rational household labor supply traditionally household behavior is derived from the maximization of a unique utility function in this paper we propose an alternative approach in which the household is modeled as a two member collectivity taking pareto efficient decisions the consequences of this assumption are analyzed in a three good model in which only total consumption and each member s labor supply are observable if the agents are assumed egoistic i e they are only concerned with their own leisure and consumption it is possible to derive falsifiable conditions upon household labor supplies from both a parametric and nonparametric viewpoint if alternatively agents are altruistic restrictions obtain in the nonparametric context useful interpretation stems from the comparison with the characterization of aggregate demand for a private good economy

labor supply of husbands and wives a simultaneous equations approach labor supply functions for married men and women are formulated as a dynamic simultaneous equations system which is estimated using panel data controlling for fixed individual effects allows marginal labor supply responses to be disentangled from permanent patterns in hours worked due to assortative mating the results suggest that the labor supply of husbands and wives without pre school children is not jointly determined in the short run while families with young children exhibit strong interactions in work hours and negative cross earnings effects neither the joint utility model of family labor supply nor an ad hoc traditional family model is supported by these results the data are for the united states and concern 381 couples from the denver income maintenance experiment excerpt

rural urban differences in bonding and bridging social capital sorensen j f l rural urban differences in bonding and bridging social capital regional studies it is a common sentiment that rural areas are richer in social capital than urban areas this hypothesis is tested here by drawing on data from a danish survey 2011 2012 and by using the distinction between bonding and bridging social capital bonding social capital was found to be significantly higher in rural areas whereas bridging social capital was found to be marginally higher in urban areas the evidence thus partly refutes the hypothesis of higher social capital in rural areas among other results the evidence suggests a degree of trade off between the two forms of social capital

women s labor supply and marital choice this paper hypothesizes that value of time and consequently labor force participation can vary with circumstances specific to a marriage or a marriage market wives traits valued in the marriage market are expected to be associated with lower labor force participation whereas husbands traits valued in the marriage market are expected to be associated with lower participation rates on the part of wives evidence for these hypotheses is found on the basis of regressions of labor force participation for a sample of israeli married women inclusion of traits valued in the marriage market and marital sorting patterns increases the explanatory power of the regressions

social capital and interlocal service collaboration in us counties abstractsocial capital and interlocal service collaboration in us counties regional studies local governments are increasingly faced with public policy problems that span across their individual jurisdictional boundaries interlocal service collaboration has been suggested as a preferable alternative to address these issues this study examines the association between collective social capital especially focusing on putnam type organizations and interlocal service collaboration by investigating the interlocal revenues at the county level for the fiscal year 2002 in the united states an instrumental variables estimator to address a potential endogeneity problem of social capital was adopted the results show that social capital is positively associated with interlocal service collaboration further analysis revealed that 15 8 of counties variation in interlocal service collaboration was attributed to the state level

maize market participation among female and male headed households in ethiopia abstractthis paper examines the market participation gaps and their causes between female headed households fhhs and male headed households mhhs in ethiopia using an oaxaca blinder decomposition approach the results showed that structural coefficient effects accounted for 74 per cent 65 of the differences between fhh and mhh in the net buyer net seller maize market positions the gap between fhh and mhhs regarding quantities of maize sold was largely explained by endowment effects the results imply that closing the observed market participation gaps will require policy interventions that facilitate equal access for both fhhs and mhhs to resources and other supportive social networks

intergenerational transfers in philippine rice villages gender differences in traditional inheritance customs abstract this paper examines education land and nonland asset transfers from parents to children in five rice villages in the philippines a model with family fixed effects explains transfers better than either individual heterogeneity or observed parent and child characteristics without family fixed effects families facing different land constraints exhibit significantly different patterns of educational investment in children in a subsample with completed inheritance daughters receive less education land and total inheritance but are compensated with nonland assets parents also exhibit preferential behavior towards children of the same gender daughters of better educated mothers receive more land nonland assets and total inheritance better educated fathers give land preferentially to sons but favor daughters in education

budgetary units a weberian approach to consumption1 established consumption theory relies heavily on application of individualistic frames and market models of behavior a framework built around consumption oriented groups would facilitate progress toward a more general theory of consumption this article reintroduces and extends weber s budgetary unit concept to address this gap correcting key problems dogging the consumption literature the budgetary unit concept 1 offers a new framework for theorizing and better accounting for observed consumption patterns 2 reveals how consumption units have organizational logics preferences strengths and vulnerabilities that are consequentially distinct from market logic of production and profit and 3 focuses attention on social processes and features enabling theorization of general social patterns of consumption across diverse contexts this article highlights the explanatory power and broad applicability of weber s budgetary unit approach using the conventionally dissimilar cases of russian organized

control and ownership of assets within rural ethiopian households this article investigates how the control and devolution of productive assets are allocated among husband and wife theory predicts that bargaining power within marriage depends on the division of assets upon divorce and on control over assets during marriage using detailed household data from rural ethiopia we show that assets brought to marriage ownership of assets control within marriage and disposition upon death or divorce are only partly related productive resources are controlled by the household head disposition upon death or divorce only loosely depends on individual ownership during marriage but control is associated with larger claims upon divorce assets brought into marriage have little impact on disposition upon death but matter in case of divorce

hearts and spades paradigms of household economics abstract this paper explains why the feminist critique of inequalities within the family poses a serious challenge to conventional economic theories of the household but it also discusses those aspects of both neoclassical and marxian theory that are useful to an analysis of conflict within the family arguing that the bargaining power models being developed by some neoclassical theorist are complementary to marxist influenced structural accounts

economic efficiency and supply response of women as farm managers comparative evidence from western kenya summary this paper assessed the relative economic efficiency and output supply and input demand responses of women farmers in western kenya the results showed that women are as technically and allocatively efficient as men however neither men nor women have absolute allocative efficiency women farmers are equally responsive to price incentives in terms of output supply and input demand while education and extension contact have significant effects on overall maize supply and input demand only extension contact has significant effects among women farmers the paper discusses a number of significant results and concludes with implications for policy

adapting household behavior to agricultural technology in west bengal india wage labor fertility and child schooling determinants the emergence of the high yielding varieties hyvs as alternatives to traditional varieties tvs of wheat rice and several other crops has been a major event in many developing countries during the last 2 decades the output income and employment augmenting effects of this modern technology have been documented in many regions of the world the existing studies have focused on aggregate economic indicators at national regional and sectoral levels analyses of technological change and household well being are now needed to explore the implications of this process for intrahousehold allocation of the resources among persons and activities the critical household activity is labor force participation in the market in own enterprise or in home production by male female and child members of the household these activities change as household demand for children changes and parents become able and willing to invest more in the health nutrition schooling and training of their children and thereby improve their productivity quality analysis of these interrelated household decisions helps to clarify efficient policies for rural development and to trace the societal repercussions of these policies ii background and objective although much has been written on the green revolution technology at the national and regional levels in india few studies have dealt with the eastern region of the country the question assumes special significance for the eastern indian states because of several factors first this region produces about three fourths of the country s output of rice the major food crop but the yield per acre is less than in other regions the new technology in rice came to this region at a later date

wal mart and social capital economists increasingly recognize that markets exist within social and cultural contexts and that these contexts affect how resources are allocated to competing ends the social economics literature views individuals as both affected by and affecting the environment in which they live e g barrett 2005 durlauf and young 2001 contributors to this literature recognize that utility and happiness are relative concepts that depend on levels achieved by peers layard 2005 and acknowledge that both utility and happiness can increase with levels of social interaction kahneman and krueger 2006 further because social organization is typically characterized by multiple equilibria small changes in economic conditions can lead to dramatic changes in the behavior of and membership in social groups and networks barrett 2005 p 10 a far reaching economic change is the recent rise of big box retailing led by wal mart corp fishman 2006 while the chain s adverse impact on mom and pop type retail outlets has been well documented stone 1997 irvin and clark 2006 the second round effects of such store closings on local social capital or civic capacity have not been studied for example economic developers lament the fact that community civic capacity declines when locally owned banks go out of business or are taken over by national corporations yet systematic evaluation of this phenomenon has remained elusive because of the difficulty of measuring local social capital advances in the consistent measurement of county level social capital rupasingha goetz and freshwater 2006 now make it possible to examine rigorously the impact of

the role of land certification in reducing gaps in productivity between male and female owned farms in rural ethiopia this paper analyses the impact of a low cost land certification programme on the productivity of female headed households the hypotheses tested in the paper emphasise on the interaction between the constraints that female headed households face in terms of insecure land tenure lack of productive resources and suboptimal land market participation on the one hand and the tenure security benefits of certification on the other our findings show that land certification has a positive effect on land market participation and productivity our analysis also suggests higher marginal effects of certification on female headed households productivity compared to the male ones

determinants of the intrahousehold allocation of food in the rural philippines this study shows that the opportunity cost of time for husbands and wives can affect the intrahousehold distribution of food in a developing country equations which explain the relative allocation of calories within households were estimated for husbands wives and children with data for the rural philippines the estimating equation is derivable from both a joint household utility function and a bargaining model because the same households were included in the four survey rounds the various observations for a given individual were averaged for each variable in the estimation procedure wages were estimated using the heckman approach

nash bargained household decisions reply pierre andre chiappori s 1988 claim that the nash bargaining model is of weak empirical relevance and neither convenient nor really restrictive is incorrect nash bargained household behavior implies a rich set of empirical implications extending well beyond the pareto efficiency of intrafamily distributions by systematically accounting for the impact of opportunities outside the family on resource distribution within the family nash bargained demand theory considerably expands the scope of neoclassical demand theory such expansion can elucidate issues ranging from the impact of alimony and child support laws in developed societies to the intrafamily distribution of nutrition in less developed countries copyright 1990 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

did the tax revolt reduce school performance abstract this paper uses detailed school level data from 49 states to analyze the effects of tax revolt era property tax limitations on school services i find that limitations are associated with larger student teacher ratios and lower cost of living adjusted starting teacher salaries all else equal these results are robust to modelling the results as endogenous and using a variety of measures for whether the limitation binds at particular schools however i find no such evidence that schools subject to limitations have reduced their administrative costs furthermore i find that limitations are associated with lower student performance on mathematics science social studies and reading examinations all else equal

child labor school attendance and intrahousehold gender bias in brazil an extensive survey data set of brazilian households is used to test whether intrahousehold gender bias affects the decisions of mothers and fathers to send their sons and daughters to work and to school an intrahousehold allocation model is examined in which fathers and mothers may affect the education investment and the child labor participation of their sons and daughters differently because of differences in parental preferences or differences in how additional schooling affects son s and daughter s acquisition of human capital brazilian household survey data for 1998 are used to estimate the impact of each parent s education on the labor market participation and school attendance of their sons and daughters for labor market participation the father s education has a greater negative impact than the mother s education on the labor status of sons the father s education also has a greater impact on son s labor status than on daughter s for schooling decisions the mother s education has a greater positive impact than the father s education on daughter s school attendance but fathers have a greater positive impact on sons school attendance than on daughter s

gender differentials in farm productivity implications for household efficiency and agricultural policy abstract within many african households agricultural production is simultaneously carried out on many plots controlled by different members of the household detailed plot level agronomic data from burkina faso provides striking evidence of substantial inefficiencies in the allocation of factors of production across the plots controlled by different members of the household production function estimates imply that the value of household output could be increased by 10 15 by reallocating currently used factors of production across plots this finding contradicts standard models of agricultural households a richer model of behaviour which recognizes that the individuals who comprise a household compete as well as co operate has important implications for the structure of agricultural production and for the design of agricultural policy

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

labour force transitions among low wage married couples a simultaneous probability model interdependence in the labour force transitions of low income married couples is studied it utilizes a simultaneous probability model in which each person s job exit depends in part on the job transitions of their spouse estimates are based on data from the seattle denver income maintenance experiments the evidence appears to indicate that wives emulate the nonwork status of their husbands wives of exit prone husbands are themsleves more exit prone and less likely to enter employment evidence in favour of reverse dependence of husbands status on wives exits appears to be weak and imprecise

gender awareness in modeling structural adjustment abstract the macroeconomic models underpinning the design of structural adjustment programs are gender blind this paper discusses strategies for introducing gender analysis into these models and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the models from a gender perspective it concludes that besides being blind to gender the models are also blind to the waste of resources and impoverishment that stems from deficient aggregate demand undemocratic decision making and directly unproductive expenditures that buttress male power this waste is however likely to be diminished by moves to more egalitarian systems of gender relations entailing changes in the structure of entitlements and the social matrix in which macroeconomic processes are embedded

a cournot nash model of family decision making this paper models a two person family each family member is utility maximising yet family members are interdependent because of caring and public goods within the family the two family members interdependent utility maximisation problems are first solved using a non cooperative or cournot nash game theoretic framework the cournot nash equilibrium is then used as a threat point in a bargaining game the paper provides a rigorous derivation of the properties of household demands a full analysis of the determinants of intra household resource allocation including the effect of varying household bargaining power and consideration of policy implications

regional social capital why it matters malecki e j regional social capital why it matters regional studies social capital refers to a culture of interaction among people with productive economic outcomes social capital promotes regional learning both within a region and beyond as it reinforces openness to the ideas of others regional cultures vary in the degree to which people individually and within their organizations trust and interact with one another which is why regional outcomes vary innovation learning and entrepreneurship key processes of regional development take place largely within and among people as members of companies and territorial organizations innovative milieus industrial districts and knowledge economies are among the regions with extraordinary pools of social capital malecki e j

price policy poverty and power within rural west african households abstract this paper explores the impact of agricultural price policy on poverty in west africa a region in which prices are an important tool for raising rural household incomes a game theoretic collective model of household income generation and resource allocation is developed that incorporates three features typical of west african rural households preference heterogeneity among women and men individual resource control and power mediated bargaining over resource control in the face of changes in households economic environments to explore price effects the model is used to simulate the income impacts of large increases in cotton prices accompanying fast paced agricultural liberalisation in burkina faso in the 1980s the paper shows that where resources are controlled individually by household members rather than pooled pareto efficiency in income generation does not hold the impact of agricultural price policy on poverty is mediated by bargaining over resource control within households bo

are women overrepresented among the poor an analysis of poverty in 10 developing countries abstract this paper presents new evidence on the proportion of women in poverty in 10 developing countries it compares poverty measures for males and females and for male and female headed households and investigates the sensitivity of these measures to the use of per capita and per adult equivalent units and different definitions of the poverty line while poverty measures are higher for female headed households and for females the differences are significant in only a fifth to a third of the datasets the contribution of female headed households to aggregate poverty is less than that of females due to the low population share of the former stochastic dominance analysis reveals that differences between male and female headed households and between males and females are often insignificant except for ghana and bangladesh where females are consistently worse off these results suggest that cultural and institutional factors may be responsible for higher poverty among women in these countries our results point to the need to analyze determinants of household income and consumption using multivariate methods and to give greater attention to the processes underlying female headship

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

commercialization and the balance of women s dual roles in non income pooling west african households barked on structural adjustment programs of which agricultural liberalization has been a major component as previously depressed farmgate prices are allowed to rise increasing incentives for farm households to produce marketed crops such liberalization has the side effect of accelerating commercialization through raising households real incomes it is expected to improve rural peoples physical well being both women and men in west african farm

economics and the well being of canadian children the basic argument of this paper is that as economists we need to pay more attention to how policy affects the well being of children as individuals not just as members of families except with reference to programs explicitly designed for children e g the child tax benefit the issue of how economic policy in general affects the well being of the children themselves is relatively missing in the economics literature though children constitute nearly 25 per cent of the canadian population for example discussions of monetary policy are unlikely to consider the impact of alternative choices for children s well being debates about the merits of labour market mobility do not pay much attention to the impact of mobility on children discussions of optimal tax structures do not look at the issue from the perspective of the child 2

examining the link between teacher wages and student outcomes the importance of alternative labor market opportunities and non pecuniary variation researchers using cross sectional data have failed to produce systematic evidence that teacher salaries affect student outcomes these studies generally do not account for non pecuniary job attribu

migration and technical efficiency in cereal production evidence from burkina faso this article uses a double bootstrap procedure and survey data from burkina faso in a two stage estimation to explore ways in which continental and intercontinental migration determine efficiency in cereal production of rural households findings suggest that continental migration has a positive relation and intercontinental migration no relation with technical efficiency for continental migrant households migration has removed surplus male labor a cause for inefficiency in production intercontinental migration leads to a gender imbalance in the household which cannot be compensated for by investments in farm equipment the failure of intercontinental migration to transform cereal production from traditional to modern is attributed to an imperfect market environment

intrahousehold allocation and bargaining power evidence from chile abstract until 1999 children born out of wedlock in chile had fewer child support rights than those born to married couples i interpret a change in this law as an increase in the household bargaining power of women in cohabiting relationships using a panel of cross sectional data i find a decrease of 1 8 percentage points in the probability of working among men and an increase of 1 2 percentage points in school attendance of children under 19 these results provide evidence that contradicts the predictions of the unitary household model as well as the nash bargaining model the labor market outcomes support a model in which a reduction in men s relative bargaining power is understood as a tax on their wages

testing for homotheticity of educational production models since the 1960s the performance of public schools has typically been investigated in the context of educational production functions e g hanushek 1986 studies generally relate educational outcomes such as standardized test scores or graduation rates to quantities and qualities of inputs such as the number and quality of teachers school spending on facilities and family peer group characteristics these educational production functions have been estimated by regression methods e g hanushek 1986 sanders 1993 summers and wolfe 1977 and by nonparametric methods e g fare grosskopf and weber 1989 the studies offer interesting insights on such issues as the effect of class size and teacher quality on student performance and the relative efficiency of schools however little attention has been given to the characteristics of the educational production technology despite the fact that some important policy questions cannot be addressed without knowledge of these characteristics one such characteristic is input homotheticity for multiple educational outcomes outputs and inputs input homotheticity means loosely speaking that each isoquant is a radial expansion or contraction of the isoquant corresponding to unit outcomes outputs see primont and primont 1994 for a formal definition to illustrate suppose that schools must be downsized perhaps as a result of declining enrollments how should downsizing be implemented if the educational production technology is input homothetic then it is economically optimal to reduce input expenditures proportionally but otherwise it is not primont and primont 1994 provide a new test for input homotheticity in this paper we use data on outputs and inputs for eleven missouri school districts to illustrate how to irnplement such a test

gender and agricultural productivity implications of the farm input subsidy program in malawi alleviating gender differences in agricultural productivity is vital for poverty reduction while numerous studies suggest that gender differences in agricultural productivity are a result of female farmers having limited access to resources few studies investigate the role of agricultural interventions in alleviating the constraints to input use and subsequently the gender gap in productivity this study investigates whether there are gendered gains in agricultural productivity from participating in an input subsidy program and if these gains help reduce the gender gap using nationally representative data that is disaggregated at the plot level this study analyzes the large scale voucher based farm input subsidy program in malawi focusing on the total value of output per hectare relationships are identified using weighted estimators where the weights are constructed from propensity scores and spatial fixed effects to address the unobservable factors that may confound the relationship between program participation and productivity the findings suggest that participation in the program improves agricultural productivity for both male and female farmers but it does not provide disproportionate help to female famers to overcome gender disparities in agricultural productivity this suggests that female farmers face additional constraints to productivity apart from nonlabor input use

investigating the gender gap in agricultural productivity evidence from uganda women comprise 50 percent of the agricultural labor force in sub saharan africa but manage plots that are reportedly on average 20 to 30 percent less productive as a source of income inequality and aggregate productivity loss the country specific magnitude and drivers of this gender gap are of great interest using national data from the uganda national panel survey for 2009 10 and 2010 11 the gap before controlling for endowments was estimated to be 17 5 percent panel data methods were combined with an oaxaca decomposition to investigate the gender differences in resource endowment and return to endowment driving this gap although men have greater access to inputs input use is so low and inverse returns to plot size so strong in uganda that smaller female managed plots have a net endowment advantage of 12 percent revealing a larger unexplained gap of 29 5 percent two fifths of this unexplained gap is attributed to differential returns to the child dependency ratio and one fifth to differential returns to transport access implying that greater child care responsibilities and difficulty accessing input and output markets from areas without transport are the largest drivers of the gap smaller and less robust drivers include differential uptake of cash crops and differential uptake and return to improved seeds and pesticides

for better or worse the roles of power in models of distribution within marriage writers from diverse intellectual traditions inside and outside the social sciences criticize neoclassical economics for neglecting power their criticisms focus on economists analyses of labor markets and of distribution within families marxists and feminists are among the leading critics the classic definitions of power come from sociology and political science and not surprisingly resonate more for sociologists and political scientists than for economists instead of discussing lofty abstract definitions i stay near the ground and focus on a concrete application specifically distribution within marriage and more generally distribution between women and men economists have three alternative models of distribution within marriage gary becker s altruist model cooperative bargaining models and noncooperative bargaining models the altruist model remains the leader becker s model implies that the equilibrium distribution maximizes the utility of the altruist the husband father dictator patriarch subject to the family s resource constraint becker does not describe the altruist model in game theoretic terms but i have argued elsewhere pollak 1985 that his model can be interpreted as a twostage bargaining game in which the altruist moves first and confronts other family members with take it or leave it choices the game theoretic interpretation makes it clear that the crucial postulate of the model is not the altruism of becker s altruist but his position in the game one is tempted to say his power altruism does play a role in becker s model the altruism of the altruist the assumption that his utility is an increasing function of his wife s utility or consumption allows the model to have an equilibrium in which the wife receives more than her reservation level of utility within the past 15 years becker s altruist model has been challenged by models that explicitly view distribution within marriage as the solution to a cooperative or a noncooperative game cooperative bargaining models are exemplified by the divorcethreat models of marilyn manser and murray brown 1980 and of marjorie b mcelroy and mary j horney 1981 and by the separate spheres model of shelly lundberg and myself 1993 all of these models use the nash bargaining solution or a similar axiomatic solution concept to obtain a unique equilibrium corresponding to a threat point which specifies the payoffs the players receive if they fail to reach an agreement in divorce threat models the threat point is the utility each spouse would receive in the event of divorce thus the threat point is external to the marriage in the separate spheres model the threat point is internal to the marriage and more specifically is the equilibrium of a noncooperative game in which the quantities of household public goods are determined by voluntary contributions by the spouses noncooperative models of distribution within marriage aside from becker s altruist model are less common than cooperative models ravi kanbur and l awrence haddad 1994 analyze intrahousehold allocation using a rubinstein alternating offer game lundberg and i 1994 discuss a repeated game in which the voluntary contri department of economics university of washington seattle wa 98195 this paper is based on a longer manuscript entitled taking power seriously i am grateful to jere r behrman douglas h blair paula england nancy folbre margaret levi shelly lundberg jane j mansbridge julie a nelson mark rosenzweig dick startz and diana strassmann for helpful conversations and to judith goff for editorial assistance

trust in large organizations several authors suggest that trust is an important determinant of cooperation between strangers in a society and therefore of performance of social institutions we argue that trust should be particularly important for the performance of large organizations in a cross section of countries evidence on government performance participation in civic and professional societies importance of large firms and the performance of social institutions more generally supports this hypothesis moreover trust is lower in countries with dominant hierarchical religions which may have deterred networks of cooperation trust hold up remarkably well on a cross section of countries this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

sharing rule identification for general collective consumption models we propose a method to identify bounds i e set identi cation on the shar ing rule for a general collective household consumption model unlike the eects of distribution factors it is well known that the level of the sharing rule cannot be uniquely identi ed without strong assumptions on preferences across households of dierent compositions our new results show that though not point identi ed without these assumptions narrow bounds on the sharing rule can be obtained we get these bounds by applying revealed preference restrictions implied by the collective model to the household s continuous aggregate demand functions we obtain informative bounds even if nothing is known about whether each good is public private or assignable within the household though having such infor mation tightens the bounds we apply our method to us 1999 2009 psid data this application obtains tight sharing rule bounds that yield useful conclusions regarding the eects of income and wages on intrahousehold resource sharing and on the prevalence of individual as opposed to household level poverty

motives for private transfers over the life cycle an analytical framework and evidence for peru abstract this paper tests for the motives for private income transfers we consider two motives altruism and exchange the question of private transfer motives is important because such motivation can influence the effects of public income transfers on the distribution of income using a household survey for peru we find that transfer amounts received increase with recipient pre transfer income which contradicts a key prediction of the strong form of the altruism hypothesis but is consistent with exchange we also find that capital market imperfections are likely to be an important cause of private transfers and that social security benefits crowd out the incidence of private transfers

unequal laws and the disempowerment of women in the labor market evidence from firm level data institutions are defined as the set of rules that govern human interactions when these rules are discriminatory they may disempower segments of a population in the economic spheres of activity this study explores whether laws that discriminate against women influence their engagement in the economy the study adopts a holistic approach exploring an overall measure of unequal laws also known as legal gender disparities and relates it to several labor market outcomes for women using data for more than 60 000 firms across 104 economies the study finds that unequal laws not only discourage women s participation in the private sector workforce but also their likelihood to become top managers and owners of firms suggestive evidence indicates that access to finance and corruption are pathways by which legal gender disparities disempower women in the labor market

gender agricultural production and the theory of the household virtually all models of the household assume that the allocation of resources is pareto efficient within many african households agricultural production occurs on many plots controlled by different members of the household pareto efficiency implies that factors should be allocated efficiently across these plots i find in contrast that plots controlled by women are farmed much less intensively than similar plots within the household controlled by men the estimates imply that about 6 percent of output is lost because of inefficient factor allocation within the household the paper suggests a new approach to modeling intrahousehold allocation consistent with the empirical results

parental wealth and adult children s welfare in marriage abstract many studies find that parental resources importantly determine children s human capital schooling returns and earnings the collective household approach suggests that in addition parental resources of marital partners may importantly affect resource distributions within marriage this paper presents empirical results consistent with this framework they suggest that parental wealth continues to play roles in augmenting welfare of children into adulthood beyond provision of human capital in early life cycle stages or direct financial aid during adulthood and that actual transfers from parents to adult children do not fully measure influences of parental wealth on behaviors and welfare of adult children

who marries whom in a surging housing market abstract this paper investigates the impact of a surging housing market on marital sorting our empirical analysis shows that there is increasing assortativeness on original family background in response to housing price appreciation that is for husbands when the down payment doubles one more year of paternal schooling predicts a marriage in which the father in law s schooling is 0 057 year greater than in a scenario in which the down payment does not increase the rising assortativeness could exacerbate the already expanding inequality caused by the booming housing market in addition to the benchmark analysis we find that a divorce reform which awards assets proportionate to the shares the spouses paid for the initial down payment rather than awarding equal shares upon divorce alleviates assortativeness the evidence suggests that joint investment in housing is likely to be a significant consideration in marital sorting

women s empowerment in agriculture implications for technical efficiency in rural bangladesh although a great deal of research exists on gender and agriculture few studies investigate the implications of reduced gender disparities in households for technical efficiency in this article i compare the levels of technical efficiency achieved on plots operated by households with different levels of gender disparities using plot level data from the 2011 2012 bangladesh integrated household survey and drawing on indicators derived from the women s empowerment in agriculture index i estimate a stochastic frontier production function model which includes women s empowerment in agriculture as an exogenous determinant of technical inefficiency i find that reduced gender disparities within households measured in terms of the empowerment gap between spouses are associated with higher levels of technical efficiency this result extends to plots that women jointly manage with their spouses as well as those that women do not actively manage

social capital economic growth and regional development iyer s kitson m and toh b 2005 social capital economic growth and regional development regional studies 39 1015 1040 this paper examines the relationships between social capital economic performance and regional development and it stresses the complexity and variability across space of such relationships in contrast to the conventional macroeconomic approach of using indicators of social capital in formal growth models what is required is a more nuanced analysis that evaluates the impact of social capital by region to support this argument the paper examines social capital data from the social capital community benchmark survey 2000 which provides social capital data for more than 24 000 individuals living in 40 communities grouped into nine regions in the usa these data show remarkable diversity of social capital by region multivariate analysis is used to examine the impact of economic and social determinants of social capital and shows that education is important for nearly all ind

gender property rights and natural resources abstract attention to gender differences in property rights can improve the outcomes of natural resource management policies and projects in terms of efficiency environmental sustainability equity and empowerment of resource users although it is impossible to generalize across cultures and resources it is important to identify the nature of rights to land trees and water held by women and men and how they are acquired and transmitted from one user to another the paper particularly examines how the shift from customary tenure systems to private property in land trees and water has affected women the effect of gender differences in property on collective action and the implications for project design

why micro credit may leave women worse off non cooperative bargaining and the marriage game in south asia abstract micro credit programmes targeting women continue to grow in south asia although research suggests that wives frequently hand over loans to their husbands women may also be unable to control the income generated by micro enterprises this article presents an intra household bargaining model explaining these findings and showing how credit may leave women worse off while benefiting men this game theoretic model also shows why a woman might rationally choose to give her loan to her husband even though she does not expect to benefit and knows he may not repay finally the article identifies the conditions necessary for micro credit to benefit women

farmer education and farm efficiency in nepal the role of schooling extension services and cognitive skills this paper reports on the analysis of data from nepal the farm households surveyed were chosen so that about half were in a region exposed to the newly introduced training and visit t v extension service while the other half were exposed to less intensive traditional extension services thus in addition to providing information on the mechanisms of education s effects on efficiency this study evaluates the impact of t v extension as introduced in nepal our study finds a positive effect of education on efficiency for the three major crops but only with wheat was the effect statistically significant at standard levels there is definite evidence of a threshold level of education 6 years below which education s impact is small and above which the effect is important the effect of education on efficiency is important only for adapting to changing circumstances we found no evidence that education s effects should be attributed even in part to family background correlates or to a measure we had of ability the farmer s numeracy did affect productivity in wheat production our measures of modernity and agricultural knowledge were uncorrelated with efficiency

cost and learning efficiency drivers in australian schools a two stage network dea approach this article explore performance issues in australian public schools using a two stage dea network model which accounts simultaneously for both cost and learning efficiency levels in the cost efficiency stage different types of expenses and investments are employed to support a given number of students teachers and administrative staff in the learning efficiency stage these groups of individuals help to produce important outputs related to performance in student tests and school rankings results indicate that australian public schools are heterogeneous policy implications are also discussed

intra household resource allocation an inferential approach if household income is pooled and then allocated to maximize welfare then income under the control of mothers and fathers should have the same impact on demand with survey data on family health and nutrition in brazil the equality of parental income effects is rejected unearned income in the hands of a mother has a bigger effect on her family s health than income under the control of a father for child survival probabilities the effect is almost twenty times bigger the common preference or neoclassical model of the household is rejected if unearned income is measured with error and income is pooled then the ratio of maternal to paternal income effects should be the same equality of the ratios cannot be rejected there is also evidence for gender preference mothers prefer to devote resources to improving the nutritional status of their daughters fathers to sons

intra family distribution of paid work time this article analyses the intra family distribution of paid work time in five european countries france germany italy spain and the uk to that end we formulate a collective model which allows us to characterize the efficient labour supply decisions of each spouse this two equation model is then simultaneously estimated by using national panel data drawn from the european community household panel echp 1994 2001 empirical results clearly show that in all sample countries the labour supply of wives is affected by own wages household and own nonlabour incomes and the number of children whereas evidence for husbands differs across countries

frontier production functions and technical efficiency a survey of empirical applications in agricultural economics abstract the modelling and estimation of frontier production functions has been an important area of econometric research during the last two decades forsund lovell and schmidt 1980 and schmidt 1986 present reviews of the concepts and models involved and cite some of the empirical applications which had appeared to their respective times of publication this paper seeks to update the econometric modelling of frontier production functions associated with the estimation of technical efficiency of individual firms a survey of empirical applications in agricultural economics is an important part of the paper

the joint determination of household membership and market work the case of young men except in special cases market work and household membership are jointly chosen a nash bargaining model of family behavior is used to specify stochastic structural relationships two indirect utility functions and a market and a reservation wage function that jointly determine work consumption and household membership the maximum likelihood estimates of the implied trinomial probit model differ sharply from those obtained when either market work or household membership is taken as exogenous this application to white male youths from the national longitudinal surveys shows the insurance function of families parents insure their sons against poor market opportunities

the empirical content of nash bargained household behavior in households whose allocation decisions can be represented as nash bargained household decisions extrahousehold environmental parameters eeps serve as pure shifters of the threat points the comparative statics of changes in demands due to changes in these eeps are given these are incorporated into a comprehensive statement of the empirical content of nash bargained household behavior including a nash generalization of barten s 1966 fundamental matrix equation of the theory of consumer demand estimation and data requirements are discussed along with nested testing of the following structure the neoclassical model is nested in the nash bargained model which in turn is nested in an unrestricted model of household demands emphasized throughout is the enriched menu of explanatory variables for demand analysis provided by the nash model as well as the model s ability to jointly analyze i household formation and ii intrahousehold allocation decisions

testing the neoclassical model of family labor supply and fertility the mcelroy horney nash bargaining model of family demand behavior relaxes the restriction that nonearned income of husband and wife has the identical effect on family labor supply and commodity demands this restriction of the neoclassical model offamily behavior is tested for the determination of husband and wife labor supply andfertility based on the 1981 socioeconomic survey of thailand the neoclassical restriction is rejected for female labor supply andfertility another unexplored limitation offamily demand studies due to the sample self selection of intact marriages is empirically treated through alternative estimation strategies in this case a more sharply focused theory of marital behavior is needed to identify family demand models

household labour supply in britain and denmark some interpretations using a model of pareto optimal behaviour this paper analyses the labour supply behaviour of households in denmark and britain it employs models in which the preferences of individuals within the household are explicitly represented the households are then assumed to decide on their labour supply in a pareto optimal fashion describing the structure of the household decision in this way allows preliminary results to be obtained on the internal weighting of utilities within the household

why governments should invest more to educate girls abstract women and men often receive the same percentage increase in their wage rates with advances in schooling because these returns decline with more schooling the marginal returns for women will tend to exceed those for men especially in countries where women are much less educated the health and schooling of children are more closely related to their mother s education than father s more educated women work more hours in the market labor force broadening the tax base and thereby potentially reducing tax distortions these three conditions it is argued justify the disproportionate allocation of public expenditures toward women s education

social capital and the dynamics of trust in government it is well understood that trust in government responds to the performance of the president congress and the economy despite improved government performance however trust has never returned to the levels witnessed in the 1950s and 1960s social capital may be the force that has kept trust low if so we need to assess the relative contributions of both government performance and social capital at the macro level using macrolevel data the analysis here is designed to capture the variation over time in both social capital and government performance and let them compete to explain the macro variation in trust the empirical results demonstrate that both government performance and social capital matter but that social capital appears to be the force which accounts for the decline in trust over the last 40 years

productivity of men and women and the sexual division of labor in peasant agriculture of the peruvian sierra abstract this paper estimates the productivity of men and women in the peasant agriculture of the peruvian sierra using recent household survey data a sexual division of labor on the farm implies that male and female labor are not perfectly substitutable evidence is found for female specialization on livestock production a translog production function reveals that the use of animal traction and land affect the marginal productivity of male and female labor differently suggesting that the two types of labor cannot be aggregated overall adult male labor is found to contribute more to farm output at the margin than adult female labor though the extent of the difference is sensitive to how farm output and the labor inputs are measured

explaining gender differentials in agricultural production in nigeria this paper uses data from the general household survey panel 2010 11 to analyze differences in agricultural productivity across male and female plot managers in nigeria the analysis utilizes the oaxaca blinder decomposition method which allows for decomposing the unconditional gender gap into i the portion caused by observable differences in the factors of production endowment effect and ii the unexplained portion caused by differences in returns to the same observed factors of production structural effect the analysis is conducted separately for the north and south regions excluding the west of the country the findings show that in the north women produce 28 percent less than men after controlling for observed factors of production while there are no significant gender differences in the south in the decomposition results the structural effect in the north is larger than the endowment at the mean although women in the north have access to less productive resources than men the results indicate that even if given the same level of inputs significant differences still emerge however for the south the decomposition results show that the endowment effect is more important than the structural effect access to resources explains most of the gender gap in the south and if women are given the same level of inputs as men the gap will be minimal the difference in the results for the north and south suggests that policy should vary by region

poverty and productivity in female headed households in zimbabwe abstract a household survey conducted in rural zimbabwe in 2001 is used to compare the position of de facto and de jure female headed households to those with a male head these households are characterised by different forms of poverty that impinge on their ability to improve agricultural productivity however once inputs are accounted for it is only for growing cotton that female headed households productivity is lower than that found for male headed households general poverty alleviation policies will benefit the female headed household but specific interventions via extension services and access to marketing consortia are also indicated

the economics of polygyny in sub saharan africa female productivity and the demand for wives in cote d ivoire polygyny is still practiced throughout much of sub saharan africa with important social consequences this paper makes the first attempt to link african polygyny directly to the productivity of women in agriculture using micro data i develop a structural model of the demand for wives that disentangles wealth and substitution effects using a large household survey from cote d ivoire i find that marked geographic diversity in cropping patterns leads to regional variation in female labor productivity i also find that conditional on wealth men do have more wives when women are more productive that is cheaper this substitution effect may explain why polygyny declined in rural areas of cote d ivoire during agricultural development

how does the choice of the gender indicator affect the analysis of gender differences in agricultural productivity evidence from uganda summary we use ols and decomposition techniques to investigate gender differences in agricultural productivity in uganda using nationally representative surveys from years 2009 2012 the analysis applies different gender dummies female head of household female plot holder and female plot manager to investigate how the variable of choice affects the calculation of the gender gap our analysis obtains different results depending on the gender variable of choice the study finds that regardless of the variable of choice the gender gap in agricultural productivity decreases or disappears when factors of production and crop choice are controlled for the conditional gender gap is about 10 and significant when using female plot manager as the gender variable while we find no conditional gender gap when using the other gender variables the use of time fixed effects and decomposition contributes evidence that the typically available gender variables are insufficient for identifying how gender and decision making of different household members play a role in productivity this finding is problematic for targeting effective interventions to increase agricultural productivity and reduce gender inequalities in agriculture finally we find that the older status of female heads holders and manager of plots child dependency ratio and limited access to adult male labor are factors decreasing productivity in female plots in uganda

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

altruism cooperation and efficiency agricultural production in polygynous households abstractaltruism toward others can inhibit cooperation by increasing the utility players expect to receive in a noncooperative equilibrium to test this we examine agricultural productivity in west african polygynous households we find cooperation as evidenced by more efficient production is greater among co wives than among husbands and wives using a game theoretic model we show that this outcome can arise because co wives are less altruistic toward each other than toward their husbands we present a variety of robustness checks which suggest results are not driven by selection into polygyny greater propensity for cooperation among women or household heads enforcing others cooperative agreements

market opportunities genetic endowments and intrafamily resource distribution child survival in rural india the authors examine how intrafamily resource allocations respond to changes in economic conditions and to genetic differences in children by estimating the determinants of variations in the sex specific survival differentials of rural indian children based on standard census and household survey data they explore in particular the hypothesis that such differences are related to the relative returns to survival with households selectively allocating resources to children in response to variation in sex differences in their expected earnings opportunities as adults data are from the 1961 census and a 1971 household survey excerpt

catholic schools dropout rates and educational attainment this paper examines the effect of catholic schooling on high school dropout rates and educational attainment particular attention is given to the effect of selection into the catholic school sector after adjusting for self selection we find that sophomores in the catholic schools are still substantially more likely to graduate with their class it is also shown that seniors in the catholic schools are not more likely to acquire more schooling than other seniors if selection is taken into account

decomposition of gender differentials in agricultural productivity in ethiopia this paper employs decomposition methods to analyze differences in agricultural productivity between male and female land managers in ethiopia it employs data from the 2011 2012 ethiopian rural socioeconomic survey an overall 23 4 percent gender differential in agricultural productivity is estimated at the mean in favor of male land managers of which 10 1 percentage points are explained by differences in land manager characteristics land attributes and unequal access to resources the endowment effect the remaining 13 4 percentage points are explained by unequal returns to productive components but cannot be easily tied to specific covariates these results are mainly driven by non married female managers mainly single and divorced married female managers do not display such disadvantages further analysis along the productivity distribution reveals that gender differentials are more pronounced at mid levels of productivity and that the share of the gender gap explained by the endowment effect declines as productivity increases detailed decomposition of estimates at selected points of the agricultural productivity distribution provides valuable information for policy intervention purposes

family policy with non cooperative families we consider a non cooperative model of a family s time allocation between market work and providing a home produced family public good such as child care or care for the elderly the model predicts underprovision of the public good because of crowding out this does not necessarily warrant public provision in contrast to other approaches in family economics we find that attempts to redistribute between spouses may alter the final distribution within the marriage and that such a policy may be pareto improving we also find that some degree of progressivity of the income tax can be welfare improving

expenditures and student achievement in illinois abstract this study examines educational outcomes in illinois for the 1989 1990 school year several measures of educational attainment are analyzed including act scores high school graduation rates and the percentage in a high school planning to attend college the most important results are that an increase in average teacher s salary increases act scores and the percentage college bound and an increase in the pupil teacher ratio reduces the graduation rate and the percentage college bound