the well being of the elderly and wage arrears in russia about one third of households with elderly were not paid their wages during the mid 1990s in russia applying matching estimations to a nationally representative survey the study shows that wage arrears had detrimental effects on the well being of the elderly in these families salaries in households with wage arrears dropped by almost two thirds income fell by more than one third and poverty doubled behavioral responses were only partly effective the net revenue loss amounted to five sixths of the wage shock for men and nine tenths of the wage shock for women the elderly cut back on food expenses by reducing food purchases and adjusting their diet towards cheaper calories economising on expenses equal to around one quarter of the wage reduction caloric and protein intakes dropped although less than income and the nutritional content of food consumption with regard to vitamins and minerals deteriorated wage arrears worsened male health more than female health even though the decline in income was comparable functional limitations rose by 8 for men and 3 for women and self rated health declined by 2 5 for men and 0 5 for women old age men with arrears were almost twice as likely to die before the next survey round and functional limitations of surviving men rose by more than 10 by contrast there was no impact on the next round s health status of old age women a rich data set is used to discount alternative explanations including feedback from health to income other economic factors health service access health behavior and environmental conditions jel i12 i30 j14 j30

rural urban poverty differences in transition countries summary this paper uses new poverty data based on household level surveys to analyze changes in rural poverty and rural urban poverty differences in 23 transition countries of central and eastern europe and the former soviet union the paper presents a series of hypotheses to explain differences across countries and changes over time

the effect of annuity insurance on savings and inequality this paper examines the amount of precautionary savings and wealth inequality arising from life span uncertainty by comparing saving behavior under perfect insurance arrangements with that arising under imperfect arrangements namely when longevity risk can be pooled only with members of one s own family the central findings of the paper are that 1 perfecting insurance arrangements can sharply lower savings in both intergenerationally altruistic and life cycle economies and that 2 in altruistic economies perfecting annuity insurance can greatly influence inequality indeed in the long run in our model switching from imperfect family insurance to perfect insurance can mean the difference between absolute inequality and absolute equality

the us retail demand for fish products an application of the almost ideal demand system the main objective is to address the limitations of past us fish demand research through the development of a variation of the almost ideal demand system model for disaggregate fish products at the retail level price and expenditure elasticities as well as elasticities of substitution between fish products and other protein commodities determined from this work may be used in the context of fisheries management and market development and promotion results indicate that with the exception of shellfish demand for the various fish products is relatively inelastic cross price elasticities are generally moderate while expenditure elasticities are large and positive for fresh fish and shellfish demographic effects especially geographical division season race occupation age sex household composition and price income interaction as a proxy for quality are highly significant variables

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

alcohol consumption and human capital a retrospective study of the literature grossman proposed an individual s health can be viewed as one aspect of their human capital following this line of thought a number of recent papers have reported a positive impact of alcohol consumption on earnings the rationale for the existence of such a relationship is the positive impact of alcohol on physical and mental health we conduct a meta analysis to determine whether such factors as the estimation technique the presence of ex drinkers in the sample possible sample selection bias and publication bias may all contribute to these findings an additional suggestion for the positive relationship between alcohol and wages is the presence of a common set of personality traits that determines drinking behaviour and also leads to higher earnings we examine this relationship by reviewing the literature that investigates if the personality influencing aspects of alcohol consumption influences measures of human capital we also survey the significant body of research that has examined how alcohol consumption has been found to influence educational outcomes and the work force participation of problem drinkers

demand analysis for fish in indonesia the purpose of this study was to determine an aggregate demand function and the factors influencing the demand for fish in indonesia during the period 1967 88 using a box cox transformation methodology the double log model was found to be appropriate for explaining the demand for fish factors influencing demand were own price price of eggs and per capita income results of static analysis showed an own price of 0 102 a cross price elasticity for eggs of 0 271 and an income elasticity of 0 506 a dynamic analysis using a houthakker taylor model indicated that fish consumption depended on psychological food buying habits of consumers short run and long run elasticities resulting from a partial adjustment model implied that per capita consumption of fish is growing at a slow rate

who pays the bar tab beer consumption and economic growth in the united states what drug provides americans with the greatest pleasure and the greatest pain the answer hands down is alcohol the pain comes not only from drunk driving and lost lives but also addiction family strife crime violence poor health and squandered human potential young and old drinkers and abstainers alike all are affected every american is paying for alcohol abuse phillip j cook paying the tab the costs and benefits of alcohol control 2007 i introduction alcohol consumption has severe social and economic consequences lost productivity disability early death crime family neglect personality deterioration to name a few cook 2007 at the individual level the effects of alcohol consumption have been explored considerably by researchers in different fields including economics medicine public health criminology and sociology however few studies have examined the economic impact of alcohol use at the aggregate level probably due to the research deficiency regarding its aggregate effects some disagreement exists about the overall net benefits of alcohol use on the one hand scholars who have done extensive research on individual outcomes claim that the overall costs of alcohol use outweigh its benefits for example cook and moore 2002 120 state in their review article the production and sale of alcoholic beverages account for a small share of national product in the united states and in other advanced economies however the deleterious effects of alcohol consumption on health and safety constitute a substantial economic burden reducing our overall standard of living on the other hand organizations formed by the producers and distributors of alcoholic beverages claim that the alcoholic beverage industry contributes significantly to the u s economy through job creation and tax revenues according to beer serves america 2011 an organization sponsored by the beer institute and the national beer wholesalers association nbwa directly and indirectly the beer industry employs approximately 1 8 million americans paying them over 71 billion in wages and benefits the industry pays over 44 billion in business personal and consumption taxes including 5 3 billion in excise taxes and 5 8 billion in sales gross receipts and other taxes 1 similarly the distilled spirits council of the united states discus 1999 the national trade association representing america s leading distillers and about 70 of all distilled spirits brands sold in the united states states that the alcohol beverage industry is a major contributor to the u s economy through job creation wages and taxes 2 room and jernigan 2000 point out that the benefits reaped from the alcohol industry in terms of economic development should be weighed against the negative impacts on economic development in addition to public health they go on to say that alcohol s contribution to total production can vary tremendously from country to country generating 3 of total manufacturing value added in argentina or the netherlands but as little as 0 07 in iran aside from the aforementioned contributions of the alcohol industry to the economy often cited by the industry itself supply side efforts also play a role in the consumption of alcohol this can be done through influencing government regulation of the market for alcohol and selling cheap alcohol in bulk which has a devastating public health impact stockwell and crosbie 2001 indeed the economic burden of excessive alcohol consumption has been found to be substantial recently estimated at 223 5 billion bouchery et al 2011 although a few studies have examined the impact of macroeconomic conditions on drinking prevalence and patterns such as those by ruhm and black 2002 and ruhm 1995 we are not aware of any studies exploring the impact of alcohol consumption on economic growth

the morning after alcohol misuse and employment problems using a rich recent and nationally representative longitudinal survey specifically designed to examine alcohol use and associated problems we investigate the effects of alcohol misuse on a series of understudied and perhaps less common employment problems such problems include being fired or laid off from a job sustained unemployment and conflicts with a supervisor and or co worker after controlling for time invariant omitted variables via fixed effects estimation we find evidence that three measures of alcohol misuse are significantly related to employment problems the results offer new information on the potential adverse labour market effects of alcohol misuse and shed light on potential mechanisms through which alcohol misuse may impact intensive labour supply and or wages

capital accumulation and the characteristics of private intergenerational transfers many recent studies of the process of family accumulation in general and household response to social security in particular have revealed growing dissatisfaction with the life cycle theory of saving see for example barro 1978 kotlikoff 1979 darby 1979 kotlikoff and summers 1981 kurz 1981 blinder gordon and wise 1981 david and menchik 1982 leimer and lesnoy 1982 an alternative to the life cycle hypothesis is expressed by defining the preference of each family over its own consumption as well as the welfare of the generations that follow thus each family consists of an infinite chain of generations who have interdependent preferences and for this reason we shall call it the inter generational hypothesis it was recently used by barro 1974 1978 to attack the conclusions of the life cycle hypothesis our purpose in this paper is to start the long road of studying the structure of the private inter generational transfer system with the aim of providing additional tests of the two competing hypotheses

the strategic bequest motive although recent research suggests that intergenerational transfers play an important role in aggregate capital accumulation our understanding of bequest motives remains incomplete we develop a simple model of strategic bequests in which a testator influences the decisions of his beneficiaries by holding wealth in bequeathable forms and by conditioning the division of bequests on the beneficiaries actions the model generates falsifiable empirical predictions that are inconsistent with other theories of intergenerational transfers we present econometric and other evidence that strongly suggests that bequests are often used as compensation for services rendered by beneficiaries

the spirit of capitalism and savings behavior abstract this paper presents a capitalist spirit model of savings by including wealth in the intertemporal utility function while this model includes the life cycle model and bequest model as two special cases it sheds light on why wealth holding has tended to increase with age why decumulation of wealth after retirement has not happened and why households with and without children have not shown significant differences in their savings behavior the capitalist spirit approach is especially useful for understanding savings by the rich and savings across countries and over time jel e21 b10

parental human capital investment and old age transfers from children is it a loan contract or reciprocity for indonesian families abstract this paper proposes two alternative models of intergenerational transfers linking parental investment in human capital of children to old age support the first model formulates these transfers as a pure loan contract and the second model as self enforcing reciprocity both models predict neutrality of intergenerational redistribution of resources within the family also known as the difference in income transfer derivatives property two models however provide different reasons for the failure of this property and yield different policy implications for parental human capital investment and provision of old age support specification tests on the indonesian family life survey data reject the pure loan model in favor of the reciprocity model the estimated difference in income transfer derivatives for this data is found to be significantly higher than the difference estimated by altonji hayashi and kotlikoff altonji et al 1992 altonji j g hayashi f and kotlikoff l j 1992 is the extended family altruistically linked direct tests using micro data the american economic review vol 82 5 1177 98 for the u s psid data

is everything neutral in his well known analysis of the national debt robert barro introduced the notion of a dynastic family this notion has since become a standard research tool particularly in the areas of public finance and macroeconomics in this paper we critique the assumptions on which the dynastic model is predicated and argue that this framework is not a suitable abstraction in contexts in which the objective is to analyze the effects of public policies we reach this conclusion by formally considering a world in which each generation consists of a large number of distinct individuals as opposed to one representative individual we point out that family linkages form complex networks in which each individual may belong to many dynastic groupings the resulting proliferation of linkages between families gives rise to a host of neutrality results including the irrelevance of all public redistributions distortionary taxes and prices since these results are not at all descriptive of the real world we conclude

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

inter vivos transfers and bequests in three oecd countries reforms reducing the generosity of pensions have distributional effects on future generations if individuals care about their descendants welfare but only affect elderly individuals if bequests are the unintentional result of precautionary savings and safety net programmes such as unemployment insurance may displace sources of private help such as that provided by living parents to their children in need this paper provides comparable measures of how expected bequests and transfers vary with cumulated parental earnings in the united states west germany and the united kingdom the strength of bequest motives is empirically very weak in the available data private inter vivos transfers which appear to depend on the recipients economic situation are partly crowded out by public unemployment insurance programmes together involuntary bequests and intentional inter vivos transfers appear to be an important channel of intergenerational inequality transmission and strengthen substantially the relationship between an individual s and his parents economic status ernesto villanueva

bequests and the size of population when population is endogenous the consequences of interfamily bequests and endogenous population size for optimal and competitive population sizes and bequests are explored when individuals utility is a function of own consumption the number of children and the welfare of their children when a bequest benefits each member of a second generation family we show that competition leads to underprovision for future generations under a separability assumption the number of children is also shown to be too large

income shocks consumption wealth and human capital evidence from russia abstract using the russia longitudinal monitoring survey this article investigates how russian households consumption responds to income shocks and in particular how household wealth and human capital affect the households ability to smooth consumption an instrumental variable estimation method with household fixed effects is implemented after correcting for potential problems of sample attrition using the inverse probability weighting method the article finds that household consumption in russia is only partially protected from idiosyncratic shocks the analysis also provides evidence that wealthier households can better smooth their consumption furthermore changes in income have less impact on consumption when households have members with higher education levels wealth effects are more pronounced in rural areas while education effects are stronger for urban households

pay as you go social security and the distribution of altruistic transfers this paper studies the impact of an unfunded social security system on the distribution of altruistic transfers in a framework where savings are due to both life cycle and random altruistic motivations we show that the effect of social security on the distribution of these transfers depends crucially on the strength of the bequest motive in explaining savings behaviour we measure this strength by the expected weight that individuals attach to the utility of future generations on the one hand if the bequest motive is strong then an increase in the social security tax raises the bequests left by altruistic parents on the other hand when the importance of altruism in motivating savings is sufficiently low the increase in the social security tax could result in a reduction of the bequests left by altruistic parents under some conditions on the attitude of individuals toward risk and on the relative returns associated with private saving and social security some implications concerning the transitional effects of introducing an unfunded social security scheme are also discussed

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

do drinkers earn less theoretical work by becker and others on human capital led initially to empirical research on the determinates of earnings interest in human capital has now spread to other areas especially health this movement is in conjunction with societal concerns regarding the role of diet and environmental factors on human well being and performance following becker 1 and grossman 9 economists expect to find a significant relationship between health and earnings health aspects of human capital have been extensively explored since the early work of grossman 9 10 good health is both beyond the control of the individual exogenous as a result of genetic factors and random events and controllable endogenous through the regulation of activities such as smoking drinking eating exercise and other informed choices this study examines the relation between earnings and drinking curiously little rigorous empirical work has been done on the relation between earnings and drinking irving fisher s claim to the contrary 1 there is little evidence that prohibition led to substantial if any productivity increases although it is established that excessive drinking leads to poor health the empirical evidence regarding earnings and drinking is mixed and inconclusive according to the u s government abusive drinkers earn less in their biennial reports to congress the national institute on alcohol abuse and alcoholism niaaa estimates the economic cost to society of alcohol abuse approximately half of this cost arises from the estimated loss in earnings productivity due to abusive drinking 2 their approach consists of estimating a wage equation which includes human capital variables as well as a dichotomous abusive drinking variable and quantity of alcohol consumed 3 berger and leigh 3 used a sample selection model to test whether drinkers earned more or less than nondrinkers they divided their sample from the 1972 73 quality of employment survey into two categories drinkers and nondrinkers using a sample selection correction estimator hedonic wage regressions for each category and by sex were estimated they found that drinkers moderate and abusive combined earned more than nondrinkers comparisons were then made between wages from each regression with demographic and human capital variables set at

did soviet elderly employment respond to financial incentives evidence from pension reforms abstract this study answers the open question of whether workers respond to financial incentives in a command economy to do this i evaluate pension reforms in soviet russia in 1964 and 1969 that allowed pensioners to receive a greater share of their pensions if they worked resulting in a progressive elimination of benefit reduction rates variation in group eligibility and variation in benefit reduction rates in eastern and western regions allow for the use of several difference in differences frameworks i collect and digitize novel data from the soviet archives on pensioner employment constructing the first database of the soviet old age labor market i find that soviet pensioners are responsive to financial incentives by 1969 after the benefit reduction rate fell from an average of 47 8 to 24 1 pensioner employment rates rose by 5 7 percentage points representing a 47 increase finally i provide illustrative estimates of the employment elasticity with respect to the average net of tax rate that range from 0 6 to 1 4

do private transfers displace the benefits of public transfers evidence from south africa abstract this paper investigates whether government transfer programs displace or crowd out private support focusing on a large increase in state old age pensions in south africa using data spanning the period of the expansion we find that each rand of public pension income to the elderly leads to a 0 25 0 30 rand reduction in private transfers from children living away from home however despite the large increase in income there were no significant changes in migration labor supply or household composition we also show that evaluations of the distributional effects of the pension are overstated when crowding out is ignored

samaritan versus rotten kid another look abstract we set up a two stage game with sequential moves by one altruist and n selfish agents the samaritan s dilemma rotten kid theorem states that the altruist can only reach her first best when the selfish agents move after before the altruist we find that in general the altruist can reach her first best when she moves first if and only if a selfish agent s action marginally affects only his own payoff the altruist can reach her first best when she moves last if and only if a selfish agent cannot manipulate the price of his own payoff

the mortality effects of retirement evidence from social security eligibility at age 62 abstract social security eligibility begins at age 62 and approximately one third of americans immediately claim at that age we examine whether age 62 is associated with a discontinuous change in aggregate mortality a key measure of population health using mortality data that covers the entire u s population and includes exact dates of birth and death we document a robust two percent increase in male mortality immediately after age 62 the change in female mortality is smaller and imprecisely estimated additional analysis suggests that the increase in male mortality is connected to retirement from the labor force and associated lifestyle changes

old age government transfers and the crowding out of private gifts the70 and aboveprogram for the rural elderly in mexico old age public transfers and remittances

the effect of social security on lifetime wealth accumulation and bequests this paper is an empirical study of the effects of social security on lifetime wealth accumulation and bequests using a sample of wisconsin males we have matched lifetime earnings records from income tax returns with their social security account records and their bequests obtained from probate court records since the cohort of males was born between 1890 and 1899 they represent a cohort that saw a great change in the size and coverage by occupation of the system hence there is substantial within cohort variation in social security wealth from which effects can be estimated for nearly 30 years the life cycle theory of savings has enjoyed an enormous amount of academic support in the no bequest variant individuals save with the sole intention of consuming their savings in later years the economy wide stock of capital can therefore be generated by this pattern without any reliance on bequests modigliani 1966 such a model will lead to rather strong predictions about the effect of a pay as you go public pension hereafter social security on private savings as feldstein 1974 points out social security should displace private savings as well as reduce macro saving since the programme is unfunded this result follows from the assumption that each household will consume all of its assets during its own lifetime some recent research however has been at odds with the no bequest variant of the life cycle model see kurz 1984 and included references darby 1979 claims that life cycle assets savings consumed later in the life cycle constitute only 13 29 per cent of total assets kotlikoff and summers 1981 report that the major share nearly 80 per cent of capital stock in the united states is due to intergenerational transfers 2 indeed these authors write life cycle models of savings that emphasize savings for retirement as the dominant form of capital accumulation should give way to models that illuminate the determinants of intergenerational transfers p 706 in addition recent empirical work suggests that people tend to accumulate or fail to significantly decumulate wealth wealth in old age a finding at odds with the strict life cycle model 3 given the potentially large role of bequests in the process of capital accumulation it is important to know how bequests are affected by the large public programme that social security has become even if social security depresses private savings among those near or at retirement if people bequeath it is conceivable that saving during retirement is augmented by the programme 4 aside from the issue of savings effects the response of people s bequests to their old age benefits might allow one to assess the target efficiency of the social security system since the original objective of the system was to ensure adequate levels of consumption among the elderly a finding that benefits

the sensitivity of an empirical model of married women s hours of work to economic and statistical assumptions this study undertakes a systematic analysis of several theoretic and statistical assumption s used in many empirical models of female labor supply using a singl e data set psid 1975 labor supply data the author is able to replic ate most of the range of estimated income and substitution effects fo und in previous studies in this field he undertakes extensive specif ication tests and finds that most of this range should be rejected du e to statistical and model misspecifications the two most important assumptions appear to be the tobit assumption used to control for sel f selection into the labor force and exogeneity assumptions on the wi fe s wage rate and her labor market experience copyright 1987 by the econometric society

child health and household resources in south africa evidence from the old age pension program this paper presents nonparametric evidence on the effects of the expansion of the old age pension program in south africa on child health did this increase in household resources improve child health and nutrition does the gender of the recipient of the pension affect its impact the answers to these questions have very important policy implications there is evidence that inadequate nutrition during childhood and even in utero affects long term physical development as well as the development of cognitive skills this in turn affects productivity later in life see partha dasgupta 1993 john strauss and duncan thomas 1998 t paul schultz 1999 in the united states the evidence suggests that monetary transfers to the poor have very little impact on child welfare janet currie 1995 susan mayer 1997 however the effects of parental income and monetary transfers on child outcomes are likely to be of greater magnitude among poor households in developing countries the south african pension program provides an unusual opportunity to evaluate the possible effects of such a monetary transfer this paper exploits the rapid increase in the coverage and benefits of the old age pension program in south africa which took place in the early 1990 s anne case and angus deaton 1998 at the end of the apartheid era the government committed to achieving parity of benefits and eligibility requirements between whites and africans this was achieved mostly by increasing the benefits received by the africans in 1993 80 percent of african women above age 60 and 77 percent of african men above 65 received the pension the maximum benefit of 370 rands per month aproximately 3 per day was equal to half of the minimum wage and about twice the median income per capita in rural areas due to living arrangements inherited from the apartheid era close to onethird of african children under the age of 5 currently live with a pension recipient children who live with a pension recipient tend to come from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds as a consequence they tend to be smaller than other children their age to estimate the effect of receiving a pension on the anthropometric status of children this paper exploits the fact that height reflects accumulated investments in child nutrition the larger the proportion of her life during which a child is well nourished the taller she will be given her age due to the expansion of the program in the early 1990 s individuals of qualified age became more likely to receive a pension and the benefits became substantially larger thus children born after the expansion of the program are more likely to have spent a larger fraction of their lives wellnourished if they live with a pension recipient to the extent that the pension resulted in improved nutrition in this paper i present nonparametric evidence of the program s effect on nutrition based on this observation

the health implications of social security failure evidence from the russian pension crisis abstract we explore whether health is vulnerable to income shocks focusing on a recent crisis in russia during which many pensioners were not paid for an extended period of time using panel data spanning the crisis we find that among affected pensioners poverty rates doubled and the intake of calories and protein and the use of health services and medications declined significantly these pensioners were also 5 percent more likely to die in the two years following the crisis however households responded in ways that mitigated the impact of the crisis replacing one fifth of lost pension income through increased labor supply and asset sales

the effect of alcohol use on wages 1988 the effect of alcohol use on wages applied economics vol 20 no 10 pp 1343 1351

determinants of canadian bilateral aid allocations humanitarian commercial or political in this paper we examine the determinants of the allocation of canadian bilateral aid over the period 1984 2000 we draw on models of donor behaviour that allow us to incorporate humanitarian commercial and political considerations the trinity of mixed motives that affect canadian aid we find that allocations are moderately altruistic recipient country human rights and membership in the commonwealth and la francophonie also affect aid flows most strikingly our results suggest that canadian aid flows became less altruistic over this period and commercial motives became increasingly important jel classification h50 o10 les determinants des allocations de l aide humanitaire canadienne humanitaires commerciaux ou politiques ce memoire etudie les determinants de l allocation de l aide bilaterale canadienne dans la periode 1984 2000 on utilise des modeles de comportement de donateur qui permettent de prendre en considerations les motivations humanitaires commerciales et politiques la trinite de motifs mixtes qui affectent l aide canadienne on decouvre que les allocations sont moderement altruistes le fait pour un pays de defendre bien les droits de la personne et d etre membre du commonwealth et de la francophonie affecte les flux d aide plus important peut etre les resultats suggerent qu au cours de cette periode les flux d aide canadienne deviennent moins altruistes et les motifs commerciaux de plus en plus importants

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

the role of intergenerational transfers in aggregate capital accumulation this paper uses historical u s data to directly estimate the contribution of intergenerational transfers to aggregate capital accumulation the evidence presented indicates that intergenerational transfers account for the vast majority of aggregate u s capital formation only a negligible fraction of actual capital accumulation can be traced to life cycle or hump savings a major difference between this study and previous investigations of this issue is the use of more accurate longitudinal age earnings and age consumption profiles these profiles are simply too flat to generate substantial life cycle savings this paper suggests the importance of and need for substantially greater research and data collection on intergenerational transfers life cycle models of savings that emphasize savings for retirement as the dominant form of capital accumulation should give way to models that illuminate the determinants of intergenerational transfers

as an economy becomes more developed do people become less altruistic abstractinter household private transfers are one of the main informal insurance mechanisms that prevalently implemented in developing countries unfortunately most of the literatures investigates

deal or no deal the effect of alcohol drinking on bargaining alcohol drinking during business negotiation is a very common practice particularly in some east asian countries does alcohol consumption affect negotiator s strategy and consequently the outcome of the negotiation if so what is the mechanism through which alcohol impacts negotiator s behavior we investigate the effect of a moderate amount of alcohol on negotiation using controlled experiments subjects are randomly matched into pairs to play a bargaining game with adverse selection in the game each subject is given a private endowment the total endowment is scaled up and shared equally between the pair provided that they agree to collaborate it is found that a moderate amount of alcohol consumption increases subjects willingness to collaborate thus improving their average payoff we find that alcohol consumption increases neither subjects preference for risk nor altruism a possible explanation for the increase in the likelihood of collaboration is that subjects under the influence of alcohol are more cursed in the sense of eyster and rabin 2005 which is supported by the estimation results of a structural model of quantal response equilibrium

public policy and extended families evidence from pensions in south africa how are resources allocated within extended families in developing economies this question is investigated using a unique social experiment the south african pension program under that program the elderly receive a cash transfer equal to roughly twice the per capita income of africans in south africa the study examines how this transfer affects the labor supply of prime age individuals living with these elderly in extended families it finds a sharp drop in the working hours of prime age individuals in these households when women turn 60 years old or men turn 65 the ages at which they become eligible for pensions it also finds that the drop in labor supply is much larger when the pensioner is a woman suggesting an imperfect pooling of resources the allocation of resources among prime age individuals depends strongly on their absolute age and gender as well as on their relative age the oldest son in the household reduces his working hours more than any other prime age household member

is there an intrahousehold flypaper effect evidence from a school feeding programme are public transfers targeted toward children neutralised by the household as the theory of altruism implies or is there an intrahousehold flypaper effect whereby such transfers stick to the child this paper studies the impact of a school feeding programme on child caloric intake in the philippines using a quasi experimental methodology the empirical results confirm an intrahousehold flypaper effect indeed they indicate virtually no intrahousehold reallocation of calories in response to the feeding programme in poorer households however children s gains from the programme appear to be taxed more heavily

motives for private income transfers private income transfers are becoming increasingly recognized as a key aspect of the u s economy the majority of private income transfers occur inter vivos i e between living persons but very little is known about this type of transfer behavior this paper tests alternative hypotheses concerning motivation for inter vivos transfers two motives are considered altruism and exchange evidence presented here casts doubt on the altruistic model of transfer behavior observed patterns for inter vivos transfers are more consistent with exchange related motives this finding has important implications for the effects of public transfer programs on the distribution of economic well being

persistence in health limitations a european comparative analysis this paper investigates the persistence in health limitations for individuals within the member states of the european union we use the full eight waves of data available in the european community household panel echp to explore the relative contributions of state dependence unobserved heterogeneity and socioeconomic characteristics in particular income education and activity status and how these vary across countries we focus on binary measures of health limitations constructed from the answers to the question are you hampered in your daily activities by any physical or mental health problem illness or disability dynamic non linear panel data models are specified and estimated using both pooled and random effects probit and logit models together with complementary log log models the random effects probit specifications are preferred results reveal high state dependence of health limitations which remains after controlling for measures of socioeconomic status there is heterogeneity in the socioeconomic gradient across countries

the family inheritance and the intergenerational transmission of inequality unequal inheritance of material wealth is commonly considered a major cause of inequality in consumption however theoretical models of the intergenerational transmission of inequality by becker blinder and ishikawa imply that unequal inheritance may either increase or reduce consumption inequality differences in inherited wealth resulting from unequal parental incomes increase inequality in recipients consumption however unequal bequests caused by differences among families in the endowed ability of children or the costs of producing human capital are equalizing empirical results confirm these predictions the inheritance received by children is inversely related to both children s income and parental education thus bequests are compensatory in that ceteris paribus low income children inherit more than their advantaged contemporaries

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

analysis of private transfers with panel fixed effect censored model estimator abstract understanding private transfer is important for safety net policies because private transfer provides economic benefits similar to those of public programs such as unemployment insurance and pension applying honore s econometrica 60 1992 533 panel fixed effect censored model estimator to korean data we show that private transfer is altruistically motivated and there is a strong crowding out effect of public transfer on private transfer we also find that low income people suffered to different degrees during the financial crisis period of 1997 to 1998 this finding and the crowding out effect may be taken as failures of the korean public transfer programs during the period

parental altruism and inter vivos transfers theory and evidence this paper uses psid data on the extended family to test whether inter vivos transfers from parents to children are motivated by altruism specifically the paper tests whether an increase by one dollar in the income of parents actively making transfers to a child coupled with a one dollar reduction in that child s income results in the parents increasing their transfer to the child by one dollar this restriction on parental and child transfer income derivatives is derived for the standard altruism model augmented to include uncertainty and liquidity constraints these additional elements pin down the timing of inter vivos transfers the method used to estimate income transfer derivatives takes into account unobserved heterogeneity across families in the degree of altruism the findings strongly reject the altruism hypothesis redistributing one dollar from a recipient child to donor parents leads to less than a 13 cent increase in the parents transfer to the child far less than the one dollar increas

alcoholism work and income this article reports on an empirical analysis of the relationships between alcoholism and income and working we show that the relationships between alcoholism and labor market success have important age or life cycle dimensions we present evidence that alcoholism may affect income more by restricting labor market participation than by affecting the wages of workers finally we demonstrate that the effects of alcoholism on earnings depend on the extent to which one controls for other covariates associated with alcoholism as such we suggest that there may be important indirect as well as direct effects of alcoholism on labor market success

employment unemployment and problem drinking the misuse of alcohol is estimated to result in enormous economic costs composed largely of reduced labor market productivity however there has been debate on this issue the purpose of this paper is to help to resolve this debate by presenting sound structural estimates of the relationship between measures of problem drinking and of employment and unemployment the analysis is based on the 1988 alcohol supplement of the national health interview survey we find that for both men and women problem drinking results in reduced employment and increased unemployment

the long term effects of youth unemployment using nlsy data we examine the long term effects of youth unemployment on later labor market outcomes involuntary unemployment may yield suboptimal investments in human capital in the short run a theoretical model of dynamic human capital investment predicts a rational catch up response using semiparametric techniques to control for the endogeneity of prior behavior our estimates provide strong evidence of this response we also find evidence of persistence in unemployment combining our semiparametric estimates with a dynamic approximation to the lifecycle we find that unemployment experienced as long ago as ten years continues to affect earnings adversely despite the catch up response

adolescent alcohol use sociability and income as a young adult we use data from the national longitudinal survey of adolescent health add health to study how sociability and adolescent alcohol use impact personal income as a young adult we find that factors which enhance not only individual sociability but also social interaction at the community level are positively linked to future earnings of adolescents adolescents whose friends and friends of friends have greater sociability reap long term labour market rewards into adulthood after adjusting for individual and community sociability the effect of teenage alcohol consumption on labour market earnings as young adults is reduced our results suggest that earnings premiums associated with adolescent alcohol consumption may be partially explained by social network dynamics

the retirement savings puzzle reviewed the role of housing and bequests the so called retirement savings puzzle is a phenomenon by which contrary to what the standard life cycle model predicts households do not run down their wealth significantly during retirement in this review paper we survey the literature on the retirement savings puzzle and we connect it with the literature on housing equity during retirement to establish a link between these two streams of literature we use as a framework the work of nakajima and telyukova 2013a home equity in retirement ucsd working paper and nakajima and telyukova 2017 reverse mortgage loans a quantitative analysis journal of finance 72 911 950 who find that home ownership interacts with factors that explain the retirement savings puzzle notably with the bequest motive we complement the results by nakajima and telyukova by relating them to the literature on altruistic bequests strategic bequests and housing as a commitment device all of which give further insights on the connection between home ownership and bequests we complement our review of the literature with descriptive evidence using the netherlands as a case study

estimates of the returns to schooling from sibling data fathers sons and brothers data on brothers and on fathers and sons from the national longitudinal survey are used to consider the impact of omitted variables and measurement errors on the economic returns to schooling the analysis suggests that the upward bias in estimated returns due to omitted variables is likely offset by an equal downward bias resulting from measurement errors in reported schooling controlling for both of these potential sources of bias yields results comparable to conventional regression estimates of the economic return to schooling

universal pensions for developing countries summary the governments of new zealand mauritius namibia botswana bolivia nepal samoa brunei kosovo and mexico city provide a basic pension to the elderly with no test other than citizenship residence and age these universal non means tested pensions automatically protect an entire population in a way that contributory earnings related pensions never can the author examines the value of this scheme for low income countries and argues that an income test if desired is best done ex post through the tax system rather than ex ante even though there are few examples of ex post recovery systems operating in the world today

taxation and wealth transmission in france abstract this paper studies inter vivos transfers and bequests in france and their relation to the french inheritance law and taxation using administrative records and a national households survey transmission behavior is highly responsive to changes in the fiscal system inter vivos gifts increased after a 1992 law made them partly tax free moreover the probability of giving to children is greater ceteris paribus if parents wealth is taxable for children the probability of receiving a gift over the life cycle increases with their permanent income the amount received increases with current income it increases or bears no relation to permanent income depending on the specification thus we find no direct support for the altruistic nor for the exchange motive these results are compatible with a model where parents transfer to the best endowed child

choosing between gifts and bequests how taxes affect the timing of wealth transfers abstract a number of theories have been advanced to explain the size and timing of intergenerational transfers one factor only recently explored is the effects of taxes and in particular the estate tax on such transfers this paper represents the first attempt to explore how capital gains and gift taxes in addition to the estate tax interact to influence incentives in the timing of transfers using estate tax data and exploiting variations in state inheritance gift and capital gains tax rates this paper finds taxes to be an important consideration in the choice between gifts and bequests in particular each of capital gains and gift taxes are found to be important determinants of the timing of transfers these findings are robust to a number of specifications that control for borrowing charitable bequests marital status and the portfolio composition of wealth transfers

demand analysis of fresh and frozen finfish and shellfish in the united states household expenditures for at home consumption on three species of shellfish and five species of finfish were analyzed factors explaining the variation of expenditures on seafood commodities were own price household income coupon value household size geographic region urbanization race and seasonality own price elasticities ranged from 0 45 flounder sole to 1 13 oysters expenditures on fishery products were more sensitive to changes in household size than to changes in household income cross price effects of red meat and poultry were not statistically significant for comparison purposes estimates of own price income and household size elasticities from the literature were made with this set of elasticities

imperfect commitment altruism and the family evidence from transfer behavior in low income rural areas in this paper we examine empirically whether risk pooling is more advantageous among altruistic compared to selfish agents in a framework where individuals cannot make binding commitments in particular we incorporate altuism into a model of risk sharing under imperfect commitment and use simulation methods to establish tests of the roles of both altruism and commitment problems in determining the extent of insurance and the intertemporal movements in interhousehold transfers the tests are carried out using three panel data sets from two countries of rural south asia that provide detailed information on transfers and enable the measurement of income shocks the estimates provide strong support for the notion that imperfect commitment substantially constrains informal transfer arrangements whether kin based or not but also provide evidence that altruism plays an important role in ameliorating commitment constraints and thus in increasing the gains from income pooling

is the extended family altruistically linked direct tests using micro data this paper uses panel study of income dynamics data on parents and their adult children to test the standard altruism model this model predicts that within the extended family the distribution of consumption is independent of the distribution of resources the authors findings strongly reject this prediction copyright 1992 by american economic association

did public transfers crowd out private transfers in korea during the financial crisis abstract how effective are public transfers in protecting households facing financial crisis induced negative shocks existing studies have not yet carefully considered the inter relationship between public transfers and the existing private transfer network in the context of the financial crisis in korea this paper investigates the possible crowding out effect of public transfers on private transfers by explicitly considering the endogenous responses of private transfers against public transfers by using two korean household level panel data sets for the periods of 1995 1998 and 1998 2003 we found a post crisis but not pre crisis crowding out effect of public transfers more importantly a crowding in effect is observed during the crisis the results suggest that private transfer networks were strengthened under the initial phase of the financial crisis which possibly complemented public transfers due to the lack of effective formal safety nets while public transfers became effective after the cri

alcohol use human capital and wages this article develops and estimates a model of wage determination that isolates the effects of alcohol use on wages as mediated through human capital accumulation although generally insignificant estimation results suggest that moderate alcohol use while in school or working has a positive effect on the returns to education or experience and therefore on human capital accumulation but heavier drinking reduces this gain slightly based on these results alcohol use does not appear to adversely affect returns to education or work experience and therefore has no negative effect on the efficiency of education or experience in forming human capital