the gender gap fertility and growth changes in fertility have long been recognized as important correlates of economic growth with the relationship between the level of fertility and the level of income per capita being one of the strongest observable correlations in cross country data this paper examines the linkages between fertility and growth theory the structure of the model is presented in sections on production couples decision making system dynamics and steady state equilibria the first component of the model is that increases in capital per worker raise womens relative wages since capital is more complementary to womens labor input than to mens the second component is that increasing womens relative wages reduces fertility by raising the cost of children more than household income finally lower fertility raises the level of capital per worker a positive feedback loop generates demographic transition a rapid decline in fertility accompanied by accelerated output growth

fungibility and the impact of development assistance evidence from vietnam s health sector how can the impact of aid be estimated in the presence of fungibility and how far does fungibility reduce its benefits these questions are analyzed in a context where a donor wants to target its efforts on a specific sector and specific geographic areas a traditional differences in differences method comparing the change in outcomes between the target and nontarget areas before and after the project risks misestimating the project s benefits the paper develops an alternative estimation method in which intersectoral fungibility reduces project benefits insofar as government spending has a smaller impact in the sector to which the funds leak than in the target sector while intrasectoral fungibility reduces benefits insofar as the donor is able to leverage productivity increases in government spending in the target areas the methods are applied to two contemporaneous world bank health projects that set out to target assistance on approximately one half of vietnam s provinces aid is not apparently fungible between vietnam s health sector and other sectors but is fungible across provinces within the health sector differences in differences yield an insignificant impact on infant mortality while the use of the new method yields a statistically significant impact of around 4 per 1000 live births the results however are ambiguous on the costs associated with intrasectoral fungibility

the fungibility of health aid reconsidered abstractthis article draws further attention to the importance of taking into account off budget aid when estimating the degree of foreign aid fungibility it does so by re evaluating the results of a recent influential paper which concluded that health aid is fully fungible in the long run allowing for the presence of off budget aid indicates that the degree of fungibility of health aid is much more uncertain than at first blush appears under plausible assumptions about the role of off budget aid the conclusion of full fungibility is overturned and at most only a limited degree of fungibility is found

gender differences in education in a dynamic household bargaining model in this paper we explore the issue of gender differences in education in the context of a two sex overlapping generations model where men and women of each generation bargain over consumpt ion number of children and investment in education of their children conditional on gender and parents are altruistic toward their children we show that the difference in the education levels of boys and girls implied by our model is smaller than the one that would result from a pure investment model also we show that as long as the time cost associated with bearing children is positive women bear the entire time cost associated with child rearing we use our model to estimate the cost to a woman of having a child the estimate we obtain using cross country data suggests that such cost amounts to about 5 of the working lifetime of a woman

how construals of money versus time impact consumer charitable giving while past research has suggested that consumers have fundamentally different responses to thinking about money versus time the current work clarifies an important nuance in terms of how consumers construe these two resources we demonstrate that in the domain of charitable giving money is construed relatively more concretely whereas time is construed relatively more abstractly this difference in the construal of these two resources has implications for how appeals for charitable contributions or money versus time should be framed when the construal level at which the consumer considers the cause is aligned misaligned with the construal level of the resource being requested contribution intentions and behaviors increase decrease in addition the moderating role of resource abundance is examined in particular when money is considered abundant vs nonabundant consumers no longer exhibit more concrete thoughts in response to money compared to time finally when the donation request makes consumers think of money in a more abundant manner monetary donations can be successfully motivated with a more abstract call for charitable support the theoretical and practical implications for marketers and charitable organizations are discussed

budget support versus project aid a theoretical appraisal should donors interested in the effectiveness of developmental programmes rely on conditional budget support or on project aid to answer this question we present a model in which only a subset of developmental expenditures can be subject to conditionality we show that budget support is preferable to project aid when the preferences of donors and recipients are aligned and when assistance is small relative to the recipients own resources furthermore when donors cannot observe the recipient s type they may impose higher levels of conditionality to separate committed governments from uncommitted ones

human capital true love and gender roles is sex destiny abstract we assume optimal specialization in the nuclear family involves one partner doing homework and the other wagework basic human capital for one or the other is imparted to individuals through early childhood training mates are chosen on the basis of noneconomic criteria true love because love strikes randomly after basic human capital is acquired a coordination problem arises in choosing complementary specializations even with no discrimination there exist equilibria characterized by gender roles perfect correlation between sex and family roles there may also exist other equilibria in which the correlation between sex and family roles is imperfect and individuals are trained by aptitude we rank the equilibria when they coexist and demonstrate that affirmative action policies can increase average welfare by eliminating some equilibria the analysis is conducted in a framework which characterizes individuals by training by aptitude and by family role in a 2 2 2 model in this framework we formalize the equality of the sexes as well as the relative importance of nature versus nurture and various types of training

existence uniqueness and stability of equilibrium in an overlapping generations model with productive capital abstract this paper analyzes the existence uniqueness and stability of a steady state equilibrium in an overlapping generations model with productive capital it is shown that for any feasible set of well behaved preferences there exists a production function that satisfies the inada conditions under which the economy experiences global contraction and the steady state equilibrium is characterized by the absence of production and consumption the study establishes a strengthened inada condition which is necessary to preclude global contraction and sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique and globally stable non trivial steady state equilibrium

power couples changes in the locational choice of the college educated 1940 1990 college educated couples are increasingly located in large metropolitan areas these areas were home to 32 percent of all college educated couples in 1940 39 percent in 1970 and 50 percent in 1990 we investigate whether this trend can be explained by increasing urbanization of the college educated or the growth of dual career households and the resulting severity of the colocation problem we argue that the latter explanation is the primary one smaller cities may therefore experience reduced inflows of human capital relative to the past and thus become poorer

will you marry me a perspective on the gender gap abstract this paper develops a general equilibrium model of the gender wage gap the difference in earnings is a consequence of a demographic regularity that men tend to marry younger women which may limit women s labor mobility and hence their average earnings however couples are always free not to marry and do so only if it is in each s self interest the intrafamily allocation of resources is determined via non cooperative bargaining this leads to interesting interactions between the game played by husband and wife on the one hand and the competitive environment in which they are immersed on the other the predictions resulting from this model s interplay between locational choice and family bargaining are consistent with the observation that the increasing stress put by women on their careers over the past 30 years has been contemporaneous with reductions in both marriage rates and the gender gap the model provides insight into the consequences of this for the relative welfare of men and women as well as exploring its wider economic implications

is foreign aid fungible evidence from the education and health sectors this paper adopts a new approach to the issue of foreign aid fungibility in contrast to most existing empirical studies panel data are employed that contain information on the specific purposes for which aid is given this allows linking aid that is provided for education and health purposes to recipient public spending in these sectors in addition aid flows that are recorded on a recipient s budget are distinguished from those that are not recorded on budget and the previous failure to differentiate between on and off budget aid is shown to produce biased estimates of fungibility sector program aid is the measure of on budget aid whereas technical cooperation serves as a proxy for off budget aid the appropriate treatment of off budget aid leads to lower fungibility estimates than those reported in many previous studies specifically in both sectors and across a range of specifications technical cooperation which is the largest component of total education and health aid leads to at most a small displacement of recipient public expenditures

aid absorption and spending in africa a panel cointegration approach abstract this article focuses on the macroeconomic management of large inflows of foreign aid it investigates the extent to which african countries have coordinated fiscal and macroeconomic responses to aid surges in practice we construct a panel dataset to assess the level of aid absorption and spending this article departs from the recent empirical literature by utilising better measures for aid inflows and by employing cointegration analysis the empirical short run results indicate that on average africa s low income countries have absorbed two thirds of grant aid receipts this suggests that most of the foreign exchange provided by the aid inflows has been used to finance imports the other third has been used to build up international reserves perhaps to protect economies from future external shocks in the long run absorption increases but remains below its maximum moreover we also show that aid resources have been fully spent especially in support of public investment there is on

male female wage differentials and policy responses without implicating them for any of the contents of the paper i am grateful to the following for helpful discussions or comments andrea beller university of illinois david bloom harvard and columnbia glen cain university of wisconsin ron ehrenberg cornell victor fuchs stanford bob gregory australian national university jonathan leonard university of california berkeley roberta robb brock university and paul weiler harvard financial support of the humanities and social sciences committee of the research board of the universitu of toronto is eratefullu acknowlede ed

on the age at marriage theory and evidence from jews and moslems in israel abstract in this paper we extend the becker keeley and bergstrom bagnoli theories of the optimal age at marriage and derive systematic cross cultural differences in the marriage pattern we then examine the empirical relevance of the hypotheses for jewish and moslem population groups in israel the empirical analysis is more detailed than previous studies by for example splitting the sample according to the wife s labor market status the evidence supports the becker keeley prediction about the effects of the spouses wage rates the bergstrom bagnoli prediction about the effect of the husband s wage rate in a traditional society and the additional hypotheses we propose

the fungibility of health aid reconsidering the reconsidered abstractlu et al found that health aid displaces domestically raised government health expenditure which renders health aid at least partially fungible these findings are questioned in the fungibility of health aid reconsidered van de sijpe s emphasis on disaggregating on and off budget aid is a valid contribution although his empirical conclusions are overstated we re evaluate the data he criticises and find they sufficiently capture on budget aid to re measure health aid fungibility we update the lu et al data adding 23 countries and four years of data despite the confidence we have in these data we employ two estimation specifications each of which addresses the measurement error discussed by van de sijpe the extended data and alternative methods show that development assistance for health channelled to governments remains significantly fungible

differntial fecundity markets and gender roles women are fecund for a shorter period of their lives than men this paper investigates how differential fecundity interacts with marriage labor and financial markets to affect gender roles the main findings of the paper are as follows i fecund women are relatively scarce men will behave differently than women in response to this scarcity in the most fundamental way demand and supply conditions in the marriage market affect gender roles ii differential fecundity does not have any market invariant gender effect gender roles depend on the way in which marriage labor and financial markets interact iii gender differences in the labor market can occur without corresponding differences in labor market opportunities productivities in child rearing or social norms iv with uncertainty in human capital accumulation and no insurance against this uncertainty the model s predictions are consistent with observed gender roles

male female wage differentials in job ladders much of the male female wage differential exists because men and women are assigned to different jobs within narrow job categories there is no male female differential only a tortured taste theory of discrimination can reconcile these facts we argue that differential movement along job ladders entails comparative advantage so the ability standard for promotion is higher for women this implies that more able women will be passed over in favor of less able men women assumed to have the same ability distribution as men earn less the differential reflects females lower promotion probability not within job discrimination

aid illusion and public sector behaviour conventional treatments of fungibility such as in assessing aid are concerned with evidence that aid recipients do not increase sufficiently that is by the amount of aid expenditure on specific areas favoured by donors in other words fungibility implies that recipients divert aid to expenditure on areas donors do not wish to fund however there is evidence that aggregate expenditure and even spending on donor supported areas rises by more than the value of the aid inflow this contribution using insights from the public choice research on fiscal illusion provides a range of theoretical scenarios to explain this outcome included are scenarios where even where all the features of fungibility are present expenditure on areas favoured by the donor can increase by more than the value of the aid inflow the study concludes by suggesting new directions for research on aid policy and the impact of aid on the public sector in developing countries

on tax efforts and colonial heritage in africa abstract one commonly observed phenomena about taxation in africa are regional differences and the fact that southern african countries have higher levels of shares of taxation in gdp this article argues that the major source of differences in tax effort is the colonial histories of various countries using standard measures of tax effort in a panel data framework and dividing colonial africa along forms of incorporation into the colonial system it shows that african countries and others with similar colonial histories have higher levels of tax effort however the difference disappears when we control for the colonial factor these results hold under different model specifications

gender discrimination without gender difference theory and policy responses abstract this paper provides an explanation for the continued existence of gender discrimination in competitive labour markets and analyzes the effects of policies designed to alleviate it unlike previous explanations of gender discrimination this theory arises from the interaction between women and men within the household and does not rely on inherent asymmetries between women and men even though discrimination is seen to be related to factors which can be thought external to the labour market such as higher job turnover and labour market exit rates for women policies which target only labour market outcomes and do not deal with external factors can both lead to reduced discrimination and also alter external factors thereby reducing discrimination further however policies aimed at external factors will in general be less effective in reducing discrimination unless combined with more direct policies

aid government expenditure and aggregate welfare summary this paper tests the hypothesis that aid contributes to increasing aggregate welfare measured by infant mortality and the human development index hdi in recipient countries estimation is based on data for 104 countries over the period 1980 2000 and for subsamples of low income and middle income countries fixed effect estimates provide robust evidence that aid is associated with improved values of the welfare indicators and this effect appears to be greater in low income countries aid appears to increase welfare either directly or through the effect on growth and there is no evidence that aid operates through public spending

aid and government fiscal behavior assessing recent evidence this paper reviews evidence published in the last 10 years that has added to our understanding of the effects of aid on government spending and tax effort in recipient countries with a discussion of when general budget support is a fiscally efficient aid modality three generalizations are permitted by the evidence aid finances government spending the extent to which aid is fungible is over stated and even where it is fungible this does not appear to make the aid less effective and there is no systematic effect of aid on tax effort beyond these conclusions effects are country specific

consumption smoothing migration and marriage evidence from rural india a significant proportion of migration in low income countries particularly in rural areas is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage we seek to explain these mobility patterns by examining marital arrangements among indian households in particular we hypothesize that the marriage of daughters to locationally distant dispersed yet kinship related households is a manifestation of implicit interhousehold contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks analysis of longitudinal south indian village data lends support to the hypothesis marriage cum migration contributes significantly to a reduction in the variability of household food consumption farm households afflicted with more variable profits tend to engage in longer distance marriage cum migration the hypothesized and observed marriage cum migration patterns are in dissonance with standard models of marriage or migration that are concerned primarily with search costs and static income gains

a coordination model of the sexual division of labor abstract the difference of natural talents in different men is in reality much less than we are aware of and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions when grown up to maturity is not upon occasions so much the cause as the effect of the division of labor adam smith 1976 the wealth of nations the sexual division of labor is a ubiquitous feature of human society this paper presents a model demonstrating that the sexual division of labor can be explained by the incentive to coordinate human capital investments among males and females seeking to enter the marriage market and make compatible matches the model assumes no inherent biological differences between men and women in productive abilities but rather demonstrates that differences between men and women may be a consequence of economic incentives in an economy based on household production the model also provides a possible explanation for how ideological beliefs about gender differences may develop and persist