported a positive impact of aid on growth within a multiple regression context this conclusion allowed policy makers to entertain the possibility that poverty across the world could be largely eradicated that countries could be moved out of poverty through the allocation of aid and that the following of successful policies would allow them to generate increased prosperity from their own resources unfortunately after some thirty years the poor are still with us poverty shows relatively little signs of disappearing and until recently enthusiasm for aid amongst donors had declined the papers in this symposium examine the effectiveness of aid in the past and its potential in the future a number of economic studies help explain this apparent failure mosley et al 1987 found it impossible to establish any significant relationship between aid and the growth rate of developing countries they suggested that this might be because of the possibility of leakages into non productive expenditure in the public sector and the transmission of negative price effects to the private sector they also argued for the targeting of aid i e its allocation to countries where it would be used most effectively boone 1996 concluded that aid does not significantly increase growth nor benefit the poor it did however increase the size of the government but again the message was not entirely negative in terms of what aid could achieve and argued for the targeting of aid this time at liberal democratic regimes as they appeared more effective in for example reducing infant mortality hence until recently the dominant view within economics had become pessimistic with respect to the past effectiveness of aid but somewhat optimistically perhaps held out the hope for improvement on the basis of aid targeting more recently however work by burnside and dollar 2000 was to put forward a more optimistic view of the former they concluded that aid had a positive impact on growth for developing countries with good fiscal monetary and trade policies in place but had little impact for those countries who were following poor policies this therefore partially at least provided an explanation of why aid had been found to have little positive impact on growth in previous empirical work it also provided specific criteria for targeting aid this was then built upon by collier and dollar 2001 2002 who calculated a poverty efficient allocation of aid which focused on those countries with a combination of most poverty and best policies they suggested that targeting of aid in this manner would almost double its effectiveness in reducing poverty this work has had an extraordinary impact upon policy and easterly 2003 as well as dalgaard hansen and tarp dht in this symposium document how it

are carbon taxes good for the poor a general equilibrium analysis for vietnam summary we evaluate effects of an environmental tax using a general equilibrium model linked to a household database the burden of the tax applied mainly to energy is passed forward by non tradable industries and backward by tradable industries facing fixed world prices the tax is thus equivalent to a real exchange rate appreciation and since export industries are labor intensive reduces employment and increases poverty especially when labor supply is responsive to wages the use of revenues to increase transfers to households can offset poverty increases but does not create jobs thus the tax will likely conflict with other development policy objectives

substitution between goods and leisure in a developing country the paper explores the substitutability between goods female leisure and male leisure we find that goods and leisure are not separable we then adapt the almost ideal demand system aids to include leisure in the system in the same manner as commodities the model is not sensitive to variations in the assumption of total time available for each individual s work and leisure results from sri lanka indicate the marginal propensity to consume leisure is quite high especially in rural areas this finding has important implications for transfer programs designed to raise food consumption a somewhat surprising complementarity between male and female leisure was also observed a number of goods were found to be complements to both male and female leisure

productivity health and inequality in the intrahousehold distribution of food in low income countries a model is formulated incorporating linkages among nutrition labor market productivity health heterogeneity and the intrahousehold distribution of food and work activities in a subsistence economy empirical results based on a sample of households from bangladesh indicate that despite considerable intrahousehold disparities in calorie consumption households are averse to inequality furthermore consistent with the model the results also indicate that both the higher level and greater variance in the calories consumed by men relative to women reflect in part the greater participation by men in activities in which productivity is sensitive to health status copyright 1990 by american economic association

the labour market impact of body weight in china a semiparametric analysis while a positive wage effect of body mass index bmi is widely observed in low income developing countries a negative wage effect of bmi is often observed in high income developed countries to fill the gap between these previous findings we investigate the relationship between body weight and wages in transition economies we focus on china whose rapid economic growth of the 1990s was followed by a rapid increase in overweight and obesity while still experiencing significant food insecurity and underweight we first use several parametric regression strategies to obtain a consistent estimate of the wage effects of weight second we adopt a semiparametric partially linear model that allows for endogeneity of weight parametric regressions provide mixed results and the sign and magnitude of their estimates are sensitive to the choice of samples and regression strategies semiparametric estimates provide evidence of a wage penalty for very heavy and thin persons among both men and women the wage pena

socioeconomic background and the returns to schooling in two low income economies in the united kingdom the increment to income yielded by an additional year of schooling declines as the occupational status of the worker s father rises in this note the relationship between family background and the returns to schooling is measured in kenya and tanzania in contrast to the united kingdom a positive relationship is documented several explanations for this marked difference between a high income economy and two low income economies are suggested copyright 1987 by the review of economic studies limited

male female differences in agricultural productivity methodological issues and empirical evidence abstract most estimates of male female differences in technical efficiency from production function studies show that male and female farmers are equally efficient farm managers controlling for levels of inputs and human capital there is some evidence however of allocative inefficiency within households marginal products of labor depend on the relative scarcities of labor and the gender division of labor in specific farming systems many of these studies however are methodologically flawed greater attention needs to be given to appropriate estimation methods endogenous input choice the use of headship as a stratifying variable and the implications of intrahousehold resource allocation

entry versus success in the labor force young women s employment in sri lanka abstract in this paper we contribute to the understanding of women s labor force behavior in developing societies through a household level analysis of young single women in sri lanka we argue that in the context of saturated and imperfect labor markets of asian societies such as sri lanka it is important to 1 a differentiate between labor force participation and employment 2 b consider familial and cultural factors in addition to the standard determinants of labor supply and demand and 3 c examine the labor force activity of the current generation of single women in sri lanka where unemployment among young women is widespread our results strongly support the strategy of differentiating between labor force participation and employment that the determinants of these components of the employment process function in different ways is best illustrated by our findings regarding the effects of education higher education levels lead to greater labor force participation but highly educated women are also more likely to be unemployed than to be employed in addition our findings show that the labor market behavior of young women is shaped by familial expectations and resources in terms of the protected role of young daughters in the household cultural differences in the acceptability of young women working across ethnic groups the necessity for women to work across social classes and classbased advantages in access to information and channels that facilitate job acquisition

estimating the intrahousehold incidence of illness child health and gender inequality in the allocation of time in this paper the authors develop and implement a method for estimating the effects of infant morbidity on the differential allocation of time of family members based on discrete indicators of health and activity participation commonly available in survey data and within the context of a household model in which health is determined endogenously their estimates that take into account the simultaneity of health activity associations indicate that increased levels of infant morbidity significantly exacerbate existing differentials in the accumulation of human capital across teenage boys and girls in indonesia copyright 1990 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

education gender gaps in pakistan is the labor market to blame abstract differential labor market returns to male and female education are one potential explanation for large gender gaps in education in pakistan we empirically test this explanation by estimating private returns to education separately for male and female wage earners this article contributes to the literature by using a variety of methodologies ordinary least squares heckman correction two stage least squares and household fixed effects in order to estimate economic returns to education the latest nationally representative data the pakistan integrated household survey 2002 are used earnings function estimates consistently reveal a sizable gender asymmetry in economic returns to education with returns to women s education being substantially and statistically significantly higher than men s the return to an additional year of schooling ranges between 7 and 11 for men and between 13 and 18 for women there are also large direct returns to women s education at low levels of schooling

the effect of price and income changes on food energy intake in sri lanka data is used to analyze the food acquisition behavior of households from a 1980 81 survey designed to be nationally sectorally and regionally representative of sri lanka the poor are shown to be much more responsive to price and income changes than other income groups the urban population generally exhibits lower income elasticities of demand for food commodities the poor appear to efficient substitutors thereby mitigating the effects of a price change on caloric intake the important exception is rice whose elasticity of calorie consumption with respect to price was about 4 times higher than for any other commodity the reluctance of households to substitute for rice even when faced with rising prices coupled with its large budget share show rice to be the most important consumption good higher rice prices are an important determinant of poverty for landless and urban workers moderating food prices preferably through technological change is a key ingredient to raising consumption among the poor simulations show that even if there are rapid and proportional increases in expenditures of all income groups this will not dramatically increase caloric intake among the poor however if the absolute value of the increase in real expenditures were distributed equally to all households there would be a marked increase in the of households consuming an adequate diet

wage and labor supply effects of illness in cote d ivoire and ghana instrumental variable estimates for days disabled abstract sickness should make individuals less productive but there are problems in measuring this effect first how is adult morbidity measured in a household survey second how is the impact or morbidity on productivity inferred if earning is partly used to improve health self reported functional activity limitation due to illness is considered an indicator of morbidity for wage earners and self employed people to deal with both the measurement and joint determination problems an instrumental variable estimation approach is used where local food prices and health services instrument for disability days that reduce wages by at least 10 and hours by 3 or more

health and productivity in a heterogeneous urban labour market the effects of changes in various health indicators on hourly earnings in different sectors of the labour market are examined using survey data from conakry guinea greater height which is associated with greater strength raises earnings of men both in self employment and the private wage sector where work is likely to involve physical labour height does not matter for women s earnings which likely reflects the less physically strenuous nature of most women s activities body mass index treated as an endogenous variable appears to raise earnings of men in self and private wage employment and of women in self employment no impacts are found for household per capita calorie and protein availability also treated as endogenous overall the results suggest that health matters for productivity in poor urban environments with these effects depending on gender and the sector of employment or type of work

pull and push individual farming in hungary this paper is motivated by the fact that part time individual farming is commonly observed among rural households in a number of transition economies but it is not clear prima facie if such resource allocation is optimal a conceptual model of household labor allocation between individual farming and off farm wage employment is developed the model explicitly accounts for the role of household endowments in labor allocation as the analysis is conditioned on the status of factor markets the hypotheses are empirically tested using 1998 data from a country representative survey of rural households in hungary an advanced transition country which only recently became eu member state results provide evidence that capital market imperfections still remain implications for the policies related to agricultural sector restructuring employment and rural development are discussed

the economic returns to schooling in the west bank and gaza strip the author uses micro data from the labor force surveys conducted in the west bank and the gaza strip during 1981 91 to show that during 1981 87 wage differences between schooling groups fell by well over one half this sharp reduction is associated with large increases in the size of the educated palestinian labor force since the returns to schooling for israeli jews were stable the decline in returns to schooling for palestinians is consistent with the notion that the returns to schooling in the territories were determined largely by the forces of supply and demand in a segmented market for skilled labor copyright 1995 by american economic association

racial harassment ethnic concentration and economic conditions in this paper we analyse the association between the spatial concentration of ethnic minorities and racial harassment ethnic concentration relates to racial harassment through at least three channels hostility in the attitudes of majority individuals that finds expression in harassment behaviour the probability that minority individuals meet majority individuals and the cost of expressing hostility aggressively thus harassment cannot simply be modelled as a stronger form of hostility using unique data for britain we show that in areas of higher local ethnic concentration experience of harassment is lower even though hostility on the side of the majority population is not

nutrition labour productivity and labour supply of men and women in ghana ghana s population is expected to increase from 14 1 million in 1990 to 18 7 million in 2000 bumb et al 1994 this growth in population along with growth in per capita income and urbanisation will create increased demand for food before the launching of the economic reform programme in 1983 ghana s food production had fallen to an abysmally low level in response to the general deterioration in the economy output of food and cash crops declined at a rate of 0 3 percent per year between 1970 and 1980 cereal production which exceeded domestic demand by some 200 000 tonnes in 1971 73 registered a deficit of over 300 000 tonnes in 1981 83 production of starchy staples fell from 7 9 million tonnes to 4 1 million tonnes between 1974 and 1981 as a result of declining food output combined with a rising population per capita food availability in 1981 83 was 30 percent lower than it was in 1975 efforts made under the economic recovery programme have improved the food supply situation in the country although food production levels still remain low output levels of cocoyam and plantain have not reached their average levels in the early 1970 s table 9 1

who benefits more from higher household consumption the intra household allocation of nutrients in china abstract previous studies find that human capital investments in boys are less income elastic than investments in girls attributing this result to favoritism toward boys i show theoretically that it is plausible for more productive or favored household members to have higher income elasticities i then investigate this question empirically utilizing panel data on individual nutrient intake from the china health and nutrition survey chns to analyze how changes in household per capita nutrient intake affect the intra household allocation of nutrients to deal with potential biases due to omitted variables and simultaneity i use measures of rainfall variation as instruments i find that nutritional intakes are more elastic for males especially prime age men than for females and significantly less elastic for the elderly

how much does violence tax trade abstract we investigate the empirical effect of violence as compared to other trade impediments on trade flows our analysis is based on a panel data set with annual observations on 177 countries from 1968 to 1999 which brings together information from the rose data set the iterate data set for terrorist events and data sets of external and internal conflict we explore these data with traditional and theoretical gravity models we calculate that for a given country year the presence of terrorism together with internal and external conflict is equivalent to as much as a 30 tariff on trade this is larger than estimated tariff equivalent costs of border and language barriers and tariff equivalent reduction through generalized systems of preference and wto participation

once in the door gender tryouts and the initial salaries of managers although women pursue managerial credentials at nearly the same rate as men gender disparities in wages exist because of the shortfall in wages women sustain relative to men at the onset of their careers this article develops a tryout approach to test for the presence of demand side contributions to initial wage inequality while also developing and testing theory on why it may be lessened through internships using detailed data on graduates from an elite management program from 2009 2010 our analyses reveal that internships are associated with the gap in men s and women s initial salaries for men there is no difference in salary offers from employers where an internship occurs versus one where an internship does not occur however women receive higher salaries from employers where an internship first takes place this paper was accepted by olav sorenson organizations

inequality as a determinant of malnutrition and unemployment policy this paper explores the policy implications that are obtained once it is recognized that at low nutrition intakes a person s productivity is an increasing function of intake in the context of a fully general equilibrium model it is shown that if aggregate assets in an economy are neither large nor small certain patterns of lorenz improving asset redistributions or nutrition transfers increase aggregate output and reduce the volume of involuntary unemployment and the incidence of undernourishment copyright 1987 by royal economic society

determinants of food consumption in rural sierra leone abstract this paper reports the application of a quadratic expenditure system with demographic variables to the household consumption leisure choice component of a household firm model a system of seven commodities is estimated including five foods non food and leisure appropriate for such a level of disaggregation a demand system is used the quadratic expenditure system which allows for a flexible relationship between full income and commodity expenditures without sacrificing parsimony in parameters demographic data on households are explicitly incorporated into the model allowing for a richer specification than can be achieved by using per capita variables the data are from a cross section survey of households in rural sierra leone price variation exists by region permitting estimation of a complete demand system engel curves are found to be significantly non linear with marginal expenditure on rice the major staple declining with higher income most foods are found to be reasonably price responsive with sizeable own price substitution effects declining with higher income aggregate labor supply is found to be price inelastic

determinants of nonfarm earnings of farm based husbands and wives in northern ghana the nonfarm work participation decisions of married men and women in rural northern ghana were jointly and separately estimated for married couples through a bivariate probit using recent survey data selectivity bias was corrected for in estimating wage offer and labor supply equations using heckman s procedure education experience infrastructure distance to the capital and population density as well as interactions between education and infrastructure and between education and distance to the city were found to be significantly related to the probability of nonfarm labor market participation wages and the amount of nonfarm labor performed with significant differences by gender

labor force participation and earnings determinants for women in the special conditions of developing countries abstract little systematic analysis exists regarding hypothesized special labor market conditions for women in developing countries this study explores such conditions in nicaragua major results are i small children affect participation less than in developed countries due to child care from extended families or while on informal sector jobs and the necessity for poor mothers to work ii schooling and experience have major roles affecting work sector and earnings but the primary school return is half that cited by the world bank iii other human capital variables particularly nutrition have some impact

intrahousehold allocation of education expenditure the case of sri lanka abstract this article uses conventional engel curve demand analysis as well as a double hurdle model to explore whether there are intrahousehold differentials in the allocation of education expenditure between boys and girls in rural sri lanka contrary to the case in most developing countries in sri lanka there was a significant bias favoring girls for 1990 91 and 1995 96 for age group categories 8 9 14 16 and 17 19 and in 2000 for age group categories 14 16 and 17 19 significant differences in enrollment favoring girls aged 17 19 explain part of the girl bias observed in 1990 91 and 2000 2001 but most of the bias is driven by positive expenditure given enrollment the biases favoring girls are observed at critical stages of the schooling career in the run up to key national exams the 8 9 age group captures the run up to the year 5 scholarship exams that are used to gain entry to the better performing secondary schools the 14 16 and 17 19 age groups capture those who read for important nationa

high quality nutrition in childhood body size and wages in early adulthood evidence from guatemalan workers espanolcausalidad entre salud y productividad no resulta directa de establecer por un lado mayores ingresos pueden trasladarse en una dieta de mejor calidad por el otro es probable que un trabajador saludable sea mas productivo este trabajo analiza el efecto del tamano corporal altura e indice de masa corporal como indicadores de nutricion en salarios los datos provienen del estudio longitudinal realizado en guatemala entre 1969 77 y 2002 04 estimaciones sugieren que la elasticidad tamano del cuerpo en relacion al salario aumenta cuando la heterogeneidad no observable es considerada sin embargo los resultados son mas robustos para los hombres adicionalmente la elasticidad estimada presenta algun grado de disparidad entre quantiles de la distribucion condicional del salario englishestablishing a causal relationship between health and productivity is not straightforward on one hand as income grows people invest in better diets on the other a healthier worker is likely to be more productive this paper focuses on the effect of body size height and body mass index as indicators of nutrition upon wages data comes from a longitudinal study conducted in guatemala during 1969 77 and followed up in 2002 04 body size elasticity increases when unobserved heterogeneity is considered although evidence is stronger for males additionally estimated elasticity shows some degree of heterogeneity at different quantiles of the conditional wage distribution

a simple test of the nutrition based efficiency wage model abstract in the nutrition based efficiency wage model wages in labor markets in developing countries are rigid because lowering them would reduce worker productivity and increase the cost per efficiency unit i evaluate this claim using data from rural india i find that contrary to what has been assumed in these models a wage cut should lower the cost per efficiency unit of labor

does better nutrition raise farm productivity household level data from sierra leone are used to test whether higher caloric intake enhances family farm labor productivity this is the notion behind the efficiency wages hypothesis which has found only weak empirical support a farm production function is estimated accounting for the simultaneity in input and calorie choice instruments include prices household demographic characteristics and farm assets the latter two sets of instruments are later dropped to explore the robustness of the results to different specifications of exogeneity the exercise shows a highly significant effect of caloric intake on labor productivity providing solid support for the nutrition productivity hypothesis the marginal effect on productivity falls drastically as calorie consumption rises but remains positive at moderately high levels of intake one result is a fall in the effective price of food a decline that is larger for households that consumer fewer calories

does the labour market explain lower female schooling in india labour market discrimination against women and parental discrimination against daughters are two of the most commonly cited explanations of the gender gap in education in developing countries this study empirically tests the labour market explanation for india using recent household survey data the results reveal substantial omitted family background bias in the estimates of rates of return to education the findings suggest that as well as overall labour market discrimination girls face poorer economic incentives to invest in schooling than boys because they reap lower labour market returns to education than boys

bending the pipeline executive search and gender inequality in hiring for top management jobs we study the sources of women s underrepresentation in hiring for top management jobs by focusing on the context of executive search using data that include proprietary information on 10 970 individuals considered by a search firm we examine the sources of the low proportion of women placed in senior roles contrary to received wisdom we find limited evidence that demand side screeners strongly contribute to gender disadvantage in this setting what gender differences exist tend to play out at the start of the hiring process and are driven both by supply side and demand side actors once considered for a position women are no less likely than men to be hired though they are slightly less likely to be interviewed by the search firm our findings highlight the theoretical importance of disentangling candidates self steering behavior from the pipeline bending of hiring agents we discuss the implications of our results for understanding gender inequality at upper echelons of the labor market this p

heteroskedastic sample selection and developing country wage equations many researchers have dealt with potential selectivity bias in developing country wage equations by employing heckman s 1979 two step method or related techniques despite the potential for such methods to produce misleading results if the assumptions on which they are based are incorrect this paper argues that the results produced even by parametric easy to implement selectivity bias correction methods can inspire more confidence than the typical applications to date when model selection testing is used to select from a specified diverse set assumptions for which there is support in the data and when sensitivity analysis is used to identify parameters whose estimates are robust across a wide range of assumptions in particular it highlights the importance of allowing for the nonlinearities implied by selection rule heteroskedasticity there is economic reason to suspect heteroskedasticity and econometric reason to believe that the nonlinearities it introduces into the first stage will improve

the economic rationale for investing in nutrition in developing countries abstract studies of experimental and socioeconomic survey data on the direct productivity effects of nutrition indicate growing though qualified evidence of positive direct effects of nutrition on labor productivity of poorer individuals in developing countries greater productivity effects for nutrition than for formal schooling studies on the indirect productivity effects of nutrition through cognitive achievement schooling and preschool ability also indicate positive productivity effects through these channels therefore for productivity reasons alone policies that favor better nutrition among the poorer members of society merit serious consideration that productivity and equity concerns are in harmony is an important plus

income productivity in china on the role of health this study provides empirical evidence regarding the income productivity of health human capital in china we appeal to concepts from human capital theory to support a basic model that treats health as a form of human capital in the income production process our model examines the economic return at the household level from the health of its individual members we estimate this with a longitudinal sample drawn from the china health and nutrition survey chns allowing us to exploit within variation in health and income to address possible unobservables biasing estimates of the impact of health on income in the simple cross sectional setting household income is strongly influenced by the health of its members particularly in rural areas these findings could have important implications for health and economic policy making aimed at reducing the long standing urban rural economic gap and more comprehensively insuring the rural population against health and economic risk

not just a formality pay system formalization and sex related earnings effects drawing on neoclassical economic internal labor market and devaluation theories we examine how the sex composition of jobs and the sex of individual workers affect earnings depending upon the formalization of the pay type using personnel data for over 8 000 employees we confirm the existence of a negative relationship between earnings and the proportion female in a job we also find that for less formalized pay types cash incentive bonuses sex composition and individual sex effects are larger than for more formalized pay merit raises and base salary together these findings support devaluation explanations suggest that incentive bonuses may widen the earnings gap between women and men and have implications for the design of pay structures in organizations

the economics of counterterrorism a survey we provide a review of theoretical and empirical contributions on the economic analysis of terrorism and counterterrorism we argue that simple rational choice models of terrorist behavior in the form of cost benefit models already provide a well founded theoretical framework for the study of terrorism and counterterrorism we also hint at their limitations which relate to the failure of accounting for the dynamics between terrorism and counterterrorism that may produce unintended second order effects as well as for the costs associated with counterterrorism and its international dimension we reevaluate previously proposed counterterrorism strategies accordingly finally in the light of our findings we discuss interesting areas of future research

job search and network composition implications of the strength of weak ties hypothesis workers find jobs through personal contacts weak and strong ties and formal sources alternative formulations of the strength of weak ties hypothesis suggest 1 weak ties relay job offers more frequently than strong ties or 2 weak tie offers are drawn from a better distribution a formal model shows that both formulations imply a correlation between network composition and a job seeker s minimum acceptable wage however the use of a weak tie is never associated with higher expected wages under the firstformulation and is only sometimes associated with higher expected wages under the secondformulation these results suggest that researchers shouldfocus on job seekers network structures

the macroeconomic consequences of terrorism abstract we perform an empirical investigation of the macroeconomic consequences of international terrorism and interactions with alternative forms of collective violence our analysis is based on a rich unbalanced panel data set with annual observations on 177 countries from 1968 to 2000 which brings together information from the penn world table data set the iterate data set for terrorist events and data sets of external and internal conflict we explore these data with cross sectional and panel growth regression analysis and a structural var model we find that on average the incidence of terrorism may have an economically significant negative effect on growth albeit one that is considerably smaller and less persistent than that associated with either external wars or internal conflict as well terrorism is associated with a redirection of economic activity away from investment spending and towards government spending however our investigation also suggests important differences both regarding the incidence and the economic consequences of terrorism among different sets of countries in oecd economies in particular terrorist incidents are considerably more frequent than in other nations but the negative influence of these incidents on growth is smaller

separate and unequal occupation establishment sex segregation and the gender wage gap the authors report the first large scale empirical investigation of within job wage differences between men and women in the same occupation and establishment using data first on blue collar and clerical employees from 16 u s industries in 1974 83 and second on employees in 10 professional and administrative occupations the authors report three findings first wage differences at the occupation establishment level were small even without controls for individual level characteristics hence within job wage discrimination was much less important than occupation establishment segregation for observed wage differences second establishment segregation was an important cause although not as important as occupational segregation of wage differences third establishment segregation was extensive as was occupational segregation

international terrorism causes consequences and cures a popular view is that international terrorism is on the increase that it is religiously motivated and that it has important adverse consequences this paper investigates this view it examines the empirical evidence on the causes of international terrorism from the late 1960s to the early 2000s and discovers that while religion has had a part to play explanations based on economics and politics appear to be consistent with the facts terrorists come from relatively poor and undemocratic countries and commit attacks in relatively rich and democratic ones the paper then examines the micro macro and global economic effects of international terrorism from both a theoretical and empirical angle and discovers that the negative effect on domestic aggregate demand is temporary and the effect on aggregate supply insignificant finally the paper explores policies to deal with international terrorism and demonstrates that this is complex analogies with conventional crime may be unhelpful

the effects of human capital on wages and the determinants of labor supply in a developing country abstract the heckman procedure is used to correct for sample selection bias in estimating wage offer and net labor market supply equations the findings show that wages are affected by education and experience in addition the wage offer is influenced by other genetic and environmental influences captured in the wage of one s father calories as predicted by exogenous instruments are also shown to influence the wage offer suggesting that better nutrition increases labor productivity the probability of market labor participation as well as the amount of net market labor supply declined with the size of paddy landholding in addition to the net market supply elasticity increasing with the amount of land owned and being lower for urban than rural workers

the intrahousehold demand for nutrients in rural south india individual estimates fixed effects and permanent income good estimates of nutrient intake responses to prices and income are very useful for the evaluation of the numerous efforts to improve nutrition in many developing countries through pricesubsidy and income generation policies we discuss three problems in standard estimates of these responses and then illustrate their implications for nutrient demand relations for a poor sample from rural south india 1 intra household nutrient allocations usually are ignored in this case nutrient intakes for females systematically have algebraically lower price elasticities than do those for males which may leave the females particularly vulnerable at times of food shortages 2 unobserved fixed effects may bias the estimates of responses to observed variables in this case not only the community fixed effects on which the previous literature has focused but also household and individual fixed effects are important failure to control for them results in substantial algebraically upward biases in many estimated price responses 3 most previous studies use current instead of permanent income which a priori may account for the low estimated income elasticities in this case however the use of permanent income does not change the conclusion that the nutrient intakes responses to income are quite small

within firm human capital externalities in tunisia this case study exploits matched firm employee tunisian data in order to underline the role played by within firm human capital in worker remuneration the estimated returns to human capital in wage equations remain unchanged when the dummies representing firm heterogeneity are replaced in the list of regressors with three firm variables a textile industry dummy within firm mean education and firm age we find that part of what is usually considered as return to education may be due to within firm externalities

returns to investment in education a global update the author updates compilations of rate of return estimates to investment in education published since 1985 and discusses methodological issues surrounding those estimates some key patterns among the three main levels of education primary education continues to exhibit the highest social profitability in all world regions private returns are considerably higher than social returns because of the public subsidization of education the degree of public subsidy increases with the level of education which is regressive social and private returns at all levels generally decline by the level of a country s per capita income overall the returns to female education are higher than those to male education but at individual levels of education the pattern is more mixed the returns to the academic secondary school track are higher than the vocational track since unit cost of vocational education is much higher and the returns for those who work in the private competitive sector of the economy are higher than in the public noncompetitive sector and the returns in the self employment unregulated sector of the economy are higher than in the dependent employment sector controversies in the literature are discussed in the light of the new evidence the undisputable and universal positive correlation between education and earnings can be interpreted in many ways the causation issue on whether education really affects earnings can be answered only with experimental data generated by randomly exposing different people to various amounts of education given the fact that moral and pragmatic considerations prevent the generation of such pure data researchers have to make do with indirect inferences or natural experiments some have been attempted the author looks at the research on overeducation or surplus schooling the conclusions reinforce earlier patterns they confirm that primary education continues to be the number one investment priority in developing countries they also show that educating females is marginally more profitable than educating males that the academic secondary school curriculum is a better investment than the technical vocational tract and that the returns to education obey the same rules as investment in conventional capital that is they decline as investment is expanded