remittances and the informal economy abstract many developing countries are characterized by a large informal sector and are also often heavily dependent on remittance inflows from abroad we develop a general equilibrium framework to understand better the dynamic absorption of remittances in a two sector small open economy by incorporating many of the stylized features of the informal sector calibrating the model to yield a long run equilibrium consistent with sample averages for 56 developing countries for the period 1990 2014 we show that the effect of remittances depends critically on how they impinge on the recipient economy i e whether these inflows are i permanent or temporary ii associated with a collateral effect to securitize borrowing and iii exogenous or countercyclical we also identify the conditions under which remittances are associated with an expansion of the informal sector as well as the dutch disease effect

the spread of municipal reform temporal spatial and social dynamics the adoption of commission and managerial administrative structures and their subsequent abandonment by the 267 largest american cities during the period 1900 1942 is studied using event history methods full period equations show no significant direct effect of percentage catholic culture clash or population size hierarchical diffussion and only a modest impact of city age modernization a strong effect from average annual manufacturing wages is found but in a direction contrary to that posited by the class conflict hypothesis the variable affecting transition rates most strongly appears to be regional adoption percentages an indicator of neighborhood diffusion these findings suggest revisions of the conventional image of the municipal reform experience

why don t remittances appear to affect growth although measured remittances by migrant workers have soared in recent years macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth this paper reviews existing explanations for this puzzle and proposes three new ones first it offers evidence that a large majority of the recent rise in measured remittances may be illusory arising from changes in measurement not changes in real financial flows second it shows that even if these increases were correctly measured cross country regressions would have too little power to detect their effects on growth third it points out that the greatest driver of rising remittances is rising migration which has an opportunity cost to economic product at the origin net of that cost there is little reason to expect large growth effects of remittances in the origin economy migration and remittances clearly have first order effects on poverty at the origin on the welfare of migrants and their families and on global gross domestic product but detecting their effects on growth of the origin economy is likely to remain elusive

women s suffrage political responsiveness and child survival in american history women s choices appear to emphasize child welfare more than those of men this paper presents new evidence on how suffrage rights for american women helped children to benefit from the scientific breakthroughs of the bacteriological revolution consistent with standard models of electoral competition suffrage laws were followed by immediate shifts in legislative behavior and large sudden increases in local public health spending this growth in public health spending fueled large scale door to door hygiene campaigns and child mortality declined by 8 15 or 20 000 annual child deaths nationwide as cause specific reductions occurred exclusively among infectious childhood killers sensitive to hygienic conditions

modeling local growth control decisions in a multi city case do spatial interactions and lobbying efforts matter our article analyzes the determinants of local growth control decisions which are modeled as the result of a political struggle between different groups of voters and organized lobbies we show that under specific hypotheses a higher homeownership rate can induce lower levels of controls considering residential choices as endogenous to growth control policies the local decisions to control growth become strategically interdependent assuming imperfect mobility we show that a spatial econometric specification can be directly derived from our theoretical model our empirical analysis concerning the determinants of the taxelocale d equipement a french local development tax is thus naturally based on spatial econometrics its results confirm the major predictions of our model

remittances in nepal boon or bane abstract nepal is one of the highest recipients of remittances percentage of gdp in the world for a small land locked economy battered by a decade long maoist insurgency 1996 2006 prolonged political instability slow growth rate and large exodus of youths for employment overseas high inflow of remittances bears a huge significance both at micro and macro levels exploring various facets of high migration and remittances this article shows remittance induced dutch disease effects and policy laxity to improve investment climate in nepal since it is costly to sterilise the impact of remittances each year it might be prudent to learn to live with it and gradually channel remittances to productive usages with a goal to boost productivity

demographic dynamics in poor countries labour market conditions and gender inequalities abstract this article analyses a stackelberg differential game in which households labour supply and fertility decisions are taken assuming husbands as leaders and wives as followers the model solution yields the optimal number of children and labour supply of male and female in equilibrium male and female labour supply increases with wage and decreases with children costs and time preference and the optimal number of children increases with male wage and decreases with cost of children husband s time preference and female s wage and time preference we test the model using ghana living standard survey round 4 and find that women are more sensitive to changes in the labour market conditions than males and better labour market opportunities for women may lead to a strong reduction in fertility

the impact of climate change on incomes and convergence in africa abstract climate change is projected to detrimentally affect african countries economic development while income inequalities across economies is among the highest on the planet however it is projected that income levels would converge on the continent hitherto there is limited evidence on how climate change could affect projected income convergence accelerating slowing down or even reversing this process here we analyze convergence considering climate change damages by employing an economic model embedding the three dimensions of risks at the country level exposure vulnerability and hazards the results show 1 with historical mean climate induced losses between 10 and 15 percent of gdp per capita growth the majority of african economies are poorly adapted to their current climatic conditions 2 western and eastern african countries are projected to be the most affected countries on the continent and 3 as a consequence of these heightened impacts on a number of countries inequalities between countries are projected to widen in the high warming scenario compared to inequalities in the low and without warming scenarios to mitigate the impacts of economic development and inequalities across countries we stress 1 the importance of mitigation ambition and africa s leadership in keeping global mean temperature increase below 1 5 c 2 the need to address the current adaptation deficit as soon as possible 3 the necessity to integrate quantitatively climate risks in economic and development planning and finally 4 we advocate for the generalization of a special treatment for the most vulnerable countries to access climate related finance the analysis raises issues on the ability of african countries to reach their sdgs targets and the potential increasing risk of instability migration across african countries of decreased trade and economic cooperation opportunities as a consequence of climate change exacerbating its negative consequences

life cycle equilibrium unemployment this paper extends the job creation job destruction approach to the labor market to take into account a deterministic finite horizon as hirings and separations depend on the time over which investment costs can be recouped the life cycle setting implies age differentiated labor market flows while search by the unemployed falls with age the separation rate is rather u shaped over the life cycle worker heterogeneity in the context of undirected search implies an intergenerational externality which is not eliminated by the hosios condition we show that age specific policies are required to attain the first best allocation

nutritional status during an economic crisis evidence from russia between 1996 and 1998 russia experienced a spectacular decline in economic activity which was followed by a dramatic rebound between 1998 and 2000 we use panel data to examine the impact of variation in household resources on six dimensions of nutritional status distinguishing longer run from short term fluctuations in resources nutritional status is very resilient to short term variation in household resources gross energy intake adult weight and child stature change very little as expenditure deviates from its long run average longer run resources have a substantively large positive and significant effect on energy intake diet quality adult weight and child stature the evidence indicates that individuals and households are able to weather short term fluctuations in economic resources at least in terms of maintaining body mass and energy intake increased globalisation has resulted in many less developed countries becoming more integrated into world markets this integration carries both benefits and costs for the populations of those countries an oft cited cost is elevated risk of exposure to economic fluctuations which has been manifest in several spectacular economic crises across the globe in the last few decades there is however little evidence on the extent to which individuals and families are able to mitigate deleterious effects of these economic upheavals on their well being in spite of its importance for understanding the consequences of globalisation this article provides new evidence on this issue specifically we examine the relationship between several dimensions of nutritional well being and variation in household resources during the russian economic crisis in the late 1990s the economies of the former soviet bloc have been especially volatile since the transition to market based economies which began in the early 1990s nowhere has this been more true than in russia where in the last half of 1998 real gdp collapsed by around 30 and then rapid growth brought the economy back to its pre crisis level by 2000 the time path of changes in gdp is closely mimicked by changes in the incomes and expenditures of russian households using extremely rich longitudinal household survey data from the russian longitudinal monitoring survey rlms we examine the impact of these large fluctuations in household resources on nutrient intake and on anthropometric markers of nutritional status at the individual level in so doing we address an important issue in the literature regarding the extent to which households in low income settings are able

statistical models of consumer behavior with heterogeneous values and constraints in a market with heterogeneous individuals the fact that a particular group of individuals are the consumers of a particular product already indicates that there exist systematic differences between them and the average person simple tools from statistical theory are used here to analyze the implications of consumer diversity it is argued that an increase in consumer diversity will increase the gains from trade and that there is a shadow price of heterogeneity associated with product quality throughout the discussion the significance of consumer self selection and the distinction between average and marginal will be emphasized

why are u s women decreasing their labor force participation if their wages are rising given the traditional interpretation of women s labor force participation rate lfpr trends as movements along a positively sloped labor supply curve it is surprising that the recent downward trend in u s women s lfpr has occurred over a period when women s real wages were commonly believed to be rising i find that almost two thirds of the decline since 2000 is attributable to aging of the adult female population the remainder due to declining labor force participation for women under 55 becomes less puzzling in light of my evidence that the wage education locus faced by women actually may have worsened since 2000 jel j21 j31 j82

an empirical model of labor supply in a life cycle setting this paper formulates and estimates a structural intertemporal model of labor supply using theoretical characterizations derived from an economic model of lifetime behavior a two step empirical analysis yields estimates of intertemporal and uncompensated substitution effects which provide the information needed to predict the response of hours of work to life cycle wage growth and shifts in the lifetime wage path

distortions infrastructure and female labor supply in developing countries abstract in this paper i document cross country gaps between gross domestic product gdp per capita and gdp per worker the gaps are driven mostly by a lower female labor force participation lfp in developing countries females began to participate more in the labor markets of these countries when more households acquired access to basic infrastructure and when distortive policies affecting the prices of household appliances were partially removed i use a model of home production with endogenous labor force participation to account for these facts i find that the prices of household appliances and access to infrastructure are quantitatively important in explaining cross country labor supply differences

tough love and intergenerational altruism tough love and intergenerational altruism this article develops and studies a tough love model of intergenerational altruism we model tough love by modifying the barro becker standard altruism model in two ways first the child s discount factor is endogenously determined so lower childhood consumption leads to a higher discount factor later in life second the parent evaluates the child s lifetime utility with a constant high discount factor our model predicts that parental transfers will fall when the child s discount factor falls this is in contrast with the standard altruism model which predicts that parental transfers are independent of exogenous changes in the child s discount factor

do remittances facilitate a sustainable current account we examine how workers remittances impact on the current account in doing so we focus on how remittances affect the sustainability rather than the size of current account balances we find that the presence of remittances makes it more likely that exports and imports are cointegrated thereby lending support to current account sustainability furthermore quantile regression analysis suggests that increased remittances are associated with a faster speed of current account adjustment towards long run equilibrium particularly for those countries characterised by already highly persistent current account balances in contrast to a literature that emphasises an adverse dutch disease impact of workers remittances on the real exchange rate in terms of reduced external competitiveness our findings suggest that remittances are actually beneficial to the current account balance

remittances finance and growth does financial development foster the impact of remittances on economic growth abstract there is no consensus in the literature regarding the long run impact of remittances on economic growth previous studies have shown that it might be related to financial development in the transfer receiving country but the direction of the link remained unclear i contribute to this literature by using a newly created index of overall financial development and two different estimation methods i measure the importance of remittances given financial development for economic growth in developing countries as there is no widely accepted measure of financial sector development i estimate an index of overall financial conditions it is created by means of an unobserved components model and used to determine the relevance of the financial sector as a transmission channel for remittances to affect economic growth i show that the more financially developed a country is the smaller the impact of remittances on economic growth remittances can foster growth but the effect is significant only at low levels of financial development this is in line with previous studies which found remittances and financial development to be substitutes however the interaction between the two factors becomes weaker once size depth and efficiency of the financial sector are taken into account my results suggest that while attracting migrants transfers can have important short run poverty alleviating advantages in the long run it might be more beneficial for governments to foster financial sector development

distributive politics ward representation and the spread of zoning this analysis examines two alternative explanations for the adoption of comprehensive zoning ordinances in the years immediately following its initial adoption in new york city the market failure explanation predicts zoning adoption in cities where externality problems represented by heavy incidence of manufacturing exist the distributive policymaking model treats zoning as a form of regulation that is most likely to be found in cities where local legislators are elected from geographically concentrated constituencies e g wards and therefore try to target policy benefits to their own constituencies while spreading the policy costs over all constituencies some support is found for each model especially striking is the interactive effect of ward representation and of economic interest i e levels of home ownership

family labor supply and asset returns abstract we study how shocks to wages and asset prices affect consumption and labor supply decisions of two earner households in a life cycle framework with housing and flexible preferences we provide a micro foundation of the wealth effects on consumption and labor supply we find evidence for non separability between non durable consumption housing services and hours of work the results also highlight the importance of family labor supply in understanding how households respond to shocks to financial and housing markets

changes in labor force participation in the united states the labor force participation rate in the united states increased almost continuously for two and a half decades after the mid 1960s pausing only briefly during economic downturns the pace of growth slowed considerably during the 1990s however and after reaching a record high of 67 3 percent in the first quarter of 2000 participation had declined by 1 5 percentage points by 2005 this paper reviews the social and demographic trends that contributed to the movements in the labor force participation rate in the second half of the twentieth century it also examines the manner in which developments in the 2000s reflect a break from past trends and considers implications for the future

motivations to remit evidence from botswana in this article a theory of motivations to send remittances is described and tested with data from botswana altruism is one of the motivations tested and found to be an insufficient explanation for remittances among migrants in botswana a refinement of the model stipulates a modified altruism or enlightened self interest in this model the relationship between the migrant and family is tempered by an implicit understanding of mutual benefit the household strategy may be to encourage some members to migrate as a means of spreading risk and sharing gains the household strategy is similar to an insurance policy where migration is to places where market potential is high the risks incurred might be high the example is given of migration during a drought in botswana migrant remittances were greater in households with more cattle or households with more to lose drought alone was not statistically related to remittances increases in remittances were related to increased levels of education it is suggested that repayment was the motive for parents investment in migrants education migrants gains are identified as the potential for an inheritance the security of channeling investments through a trusted family member and security in having a home to return to it is pointed out that the altruism and family remittances from urban migration were strategies that bridged the simple dynamic of either urban development or rural development impacting on family welfare it is suggested that household models of economy adopt some measure to express the relationship of household wealth to remittances from urban migrants

intercountry comparisons of labor force trends and of related developments an overview this paper is a survey of analyses of women s labor force growth in 12 industrialized countries originally presented at a conference in sussex england in june 1983 the main focus of the conference papers and of the current survey is on growth of the labor force of married women in the years 1960 80 trends in fertility wages and family instability also receive attention as related developments married women s labor force growth is observed in all countries except for the ussr after 1970 where labor force rates of women reached the level of men growth rates differ among countries they apparently respond to growth in real wages and to growth in education but response elasticities differ among countries estimates of these elasticities contained in the country papers were helpful in predicting the trends other findings include ubiquitous declines in fertility and growth of divorce in the 1970s both developments are related to long run labor force growth in all countries wages of women were lo

dynamics of female labour force participation in france abstractthis article formulates and estimates a structural intertemporal model of labour force participation relying on theoretical characterizations derived from an economic model of lifetime behaviour we estimate a dynamic probit model with correlated random effects using longitudinal data to allow for a dynamic structure the model is applied to a panel of married women drawn from the 1997 2002 french labour force surveys in order to represent their participation behaviour it is estimated by maximum simulated likelihood our results show that women s decisions to go out to work are characterized by significant state dependence unobserved heterogeneity and negative serial correlation in the transitory error component in addition we find that the presence of young children in a woman s household reduces her labour participation but unequally according to their age and number as expected educational level has a positive impact on women s participation last a rise in the husband s wage is found

employer skill demands and labor market outcomes of blacks and women the author uses data from a 1992 94 survey of employers in four metropolitan areas to investigate the effects of skill demands as measured by hiring requirements and job tasks on the wages and employment of newly hired workers skill demands were generally associated with lower employment of blacks than whites and with higher employment of women than men most tasks and requirements had statistically significant positive effects on starting hourly wages together these effects help to account for some of the differences between the hourly wages of white and black men and for some of the trends over time in the relative wages and employment of race and gender groups

labor supply in the past present and future a balanced growth perspective the absence of a trend in hours worked in the postwar united states is an exception across countries and historically hours fall steadily by a little below 0 5 per year are steadily falling hou

the market work behavior and wages of women 1975 94 changes in the labor market participation and wages of women in the united states are analyzed over the period 1975 1994 using data from the current population survey women are organized into nine birth cohorts five schooling groups and each year of age from 25 to 60 years and their weekly and annual work hours their annual work weeks their employment population ratio and their real average hourly earnings tabulated schooling differences in work behavior have become wider in recent cohorts as have their wages the relationship between work and wages is estimated for women of different ages cohorts and marital status the gap between the work of unmarried and married women has narrowed and the role of wages both the wages of women and those of husbands is examined to determine the extent to which changes in wages account for these movements excerpt

economic growth and the demand for education is there a wealth effect abstract human capital investment in developing countries is thought to be significantly constrained by household resources this paper studies the relationship between household resources and the demand for education using recent household survey data from vietnam the data cover a period 1993 1998 of exceptional income growth in vietnam during which secondary school enrollment rose substantially using consumption expenditures to measure household wealth we find a positive and significant relationship between changes in wealth and changes in the demand for education this wealth effect persists even after controlling for locality specific factors such as changes in education returns and the supply and quality of schools and for the opportunity costs of schooling

an empirical study of the timing and spacing of childbearing the author presents evidence concerning the economic determinants of the timing and spacing of births in the united states with particular reference to the effects of shifts in a womans wage profile and shifts in her husbands earnings profile the data are from the young womens cohort of the national longitudinal surveys of labor market experience and concern 314 white women whose husbands were present during the period 1968 1978 the author develops an empirical model of the probability that a woman will give birth in a given time period the results suggest that an increase in the womans income tends to lead to a postponement of childbearing and a tendency toward closer spacing of births an upward shift in husbands income involves a shift away from very close or very wide spacing toward intermediate spacing

individual and aggregate labor supply in heterogeneous agent economies with intensive and extensive margins we develop a heterogeneous agent general equilibrium model that incorporates both intensive and extensive margins of labor supply a nonconvexity in the mapping between time devoted to work and labor services distinguishes between extensive and intensive margins we consider calibrated versions of this model that dier in the value of a key preference parameter for labor supply and the extent of heterogeneity the model is able to capture the salient features of the empirical distribution of hours worked including how individuals transit within this distribution we then study how the various specications inuence labor supply responses to aggregate technology shocks we nd that abstracting from intensive margin adjustment has large eects on the volatility of aggregate hours even if intensive margin uctuates relatively little

employment motherhood and school continuation decisions of young white black and hispanic women we examine the empirical relationship between early employment activity and school continuation decisions for young american women using a dynamic sequential discrete choice framework that estimates schooling labor supply and birth decisions jointly controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and the endogeneity of these life cycle decisions that the rate of school withdrawal increases as work intensity rises helps explain the higher departure rates of hispanic girls from secondary school and the premature departure of young black women from college the disturbing implication is that youth employment induces long run wage stagnation for early school leavers and potentially increases race and ethnic inequities

planning stochastic shocks and labour contracts of female workers and their welfare implications in this paper we analyse labour contracts for female workers when there are planned shifts or stochastic shocks to their leisure preference which arise as a result of planned or unplanned pregnancy it will be shown that when female workers plan their pregnancy contract firms can induce self selection among workers through a contract that stipulates a wage profile steeper than the spot wage profile so that self selected workers who accept the contract will not quit even though information on shifts in leisure preference is asymmetric first best efficiency can be achieved through self selection when female workers do not plan childbirths however self selection contracts are not possible when the stochastic shocks are realized there will be quits planning is pareto superior to no planning at equilibrium workers will be allocated optimally workers who have low marginal value of home time will join contract firms and make specific investments while those who have high marginal value will seek employment in the walrasian market and make no specific investments some implications of these results are also discussed in the paper

estimating the personal distribution of income with adjustment for within family variation the 1970 and 1979 current population surveys are used to compute the personal distribution of income the major innovation in this paper is that all individuals in the household are not treated identically in particular children receive a different proportion of income than do adults that proportion is estimated its variations with respect to household characteristics are discussed and a final distribution of personal income is computed that distribution has considerably fatter tails than does the one normally used

credit constraints and the labour supply of immigrant families in canada the hours of work decisions in immigrant and nonimmigrant families are compared using an intertemporal labor supply model estimated over data from the 1981 and 1991 census of canada surveys the family investment hypothesis is evaluated the hypothesis states that the immigrant family is unable to borrow in the first years after migration and that the immigrant wife responds by working longer hours so as to support family consumption and her husband s labor market adjustment the empirical evidence in general supports the hypothesis since credit constraints are found to significantly distort the labor supply decisions of recently arrived immigrant families

the macroeconomic consequences of remittances abstract this paper analyzes the dynamic absorption of remittances at the macroeconomic level contrasting two possible effects on economic activity depending on whether these accrue to hand to mouth wage earners or credit constrained entrepreneurs using an open economy dsge model with heterogeneous households we show that the effects of remittances are inherently contractionary if they accrue to the first group and expansionary when they accrue to the second group calibrating the model to the philippines using both aggregate data as well as micro evidence from the family income and expenditure survey fies we show that accounting for both binding credit constraints and the internal distribution of remittances improves the model s fit to the data welfare gains result when the distribution of remittances is skewed towards entrepreneurs

why is the labour force participation of women declining in india summary this paper explores the recent fall in female labour force participation and its socio economic determinants in india the major contribution of this paper is to explore both micro and macro level factors which determine female labour force participation rate lfpr to examine the u shape female lfpr by examining the likely income and substitution effects of the real wage increase to identify the sub sectors within manufacturing and service sectors that could create jobs for new female job aspirants and those older women displaced from agriculture in recent years and thus to understand the conditions under which female lfpr could be raised using both macro level and household survey nss data we find that the recent fillip in the process of structural transformation has pushed a large number of females out of agriculture the growing mechanization in agriculture and rising capital intensity in manufacturing sectors together have limited the opportunity for females because of their low education and skill and due to other cultural constraints we also found that the rise in real wages in rural areas and the consequent improvement in the standard of living has produced a strong negative income effect which outweighs the positive substitution effect and as a result female lfpr has declined substantially however with the massive increase in female enrollment in secondary and higher levels of education it could be expected that the substitution effect of the increase in real wage would become stronger if appropriate measures are taken by the government which are suggested

the effects of international migration on migrant source households evidence from ethiopian diversity visa lottery migrants about a million people have migrated to the us via the diversity visa dv lottery the dv was instituted by an act of the united states congress to diversify the u s population through a lottery made available to people from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the country in any given year the probability of winning the lottery is less than 1 with millions of people from around the world competing for a maximum of 55 000 immigrant visas that can be obtained through this migration channel using ethiopian dv participants which have consistently made up between 6 and 8 of all dv immigrants i study the causal effects of emigration on the well being of the migrant sending families i infer that migration contributes positively to the welfare of the source families overall migration increases consumer expenditure but has no effect on savings and business ownership of the senders the positive treatment effects do not diminish with duration of emigration migrant men contribute more to the increase in their families standard of living than their female counterparts do while expenditure on food and energy are invariant to the migrants gender the gains in terms of durable ownership access to clean water and sanitation facilities occur almost entirely in families where the emigrants are men i find that dv participants are favorably selected relative to the overall population

effects of permanent and transitory tax changes in a life cycle labor supply model with human capital i examine effects of labor income taxation in life cycle models with human capital accumulation in this case the opportunity cost of time equals the wage plus returns to work experience this has several interesting consequences first the data appear consistent with larger labor supply elasticities than prior work suggests second contrary to conventional wisdom permanent tax changes can have larger effects on current labor supply than temporary changes third human capital dampens responses of young workers to transitory tax changes fourth labor supply elasticities increase with age fifth human capital amplifies the effect of permanent tax changes in the long run

shifts over time and regional variation in women s labor force participation rates in a developing economy abstract in this study an attempt is made a to explain the decline and the inter area variation in women s activity rates in greece during the process of its economic development b to ascertain if there were any shifts in the relevant relationships over time and c to estimate women s hidden unemployment the decline in activity rates was explained with the help of the hypothesis of a u shaped impact of economic development on them among the most important findings were the considerable discouraging effect on labor force participation of unemployment and the negative impact of education women s hidden unemployment was found to be two to three times larger than reported unemployment

women s rising market opportunities and increased labor force participation i introduction this paper examines the secular increase in the labor market activity of married women in the united states from 1975 to 1991 overall the female employment rate increased from 49 in 1975 to 67 in 1991 not surprisingly the employment gains of married women the primary focus of this study largely accounted for this increase 1 in particular the employment rate of married women climbed from 44 in 1975 to 64 in 1991 analysis of the dramatic increase in female labor force participation is certainly not new for example smith and ward 1985 document the time series growth in female labor force participation from the beginning of this century to 1980 goldin s work 1977 1989 stresses that women s role in the labor market began changing well before world war ii most broad based studies of female labor force participation end their analyses around 1980 thus this research updates earlier work and provides a glimpse of what happened to women during the 1980s more importantly the present research places special emphasis on the degree of married women s attachment to the labor force conventional wisdom suggests that women particularly married women or women with children are not as productive or as attached to their jobs as their male or other female counterparts my findings combat this view and demonstrate a strengthening in married female labor force attachment over the period studied regardless of children s presence 2 this paper finds that the fraction of the married female population who worked a full year significantly increased from the 1977 1981 time period to the 1987 1991 time period this coincided with a decrease of equal magnitude in the fraction who did not work at all during the calendar year moreover although the absolute number of married women who work part time has increased in prevalence their representation among the population of working married women has declined in fact the fraction of married women who work part time has increased only among those who work part of the year a shrinking category of women even more interesting this study shows that the increase in married female employment from 1975 to 1991 stems primarily from a substantial decline in their exit rates from employment this holds for the sub population of married women with young children as well these results suggest that an increase in the duration of married women s employment spells was the most significant contributor to the increase in their employment rates over this time period not only did married women s employment increase but so did their wages during the period studied however the wages of higher and lesser skilled women diverged a story that has already become familiar for men in the case of women the higher skilled have made significant wage gains while the wages of the least skilled have stagnated with this in mind this research links women s employment increases to their changing market opportunities the findings suggest that women work more primarily because of their willingness to work more at the same wage supply shift and not because of their rising potential wage demand shift 3 in fact less than 15 of the increase in employment can be explained by rising wages regardless of skill category i interpret these results to reinforce the hypothesis of increased labor market attachment among married women the remainder of this paper is organized as follows section ii describes the current population survey cps data set used for the empirical work section iii documents the secular increase in married women s labor market participation from 1975 to 1991 in particular the employment increase for married women is disaggregated by race presence of children education group and own skill group section iv disentangles the effects of women who work more because of their rising potential wage from the effects of women who work more at the same wage because of either a possible decline in their non market opportunities or changes in behavior arising from possible changes in preferences

a blessing in disguise banking crises and institutional change weak economic growth is a contributing factor behind many banking crises in this paper we test whether banking crises cause long term institutional change aimed at improving macroeconomic performance and thus indirectly reduce the risk of future crises our dataset consists of 22 developed and 34 developing countries covering the period from 1985 to 2009 the results show that banking crises cause institutional change if gdp growth is below potential growth during the crisis approximately 40 of the change in institutional quality during the considered period occurred after a banking crisis these results hold for both developed and developing countries

the effect of part time work on wages evidence from the social security rules this article identifies the part time wage effect using hours variation caused by the social security rules we show that work hours and wages drop sharply at ages 62 and 65 we argue that the hours decline causes the wage decline resulting in a 25 wage penalty for men who cut their work week from 40 to 20 hours however we find little evidence for such an effect among women we also show that models that fail to account for the joint determination of hours and wages will understate the labor supply response to a tax change by about 26

remittances institutions and economic growth summary there is considerable debate regarding the relative contribution of international migrants remittances to sustainable economic development while officially recorded remittances to developing countries have increased over the last decade research has not come to a consensus over whether remittances have a positive or negative impact on long run growth this paper argues that contradictory findings have emerged when looking at the remittances growth link because of an omitted variable bias specifically remittances will be more likely to contribute to longer term growth in countries with higher quality political and economic policies and institutions

politics institutions and local land use regulation summary this article investigates the factors that account for second generation land use restrictions that result from comprehensive planning processes after a review of the evolution of growth management policy in the us variation among florida counties in the adoption of development impact fees and regulatory complexity is examined political system institutions were found to be related to growth management policies as predicted by distributive theories of urban politics in particular elected mayor commission government was linked to growth management these results indicate that second generation land use regulation may be driven as much by the political incentives of local actors as the preferences of the median voter

are remittances an effective mechanism for development evidence from tajikistan 1999 2007 abstract in many remittance receiving countries evidence linking remittances to household economic stability and investment is limited using three cross sectional national surveys 1999 2003 2007 we compare remittance receiving to non remittance households in tajikistan a country highly dependent on remittances exploring household perceptions of financial security wealth and entrepreneurial activity across a period of rising remittance reliance we find that households receiving remittances are not more economically stabile wealthier or entrepreneurial than non remittance households findings highlight the importance of conceptualising remittances as a process influenced by the developmental contexts within receiving countries and question previous assumptions concerning development pathways

female labour force participation in an era of organizational and technological change the supply of skilled female labour increased significantly at the beginning of the twentieth century as women assumed positions in the newly created clerical workforce evidence suggests that despite this increase in labour supply the wage paid to female clerical workers increased over the period and that the ratio of female clerical wages to male manufacturing wages was roughly constant these labour market facts can be accounted for in a dynamic general equilibrium model in which an exogenous increase in human capital induces an increase in demand for skilled clerical workers while induced technological change that favours skilled workers may account for the observed increase in female real wages explaining the stagnate relative weekly wages paid to female clerical workers requires a framework that includes organizational change l offre de travail feminin qualifie s est accrue de maniere significative au debut du xxe siecle a proportion que les femmes ont occupe des positions dans la main d uvre administrative nouvellement creee les donnees suggerent que malgre cet accroissement dans l offre de travail les salaires payes aux travailleuses administratives ont cru au cours de cette periode et que le ratio des salaires des femmes dans des t ches administratives par rapport aux salaires des hommes dans le secteur manufacturier est demeure grosso modo constant on peut expliquer ces faits stylises dans un modele dynamique d equilibre general dans lequel un accroissement exogene de capital humain suscite un accroissement de la demande de travailleurs qualifies dans l administration alors que le changement technologique induit qui favorise les travailleurs qualifies peut expliquer l accroissement du salaire reel des femmes l explication d une stagnation des salaires relatifs hebdomadaires payes aux femmes dans des t ches administratives reclame un cadre d analyse qui incorpore des changements organisationnels

on the causal nexus of remittances and poverty reduction in bangladesh the aim of this article is to investigate the causal relationship between remittances and poverty reduction in bangladesh over the period 1976 to 2010 this issue is of fundamental importance for the developing economy of bangladesh we apply newly developed methods by hacker and hatemi j 2006 2012 that are based on simulations and are robust to the violation of statistical assumptions especially when the sample size is small as is the case in this article our estimation results reveal that causality nexus of poverty and remittances is bi directional we also find that the causal impact of poverty reduction on remittance is stronger than the reverse impact this finding implies that bangladeshi policy makers can influence remittances through poverty reduction in the long run

remittances and economic growth a meta analysis abstract expatriate workers remittances represent an important source of financing for low and middle income countries no consensus however has yet emerged regarding the effect of remittances on economic growth in a quantitative survey of 538 estimates reported in 95 studies we find that approximately 40 of the studies report a positive effect 40 report no effect and 20 report a negative effect our results indicate publication bias in favor of positive effects correcting for the bias using recently developed techniques we find that the mean effect of remittances on growth is still positive but economically small nevertheless our results uncover noticeable regional differences remittances are growth enhancing in asia but not in africa studies that do not control for alternative sources of external finance such as foreign aid and foreign direct investment mismeasure the effect of remittances finally time series studies and studies ignoring endogeneity issues report systematically larger effects of remittances on growth

fiscal policy with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets i undertake a quantitative investigation into the short run effects of changes in the timing of proportional income taxes for model economies in which heterogeneous households face a borrowing constraint temporary tax changes are found to have large real effects in the benchmark model a temporary tax cut increases aggregate consumption on impact by around 29 cents for every dollar of tax revenue lost comparing the benchmark incomplete markets model to a complete markets economy income tax cuts provide a larger boost to consumption and a smaller investment stimulus when asset markets are incomplete copyright 2005 wiley blackwell

residential location housing demand and labour supply decisions of one and two earner households the case of bogota colombia this paper is concerned with the simultaneous determination of housing consumption residential location and the labour supply decisions of one earner and two earner households the model is applied to the city of bogota colombia it finds that housing consumption and location as well as labour supply decisions vary across gender and household type the paper suggests that married women who work in the labour market have the burden of a long journey to work and a probable heavy share of household responsibilities their well being is further eroded by lower wages and compensatingly long hours of work

do remittances lead to a public moral hazard in developing countries an empirical investigation abstract this article tests the hypothesis that in a context of bad governance remittance inflows strongly reduce public spending on education and health in receiving countries a phenomenon called the public moral hazard problem using a large sample of 86 developing countries over the period 1996 2007 and after factoring in the endogeneity of remittances the results suggest a negative impact of remittances on public spending on education and health when governance is bad in remittance dependent economies

demographic factors affecting constitutional decisions the case of municipal charters after decades of studying municipal charters largely by looking for patterns in the data we have a good basis for proceeding more formally with testable theories the political significance of demographic change becomes apparent by looking at its impact on political conflict in combination with the biases in social choice rules the theory of civil rights provides a framework for doing this it suggests identifying 1 the distribution of civil rights conveyed to citizens by alternative charters and 2 the bases for political conflict such as different demands for services and the unequal command of economic resources to satisfy them charters then become political tools simple statistical tests fail to refute this

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

mothers and sons preference formation and female labor force dynamics this paper argues that the growing presence of a new type of man one brought up in a family in which the mother worked has been a significant factor in the increase in female labor force participation over time we present cross sectional evidence showing that the wives of men whose mothers worked are themselves significantly more likely to work we use variation in the importance of world war ii as a shock to women s labor force participation as proxied by variation in the male draft rate across u s states to provide evidence in support of the intergenerational consequences of our propagation mechanism

business cycles and labor market search the quantitative implications of labor market search for economic fluctuations are evaluated in the context of a real business cycle model incorporating labor market search into the model is found to improve its empirical performance along several dimensions in particular hours now fluctuate substantially more than wages and the contemporaneous correlation between hours and productivity falls in addition the model replicates the observation that output growth displays positive autocorrelation at short horizons overall the empirical results suggest that the labor market search environment embodies a quantitatively important propagation mechanism copyright 1996 by american economic association

jewish mother goes to work trends in the labor force participation of women in israel 1955 1980 the labor force participation of jewish women in israel increased between 1955 and 1980 accelerating in the 1970s schooling accounts for most of the change the sharpest rise is among mothers ages 25 44 thus differentials in participation by marital status have been sharply narrowed and the life cycle in participation has been transformed the m shaped curve being replaced by an inverted u with delayed labor force entry due to prolonged schooling and more continuous participation throughout the childbearing period the reduced incompatibility between child rearing and market work is associated with part time work and increased reliance on day care services the increased employment of women is concentrated in the service industries mostly public and is accompanied by some decline in the relative wage of highly educated women successive cross section estimates corroborate this picture in general but do not support the notion that over time preschool children interfere less in women s labor supply

the volatility effect of diaspora s location remittances can transmit volatility from host to home countries for some common patterns of diaspora s geographical distribution in a migration portfolio model the overall risk of volatility of any set of diaspora location is decomposed into a contagion and a concentration risks a diaspora located in more volatile destinations induces a higher contagion risk while a diaspora located in few destination countries increases the concentration risk a series of estimations on a large panel of developing countries over 1995 2015 provide evidence for these two risks estimation of a structural model confirms that the geography of diaspora has an indirect impact on the origin country s aggregate instability through remittances

remittances and economic growth larger impacts in smaller countries this paper examines the impact of remittances on economic growth in small island developing states sids results from variants of an empirical model suggest that while on average there is at best no association between remittances and growth in developing countries there is a positive association between these variables in sids this finding holds for sids in sub saharan africa and the pacific but not for those in latin america and the caribbean relationships between remittances economic volatility and household labour supply are offered as reasons for these findings

more power to the pill the impact of contraceptive freedom on women s life cycle labor supply the release of enovid in 1960 the first birth control pill afforded u s women unprecedented freedom to plan childbearing and their careers this paper uses plausibly exogenous variation in state consent laws to evaluate the causal impact of the pill on the timing of first births and extent and intensity of women s labor force participation the results suggest that legal access to the pill before age 21 significantly reduced the likelihood of a first birth before age 22 increased the number of women in the paid labor force and raised the number of annual hours worked

remittance inflows and financial development evidence from the top recipient countries in sub saharan africa this paper utilizes a panel cointegration approach to investigate the relationship between remittances and financial development in the top remittance recipient countries in sub saharan africa our

unilateral divorce and the labor force participation rate of married women revisited two recent articles in this review by h elizabeth peters 1986 and william r johnson and jonathan skinner 1986 address an anomaly recently observed by labor economists james p smith and michael p ward 1985 have noted that real wage growth explains most of the increase in the female labor supply between 1950 and 1980 however in the period after 1970 the female labor supply growth rate rose while the real wage growth rate fell robert t michael 1985 provides a partial explanation by identifying the effect of divorce on the labor market decision of married women in that article a lagged relationship is observed between increases in the divorce rate and increases in the labor force participation rate lfpr of married women with young children during the post world war ii period since the divorce rate rose in the period after 1960 it could explain part of the increase in the growth rate of the lfpr of married women observed after 1970 the articles by peters and by johnson and skinner provide additional insights into this anomaly they recognize that the introduction of no fault grounds for divorce after 1970 may have contributed to the increase in the labor supply of married women after that date the no fault grounds for divorce created what has been called unilateral divorce the shift in female labor supply also could explain the slower real wage growth using 1979 data peters concludes that residence in a unilateral divorce state had a statistically significant positive influence on whether a married woman was in the labor force johnson and skinner use 1972 data to conclude that being in a unilateral divorce state in that year had a negative effect on the labor supply of married women unilateral divorce was introduced in the united states in 1970 when california adopted its no fault divorce statute therefore peters s data are probably more useful for testing the impact of unilateral divorce laws on married women s labor force participation in her article the lack of compensation for marriage specific investment at divorce creates an incentive for married women to increase their more general market capital during marriage by entering the labor force 2 a lack of compensation for marriage specific investment implies that women are not being compensated for being good housewives and mothers given the range of commodities produced by housewives and mothers marriage specific investment should not necessarily vary with characteristics of women such as age race or education if the impact of unilateral divorce on the lfpr of married women is due to the lack of compensation for mar regents professor of management robert 0 anderson schools of management university of new mexico albuquerque nm 87131 i thank michele blazek steve cauley dwight grant ron johnson rod lievano sam peltzman john schatzberg david weeks nelson woodard douglas young and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments the anderson schools of management provided research funding for this project ibefore 1970 most states had grounds for divorce that were based on fault such as adultery or mental cruelty between 1970 and 1985 all the american jurisdictions enacted some form of no fault divorce the no fault divorce statutes generally make either irretrievable breakdown or incompatibility the sole ground for divorce or add one of them to the fault grounds while no fault divorce is often called unilateral divorce that is not technically correct since some states require mutual consent to the no fault grounds see doris j freed and timothy b walker 1990 2while it was recognized by peters p 443 that women who invest in marriage may face lower wages in the future based on gary s becker 1981 p 15 marriage specific investment has value based on its ahilitv to increase houiehold nrodiution

changing world prices women s wages and the fertility transition sweden 1860 1910 this time series analysis examines during 1860 1910 the impact of changes in local prices of agricultural commodities on wages among men and women in sweden and the impact of changes in wages on fertility decline child mortality urbanization and improved social conditions linear ordinary least squares models are set up to determine whether demand induced increases in womens wages relative to mens are significant factors in explaining swedish total fertility rates data are obtained from 25 counties and the city of stockholm among pooled observations for six time periods during 1860 64 and 1910 14 this period is marked by a total fertility decline of 28 a marital fertility decline of 26 and a child mortality decline of 52 explanatory variables are the relative prices of main agricultural outputs employment outside of agriculture the proportion of urban population and the child mortality rate findings indicate a significant relationship between child mortality and total fertility and specific fertility rates among women aged 20 39 years a doubling of the male real wage rate was significantly associated with earlier marriage higher birth rates among women aged 15 29 years and lower birth rates among women aged 35 49 years the ratio of male wages to female wages was associated with a decline in birth rates at all ages with the exception of teenagers 66 of fertility increase was due to declines in child mortality but this increase was counterbalanced by fertility decline among older women child mortality and urbanization depressed marital fertility male wages increased the proportion married a 10 increase in the male female wage rate was associated with a 25 reduction in the total fertility rate another 25 increase in the male female wage rate was associated with a 50 reduction in child mortality it is concluded that the value of womens time had a key impact on the swedish fertility transition

women in the labor market and in the family t here are two themes in this paper the first an exercise in revisionist history argues that the conventional wisdom of an absence of any substantial labor market progress for women is mistaken instead throughout this century women s wages have been steadily rising relative to those of men a progress likely to accelerate in the next few decades our second theme contends that this labor market progress is not enough alongside their labor market advances the relative economic plight of many women is worsening the downside news is the increasing feminization of poverty a reflection of the growing instability of the american family

determinants of risk sharing through remittances abstract the sending of remittances is a decentralised decision of migrant workers nevertheless it has macroeconomic implications in providing insurance against domestic output shocks in the recipient economies a phenomenon known in literature as risk sharing income smoothing using a large sample of 86 developing countries for the period 1990 2010 we establish that remittance inflows serve as an important channel through which risk sharing takes place in the developing world the extent of income smoothing via remittances stands at around 5 on average subsequently we explore the underlying factors that explain countries ability to share risk through remittances the diversification of migrants turns out to be the leading explanation for the extent of risk sharing via remittances the more diverse the migration destinations of a country the higher the amount of risk shared in addition the size of remittance flows appears to have a strong and statistically significant impact on enhancing risk sharing we also find suggestive evidence that a higher proportion of remittances originating from farther countries facilitate more risk sharing compared to those originating from neighbouring or regional economies

savings and wealth in models with altruistic bequests during recent years much attention has been given to the role of bequests in explaining various aspects of economic behavior for example authors have studied the impact of bequests on physical wealth accumulation laurence kotlikoff and lawrence summers 1981 the interest elasticity of savings owen evans 1983 tax reform laurence seidman 1984 and the distribution of wealth alan blinder 1976a more recently economists have begun to distinguish between human and physical bequests gary becker and nigel tomes 1986 acknowledging the presence of bequest in human form is important in analyzing each of the issues mentioned above outlays on children affect the shape of the family s labor supply and expenditure profiles upon which the level of aggregate savings crucially depends if these outlays are interest sensitive substitutes for physical bequests they will also influence the interest elasticity of savings in the area of tax reform the neutrality of the consumption tax depends on the ability of the government to identify human capital bequests from general consumption raymond batina 1987 if this is not possible the portfolio choice of investment in human versus physical capital may be distorted at the margin finally the unequal transmission of wealth across generations may be explained by the lack of physical bequests and the inefficiently low levels of human bequests made by wealthconstrained households becker and tomes 1986 to distinguish clearly the behavior of constrained households from unconstrained households who make sizeable physical bequests both types of bequests must be recognized this paper introduces a model that makes explicit examination of these issues possible it extends lord s 1989 multiperiod model of life cycle savings and adult human capital investment by adding altruistically motivated human and physical bequests 2 the model is calibrated using microeconomic data on earnings time and goods expenditures on children s human capital and physical bequests we then use the model to examine the contribution of bequests to wealth accumulation and the level of savings this topic is the source of an important but yet unresolved debate between franco modigliani 1988 and kotlikoff 1988 kotlikoff maintains that u s wealth accumulation is primarily the consequence of bequests as opposed to life cycle savings for retirement one type of evidence cited by kotlikoff comes from simulation results demonstrating the failure of realistically calibrated life cycle models to generate sufficiently high saving rates and wealth income ratios alan auerbach and kotlikoff 1987 we show however that if a pure life cycle

trends in the well being of american women 1970 1995 this paper examines the trends in the well being of american women over the last 25 years a time of significant changes in the relative economic status of women and in the labor market as a whole a broad range of indicators are considered to capture changes in women s well being in the family as well as in the labor market for virtually all age and education groups substantial evidence is obtained of rising gender equality in labor market outcomes notably labor force participation wages and occupational distributions broad evidence is also found of greater gender parity within married couple families as the housework time of husbands increased relative to wives and the relative wages of wives rose compared to their husbands however parallel to the recent evidence of the declining labor market position of lower skilled men there has been a similar deterioration in the economic status of less educated women especially high school dropouts their labor force participation rates and wages have risen at a much slower pace than those of more highly educated women while their incidence of single headship has increased much more rapidly these findings for less educated women serve to underscore the widening gap between more and less skilled americans of both sexes as well as to emphasize its broad dimensions

labor supply and marital separation panel data are used to estimate the effect of marital separation on labor supply female labor supply increases substantially and male labor supply declines marginally lending support to the theory of specialization within the household the most interesting finding is that women began to increase their labor supply well before the actualsplit occurs suggesting either that shocks to labor supply change divorce probabilities or that women with a higher likelihood of divorcework more this argument is pursued by constructing and estimating a simultaneous model of labor supply and divorce risk copyright 1986 by american economic association

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

time series growth in the female labor force in this paper we investigate the reasons for the growth in the female labor force in america during the twentieth century in our research we study the longer term trends since 1900 and conduct a more intensive examination of developments after the second world war on the basis of our work we conclude that rising real wages accounted for 60 of the total growth in the female labor force half of this wage effect in expanding labor supply was the fertility reducing consequence of a higher female wage

the effect of development aid unpredictability and migrants remittances on fiscal consolidation in developing countries summary we use panel data on 74 developing countries for the period 1980 2007 to examine the effects of aid unpredictability and migrants remittances on fiscal consolidation in these countries using two definitions of fiscal adjustment and a conditional logit model to perform our analysis evidence is shown that except for the case of low income countries especially gradual fiscal retrenchment remittances increase the likelihood of fiscal consolidation be the latter gradual or rapid surprisingly we observe that aid unpredictability does not affect the adoption of fiscal consolidation measures in all the groups considered

the effects of the 1978 pregnancy discrimination act on female labor supply this article analyzes the effects of the 1978 pregnancy discrimination act pda on the labor force participation rates of married women by estimating a dynamic model of labor force participation results show that the pda increased the labor force participation rate of pregnant women by 8 2 percentage points of women with a child less than one year old by 3 4 percentage points and of women with older children by 1 5 percentage points counterfactual policy simulations show that the provision of unpaid leave will increase the labor force participation rate of women with older children by an additional 3 7 percentage points

simulating fundamental tax reform in the united states this paper uses a new large scale dynamic life cycle simulation model to compare the welfare and macroeconomic effects of transitions to five fundamental alternatives to the u s federal income tax including a proportional consumption tax and a flat tax the model incorporates intragenerational heterogeneity and a detailed specification of alternative tax systems simulation results project significant long run increases in output for some reforms for other reforms namely those that seek to insulate the poor and initial older generations from adverse welfare changes long run output gains are modest

the butz ward fertility model in the light of more recent data butz and ward b w in their 1979 article the emergence of countercyclical us fertility postulated a change in the longstanding pattern of procyclical fertility first documented by dorothy thomas in 1927 the paucity of published data on female wages led b w to approximate a time series using a number of disparate sources there has been some criticism of the b w methodology focusing mainly on the problem of autocorrelation in time series analysis and misspecification 15 years after the 1979 article a great deal of both micro and macro data exist which were not available at the time of the original b w research the author tests the robustness of the b w results by first updating them using their original sources then with data drawn from the march current population survey cps the results indicate that there are wide divergences between the original b w estimates of female wages and the cps time series in particular the cps time series shows that much of the dramatic increase in the female hourly wage in the 1960s as estimated by b w appears to have been the result of the proxy they used for average hours worked that proxy was a series of average hours of all workers in the retail trade which trends sharply downward contrary to the actual pattern for married women estimates of the b w model using the new cps series fail to work neither in terms of the signs nor significance of the variables even using the original b w data their model no longer fits in the period after about 1954 their results seem to have been driven by relationships exhibited during 1947 54 almost 10 years before the increases in female labor force participation which began in the 1960s