paying down the environmental debt we reflect on scenarios of sustain able development constant utility paths in which the stock of pollution is drawn down by investments in environmental cleanup we also report on con stant utility as interest on the vector of capital stocks in our economy jel 02 the costs of cleaning up the environment involve multiyear programs for many sites and or problems and sums in the billions of dollars we have superfund activities in the united states in mind but obviously the site cleanup problems facing the people of eastern europe are also very large scale cleanup expenditures resemble programs of investment in infrastructure rather than once over disbursements for troubleshoot

women s schooling home teaching and economic growth the hypothesis that increases in the schooling of women enhance the human capital of the next generation and thus make a unique contribution to economic growth is assessed on the basis of data describing green revolution india estimates are obtained that indicate that a component of the significant and positive relationship between maternal literacy and child schooling in the indian setting reflects the productivity effect of home teaching and that the existence of this effect combined with the increase in returns to schooling for men importantly underlies the expansion of female literary following the onset of the green revolution

women s work and economic development using a cross country dataset and microdata from india and thailand we examine how women s work status changes with economic development several clear patterns emerge women s labor force participation first declines and then rises with development women move from work in family enterprises to work as paid employees fertility declines and gender gaps in education narrow women s education levels and those of their spouses appear to be important determinants of women s labor market activities broad welfare indicators such as mortality rates and education levels indicate that women s well being improves on average with development both in absolute terms and relative to men

child fostering in africa when labor and schooling motives may coexist abstract the paper proposes a theoretical framework for understanding purposive child fostering in africa whereby a non orphaned child is sent to live temporarily with relatives in the model adults decide whether to foster in or out a child in conjunction with other household choices e g own time allocation between market and non market activities children s amount of work and schooling by allowing for positive externalities from fostering and thus asymmetric motives for fostering in labor and out human capital the proposed framework predicts that school age children are sent to better off households and that some families may foster in and out simultaneously the model identifies the conditions under which all actors involved children included may benefit from fostering arrangements but also points to situations where fostering may become an opportunity to marginalize a subset of children the paper aims to provide a sound theoretical foundation that sheds light on why there exists mixed empirical evidence on the effects of fostering on children s well being and cautions against demonizing non parent residence as unequivocally detrimental to children

india s missing girls biology customs and economic development we review the evidence on the sex ratio among children below the age of six international evidence shows that the sex ratio at birth is slightly biased towards boys but boys suffer greater mortality a pattern consistent with darwinian evolution with economic development the male bias in the child sex ratio increases south and east india show levels and trends in the child sex ratio that are consistent with this evidence however unbalanced sex ratios in the northern and western states since the first censuses indicate discrimination against girls technological developments permitting sex selective abortions have seriously aggravated the imbalances in these states economic modelling of parental choice regarding a child s gender suggests that gender imbalances may be consistent with individual maximization and marriage market equilibrium nevertheless these choices have adverse welfare consequences which will be aggravated by the decline in population growth and consequent relaxation of the marriage squeeze

poverty and public policy the problem of poverty is particularly acute in india with 14 of the world s population we have the misfortune of having almost twice as large a share of the world s poor indeed as i shall presently underline the question of poverty and its amelioration has been at the center of our concerns from the beginning of our planning efforts almost four decades ago little therefore can be said on it that some distinguished indian economist has not already said in some ways therefore to talk on the design of public policy for poverty to an indian audience is to carry coal to newcastle or as the old saying goes to teach your grandmother how to suck eggs nonetheless i hope to provide a fresh perspective by putting the problem into an explicit analytical framework that permits alternative policy designs to be sharply defined and contrasted i also intend to draw on international experience to put our efforts and problems into both historical and comparative perspectives

income shocks and gender gaps in education evidence from uganda abstract this paper uses exogenous variation in rainfall across districts in uganda to estimate the causal effects of household income shocks on children s enrollment and academic performance conditional on gender i find negative deviations in rainfall from the long term mean to have negative and highly significant effects on female enrollment in primary schools and the effect grows stronger for older girls i find no effect of rainfall variation on the enrollment of boys and young girls moreover i find that when schooling is free of charge and both marginal boys and girls are enrolled a negative income shock has an adverse effect on the test scores of female students while boys are not affected the results imply that households respond to income shocks by varying the amount of schooling and resources provided to girls while boys are to a large extent sheltered a finding consistent with a model where parents values of child labor differ across sexes

intrahousehold resource allocation in rural pakistan a semiparametric analysis we estimate semiparametric engel curves for rural pakistan using a large household survey this allows us to obtain consistent estimates of the effects of household size and composition on consumption patterns even when these demographic variables are correlated with an unknown function of income the coefficients on the household composition variables are used to infer patterns of intrahousehold allocation while there is little evidence of gender bias amongst children adult males appear to get more than adult females there is a tendency amongst males for workers to get more than dependents there is no evidence of differential treatment of the elderly and higher birth order children we identify substantial economies of size in food consumption we also find that engel curces for food adult goods and child goods are nonlinear which suggests that the piglog class of demand models in inappropriate

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

technical change and intra household welfare a case study of irrigated rice production in south sulawesi indonesia in this article the effect of an agricultural technical change on intra household welfare is discussed existing theories of the household suggest that the distribution of resources within the household is a function of household members employment the differences in male and female employment levels under rainfed and irrigated rice production are investigated in a case study of two villages in south sulawesi indonesia it is concluded that the pattern of labour allocation in the irrigated area involves higher absolute labour requirements for both men and women compared to the rainfed area but that women s agricultural labour relative to men s is lower furthermore women s participation in the cash economy is relative to men s lower in the irrigated than in the rainfed area it is argued that these differences can be seen as a response to the different agricultural production technologies being used this suggests that the levels of inequality within the household are greater in the irrigated than

the impact of development on women a specific factors analysis abstract the specific factors model is employed in this paper as a means of explaining how economic development may serve to diminish women s welfare three changes associated with the development process are analyzed for their effect on women s real and relative wage 1 an expansion of trade induced by an improvement in the terms of trade 2 technological change and 3 an increase in female labor force participation

a population macroeconomic growth model for currently developing countries abstract this paper constructs a theoretical model that predicts as observed in some currently developing countries that the average school enrollment ratio may fall even when the average fertility rate declines unlike existing models the current analysis indicates that economic growth may slow down when a fertility transition starts asymmetric behavior with respect to fertility and education between households stemming from income inequality plays an important role in generating this result we examine the implications of an education subsidy policy contrary to intuition in some circumstances this policy may decrease the average school enrollment ratio and future economic growth

constant consumption and the economic depreciation of natural capital the nonautonomous case we investigate economic depreciation of natural capital for cases of nonstationary output prices technology and interest rates for the former two cases exogenous movements in prices and technology constant consumption emerges under a strategy of investing to cover off economic depreciation the interest rate case requires a modified sinking fund strategy

an analysis of childhood malnutrition in rural india role of gender income and other household characteristics there are controversies regarding the role of individual and household characteristics in childhood nutritional status measured by anthropometric indicators using a nutrition index based on weight for age of children in rural india the paper re examines this issue ordered probit estimates of nutritional status suggest female literacy improves the nutritional status of boys at the cost of girls while higher per capita current income improves that of both boys and girls though the impact is higher for boys however effect of income is not robust when we use instruments of longer run income but more income and literacy give more ways to discriminate between boys and girls

intra household gender disparity in school choice evidence from private schooling in india abstractthis paper explores gender inequality within households in the decision of private versus government school choice in india using a three period longitudinal dataset on rural households from uttar pradesh a northern state of india this paper estimates a household fixed effects model and finds that there is an intra household gender bias of 6 percentage points in private school enrolment among children aged 6 16 years contrary to the trend in overall enrolment the gender gap in private school choice is rising over time and is more pronounced in villages with a larger cost difference between private and government schooling this finding remains robust even after controlling for average school quality and considering potential endogeneity of the cost variables

input choices in agriculture is there a gender bias summary this paper examines evidence of gender biases in the decisions of agricultural households utilizing data from international crops research institute for the semi arid tropics s village level studies in india 1975 85 the main empirical finding is that households with a high proportion of boys tend to use some agricultural inputs including fertilizers and irrigation services more intensively than households with girls this pattern is more pronounced among wealthier households but does not appear to be driven solely by bequest motives or male child labor productivity

monotone instrumental variables with an application to the returns to schooling for fifty years econometric analyses of treatment response have made extensive use of instrumental variable iv assumptions holding that mean response is constant across specified subpopulations of a population of interest 2 yet the credibility of mean independence conditions and other iv assumptions has often been a matter of considerable disagreement with much debate about whether some covariate is or is not a valid instrument in an application of interest there is therefore good reason to consider weaker but more credible assumptions to this end we introduce monotone instlumental variable miv assumptions holding that mean response varies weakly monotonically across specified subpopulations we study the identifying power of these miv assumptions and give an empirical application the findings reported here add to the literature developing nonparametric bounds on treatment effects 3 this paper uses the same formal setup as manski 1997 there is a probability space j x2 p of individuals each member j of population j has observable covariates xi e x and a response function yj t y mapping the mutually exclusive and exhaustive treatments t e t into outcomes yj t e y person j has a realized treatment zj e t and a realized outcome y 1 y zi both of which are observable the latent outcomes yj t

glass slippers and glass ceilings an analysis of marital anticipation and female education abstract this paper studies how marital anticipation affects female schooling in the presence of gender wage inequality and private benefits of education gender wage inequality induces a marital division of labour that creates i a marginal disincentive to girls schooling and ii a tradeoff between consumption and education facing females in marriage markets we show that in the presence of the last effect an increase in the market wage can have negative consequences for the education of females who specialise in housework

is it better to be a boy a disaggregated outlay equivalent analysis of gender bias in papua new guinea the demographic evidence of gender bias in many countries has provided an impetus for finding ways to study the status of women in developing countries because of the lack of accurate intra household data deaton 1989 introduced a method for using household expenditure data to infer discrimination in the allocation of goods between boys and girls few studies of discrimination using the method however have detected bias even though alternative indicators suggest it is a serious problem in this paper we study the case of papua new guinea a country in which there are many indicators of severe gender bias discrimination in the allocation of goods between boys and girls within households in papua new guinea is examined using deaton s outlay equivalent ratio method adding a boy to the household reduces expenditure on adult goods by as much as would a nine tenths reduction in total outlay per member but girls have no effect on adult goods expenditure the hypothesis of haddad and reardon 1993 that

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

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

nonparametric estimation of labor supply and demand factors this article derives sharp bounds on labor supply and demand shift variables within a nonparametric simultaneous equations model using only observations of the intersection of upward sloping supply curves and downward sloping demand curves furthermore i demonstrate that these bounds tighten with the imposition of plausible assumptions on the distribution of the disturbance terms using katz and murphy s 1992 panel data on wages and labor inputs i estimate these bounds and assess the supply and demand factors that determine changes within male female wage differentials and the college wage premium

the effects of sons and daughters on men s labor supply and wages in this paper we estimate the effects of children and the differential effects of sons and daughters on men s labor supply and hourly wage rates the responses to fatherhood of two cohorts of men from the psid sample are examined separately and we use fixed effects estimation to control for unobserved heterogeneity we find that fatherhood significantly increases the hourly wage rates and annual hours of work for men from both cohorts most notably men s labor supply and wage rates increase more in response to the births of sons than to the births of daughters

deforestation and development in a small open economy abstract our economy faces world prices and starts with a large endowment of land in forest and a small endowment of land in agriculture clearing of forested land yields marketable timber and a unit of land for agriculture early the high price of agricultural land drives the clearing process later the profit from marketing timber from the cleared land drives the process dates of phase transitions are endogenous we also set out a submodel of perpetual cyclic clearing and reforesting and show that it when cyclical harvesting regrowing is optimal the extent of clearing can be relatively large

prices credit markets and child growth in low income rural areas in this paper it is argued that fluctuations in child growth in rural areas of bangladesh during and after severe floods in i988 can provide insight into the structure of credit markets a model of intertemporal resource allocation is developed and euler equations relating growth patterns of children to the cost of borrowing by household are then derived from the model the evidence indicates that although some of the variation in growth patterns over the relevant period may be attributed to variation in illness and the price of rice growth patterns for children in landless households were influenced by credit market imperfections this paper links two prominent strands of research in economic development the first strand examines the extent to which households in poor rural economies are able to protect themselves from the adverse weather and other shocks that importantly influence earnings in underdeveloped areas while it has long been thought that credit market imperfections and other forms of market failure make it difficult for poor individuals in these economies to smooth consumption both within and across years there remains some question about the magnitude and pervasiveness of these imperfections while there is evidence that fluctuations in economic conditions result in inefficient allocation of resources e g morduch 1990 rosenzweig and wolpin i993 some recent papers have emphasised the fact that consumption patterns of households in the same village comove in a manner consistent with the idea that a substantial fraction of idiosyncratic variation in income is effectively

program interventions intrahousehold distribution and the welfare of individuals modelling household behavior abstract in this essay the implications for the intrahousehold distribution of resources derived from economic models of household behavior that treat the household as maximizing a single welfare function are reviewed particular attention is paid to the within family allocation of time and food and to the effects of these resources on the schooling earnings and health status of individuals as they are affected by direct food intervention and female employment schemes and price altering policies empirical applications are provided from data sets from india indonesia and the philippines to illustrate the power and limitations of such models for illuminating household interventions and for placing restrictions on data

real income equivalence among one earner and two earner families in an earlier paper we proposed a technique for making income comparisons across various household sizes in this paper we employ a modified version of that method to convert nominal income to some real equivalent comparable across families of a given size but with one or two family earners we begin with a discussion of some of the conceptual difficulties involved in making cross family size or structure comparisons in income we then describe spending pattern differences between one and two earner families the final section discusses our effort to convert nominal income into comparable real income units we conclude that nominal income differences between two and one earner families far overstate differences in standards of living excerpt

on the intergenerational allocation of natural resources it is known hartwick and others that under standard assumptions a society that invests in reproducible capital the competitive rents on its current extraction of exhaustible resources will enjoy a consumption stream constant in time it is shown here that this result can be interpreted as saying that an appropriately defined stock of capital including the initial endowment of resources is being maintained intact and that consumption can be interpreted as the interest on that patrimony this seems like a useful rule of thumb for policy

does increased access increase equality gender and child health investments in india increases in access to social services are often thought to decrease inequality in the level of these services between advantaged and disadvantaged groups this is an issue in the developing world where policy makers often argue that increasing the level of health care for example will decrease gender inequality however increases in access to services often have empirically ambiguous eects on inequality increasing it in some cases and decreasing it in others this paper argues that this is not surprising and simple economic theory suggests that we should expect a non monotonic relationship between access and inequality at low levels of access to investments there is no investment for either the advantaged or disadvantaged group producing equality increases in access increase investment for the advantaged group rst generating inequality further increases in access increase investment in the disadvantaged group decreasing inequality i test the predictions of this theory using data on the availability of health camps or distance to health centers and gender dierences in vaccinations in india i nd strong support for a non monotonic relationship between access and gender equality

investments in schooling in two generations in pre revolutionary nicaragua the roles of family background and school supply abstract family background and school supply underlie the demand and supply for schooling but are usually ignored in empirical estimates these considerations are investigated for two generations in nicaragua using unique data on adult sisters and their offspring to identify inter versus intrafamilial effects and to control for unobserved family background the results suggest that the standard interpretations are misleading 1 unobserved family background and school supply factors are important in schooling determination 2 omission of these factors leads to overestimates of impacts of parental schooling and family size 3 both parental schooling and family size primarily represent unobserved family background and school supply in standard estimates

birth order and the intrahousehold allocation of time and education this paper develops a model of intrahousehold allocation with endogenous fertility which captures the relationship between birth order and investment in children it shows that a birth order effect in intrahouse hold allocation can arise even without assumptions about parental preferences for specific birth orders of children or genetic endowments varying by birth order the important contribution is that fertility is treated as endogenous a possibility that other models of intrahousehold allocation have ignored the implications of the model are that children with higher birth orders that is who are born later have an advantage over siblings with lower birth orders and that parents who are inequality averse will not have more than one child the model furthermore shows that not taking account of the endogeneity of fertility when analyzing intrahousehold allocation may seriously bias the results the effects of a child s birth order on its human capital accumulation are analyzed using a longitudinal

gender bias credit constraints and time allocation in rural india this paper examines the impact of a child s gender on the time allocation of rural indian households for the five year period subsequent to its birth a theoretical model generates predictions for the effect of the birth of a boy relative to a girl i e the gender shock on household behaviour when the household is liquidity constrained and when it is not the results from the empirical analysis are consistent with the case in which poorer households are liquidity constrained and less poor households are not the interpretation of the finding that women in both groups of households work less subsequent to the birth of a boy relative to a girl differs in these two cases

parental preference heterogeneity and human capital inequality abstract in this article i provide an empirical account of the human capital investment behavior of parents in the face of endowment differences among siblings the data set used contains a three wave panel of 4 030 individuals the article presents a rare case in which endowments are measured explicitly health endowments are estimated from dynamic health production functions while educational endowments are obtained from test scores the simple score of the standard raven s colored progressive matrix cpm test is used to measure educational endowments i use estimation procedures that combine an instrumental variables method with panel data estimators to control for endogeneity and heterogeneity the results suggest that parents compensate for initial differences in health but reinforce initial educational differences among siblings hence an educational subsidy aimed at reducing inequality may end up reinforcing the inequality that might exist in the absence of such subsidy when parents invest mor

the retirement health nexus a new measure of an old puzzle traditional empirical models of retirement which use a self assessed health measure have often found that the wage rate has a surprisingly small effect on retirement using both a self reported health measure and one not based on self report subsequent mortality experience in a more general reduced form joint demand framework we test the importance of the interaction effects of health and retirement our findings are consistent with a joint determination of health and retirement the wage elasticity using either health measure is about equal to that found in a single equation model when a mortality measure is used but all three elasticities are five times greater than one found using self reported health in a traditional single equation model

type of work matters women s labor force participation and the child sex ratio in turkey abstract province level census data for 1985 and 1990 from turkey are used to examine the effect of the economic value of women on the 0 9 cohort population sex ratio the sex ratio is interpreted as an indicator of the relative life chances of girls reflecting their relative neglect in the household we test two hypotheses women s labor force participation lowers the sex ratio and women s gainful work outside is more effective than the not directly remunerative work in an integrated family production system in lowering the sex ratio we find an inverse relationship between women s labor force participation and the sex ratio but this effect is present only where women engage in unpaid family labor

food aid and adult nutrition in rural ethiopia insight into the role of safety nets that contribute to adult nutrition is an important component to understanding the dynamics of poverty in developing countries this article uses panel data from rural ethiopia on individual nutritional status to test for an effect of public transfers on adult body mass index bmi results show that among adult household members male members are the primary beneficiaries of food aid as male and female aid recipients tend to invest aid receipts in male household members these results are consistent with a theory in which additional resources are allocated to members of the household whose market returns are higher or those who engage in activities that expend higher levels of energy for high asset households female household members benefit if the aid recipient is a female women in low asset households appear to be adversely affected by aid receipts and evidence suggests that women with little bargaining power suffer the most the results suggest that aid receipts are useful in mitigating fluctuations in adult bmi over a short time period

do labor market opportunities affect young women s work and family decisions experimental evidence from india do labor market opportunities for women affect marriage and fertility decisions we provided three years of recruiting services to help young women in randomly selected rural indian villages get jobs in the business process outsourcing industry because the industry was so new at the time of the study there was almost no awareness of these jobs allowing us in effect to exogenously increase women s labor force opportunities from the perspective of rural households we find that young women in treatment villages were significantly less likely to get married or have children during this period choosing instead to enter the labor market or obtain more schooling or postschool training women also report wanting to have fewer children and to work more steadily throughout their lifetime consistent with increased aspirations for a career copyright 2012 oxford university press

fertility and the household s economic status a natural experiment using indian micro data abstract we model fertility as endogenous to the family s economic status because poor households choose to have large families in the absence of adequate social insurance because of a strong son preference in india having two girls first can proxy an exogenous increase in fertility and is therefore a good instrument for fertility in determining poverty of rural households the 1993 1994 indian quinquennial survey data shows that even though poverty rates are comparable 74 per cent of two girl families have a third child compared to 63 per cent of other families fertility significantly positively affects poverty when treated as exogenous but vanishes once endogenised these results are robust to omitting states with skewed sex ratios and to proxying economic status by expenditures

traditional vs modern production systems price and nonmarket considerations of cacao producers in northern ecuador many factors besides profit maximization such as nonmarket ecological and social benefits influence smallholder households to adopt a specific agricultural production system or sell in a particular market thus different analytical techniques are needed that take into consideration more than monetary income to fully capture these additional benefits to better understand the production decisions of smallholder farmers we build on previous work on the household model and shadow wage estimation to develop a shadow wage for ecuadorian cacao producers that includes these nonmarket benefits we found that the shadow wage correctly indicated that on average these households would prefer to use an agroforestry production system instead of the more profitable modern system because of the nonmarket benefits received from the former system

adjusting green nnp to measure sustainability weitzman provides a foundation for nnp as the stationary equivalent of a wealth maximizing path when there is a constant interest rate and no exogenous technological progress here the implications of weitzman s foundation are explored in a case encountered in resource models i e the case of non constant interest rates in a setting that allows for exogenous technological progress an expression for nnp is obtained that adjusts green nnp for anticipated capital gains and interest rate effects to produce a measure that indicates sustainability this result is important when measuring the relative sustainability of resource rich and resource poor countries i introduction how should net national product nnp be adjusted for the depletion of natural and environmental resources a prerequisite for examining this problem is to decide on an underlying notion of income at the personal level hicks 1946 defines income as the consumption that if kept constant would yield the same present value as a person s actual future receipts since market prices are not influenced by any single person this notion of income equals a person s maximal sustainable consumption at the national level national income can likewise be defined as the consumption that if kept constant would yield the same present value as the actual future consumption path unless the nation is a small open economy faced with given international prices this notion of national income will exceed

parental altruism and the value of avoiding acute illness are kids worth more than parents abstract a model describing parents preferences to relieve their own and their children s acute illnesses is estimated using stated preference data estimated marginal rates of substitution mrs between child and parent illness are about two indicating that parents value children s illness attributes twice as highly as their own the mrs is larger for younger children falls toward unity as the child approaches adulthood and appears to reflect parental altruism rather than parent child differences in initial health or illness costs intra family allocations may compensate for chronic health impairments parents willingness to pay to avoid own or child illness increases with income declines with fertility increases at a decreasing rate with duration and number of symptoms and depends on perceived discomfort and activity restrictions current methods of assessing morbidity benefits of environmental regulations may understate substantially the value of children s health particularly in african american families

decomposing the gender gap in cognitive skills in a poor rural economy girls lag markedly behind boys in education in many developing countries which may slow economic growth and increase inequity this paper uses indicators of the output of the education production process cognitive skills to characterize and to investigate the determinants of the large educational gender gap in rural pakistan local school availability accounts for about a third of the total cognitive achievement gender gap and over two fifths of that in numeracy which implies that policies that increased local school availability for girls could reduce substantially the gender gaps in cognitive skills to further reduce these gender gaps will require policies that focus on the demand side of the market where our results suggest the response to modest changes in incentives may be high

women and structural transformation development is at a relatively early stage 2 analysis of women s role as economic actors as distinct from being part of the labor force in general is still rudimentary 3 the extent to which and the conditions under which gender may influence a variety of economic outcomes are not well researched the nature and the extent of segmentation of economic activity between males and females and their changing roles in different socioeconomic settings and during the course of economic development are inadequately investigated in economic literature 4 consequently whether the efficiency and welfare losses from women s low participation in economic activity are significant in static and dynamic contexts is inadequately articulated much of the research on women in developed countries has been in a comparative static context 5 the changes in incomes technology demography and tastes with regard to women s roles however are not only much more rapid but also simultaneous in developing countries making research in a comparative static context of relatively little value the implications of the dynamic factors are analytically complex to handle but are critical for public policy even where policy implications are obvious from the existing limited research however these have not always been effectively incorporated by governments in their actions this article first summarizes the major themes of the various types

birth spacing and sibling inequality asymmetric information within the family this paper formulates a dynamic model of birth spacing incorporating uncertainty about and heterogeneity in birth outcomes and joint production to assess how the spacing of children responds to exogenous shocks in birth outcomes estimation technics are developed that use assumptions about the constraints on the information available to parental decision makers associated with the sequential nature of childbearing ignored in static models of intra household behavior section 1 examines the technology of birth spacing and its consequences for the level and distribution of child outcomes and resources in section 2 the model compares alternative estimation technics in section 3 data from a probability sample of us white married couples are used to describe intrafamily variation in birth outcomes and spacing and to test for heterogeneity bias the results in section 4 suggest that across family heterogeneity bias may be less important than within family heterogeneity bias in estimates of the effects of birth order and timing patterns of births on health results from family fixed effect of sibling models of child quality determination that ignore intrafamily substitution may be misleading section 5 estimates how birth outcome endowments and information on gender are used to estimate how differences in them affect subsequent birth timing decisions and sibling inequality results suggest that 1 the birth of 1st born children tends to be delayed among families with high income husbands highly educated parents superior health endowment or high tastes for health investments 2 the proximity of the birth of the 2nd child to that of the 1st child is a positive function of the quality of the 1st born and 3 the spacing and existence of a 3rd child is significantly related to the birth outcomes sex composition and sex ordering of the 1st and 2nd children

nutrition health birth order and seasonality intrahousehold allocation among children in rural india abstract nutrients available to children are determined largely by intrahousehold allocations there are a number of reasons why birth order may affect these allocations a model is developed to estimate critical parameters of parental preferences regarding the allocation of nutrients among their children latent variable estimates for rural south india indicate that parental preferences have productivity equity tradeoffs and parents favor older children the productivity equity tradeoff however is much less for the lean season therefore when food is scarcest parents follow more closely a pure investment strategy exposing their more vulnerable children to greater malnutrition tisk

gender and poverty issues and policies with special reference to asian developing countries abstract recent years saw the outpouring of a theoretical and empirical literature exploring the nexus between gender and poverty in developing countries this paper which provides a critical review of the literature examines the conceptual basis for a gender focused approach to poverty alleviation reviews the relevant empirical studies and data drawn principally but not exclusively from asian developing countries and explores the role of public policies to redress gender disparity the present review argues that the conceptual basis for many gender focused policies is far from well established the empirical foundations of many conventional wisdoms as well as of popular policies remain fragile due to the dearth of reliable gender segregated data and rigorous empirical studies the paper underscores the need for more careful empirical analyses as an input to formulating sound public policy with regard to gender and poverty

child gender and parental borrowing evidence from india discrimination against girls is well documented especially in asia we show that women try to level the playing field for their daughters by taking on debt but wealth asymmetry between mothers and fathers perpetuates gender inequality across generations

literacy sharing assortative mating or what labour market advantages and proximate illiteracy revisited abstract this paper explores the relationship between household literacy and the labour market outcomes of illiterate household members which basu narayan and ravallion 2002 report using household income and expenditure data from bangladesh bnr attribute a considerable wage premium for proximate illiterate women in off farm employment to labour productivity gains from intra household literacy sharing this wage premium also suggests that women may be more efficient recipients of literacy externalities than men we propose that any such relationship might not be due to higher labour productivity but may have other explanations such as systematically different and unobserved attributes of illiterate females married into literate households we also pay attention to the negative selection of illiterate females into non farm wage employment which contrary to received wisdom suggests that household literacy may not be unambiguously progressive for females we propose that the widely reported finding that

evaluating familial support for the elderly the intrahousehold allocation of medical expenditures in rural pakistan introduction in this article i examine the determinants of medical expenditures on the elderly in rural pakistani households analyzing in particular the dependence of such expenditures on the economic contribution of the elderly to household income the results for older males are contrasted with those for younger males improved life expectancies in the south asian economies as in other developing economies have generated new policy interest in the economic status of the elderly there is however little empirical evidence on this topic while the scant research on the elderly in south asia undoubtedly reflects the fact that they represent one of the smallest demographic groups in these economies it also reflects the widespread belief that they are well provided for by the intergenerational households where the vast majority of them reside with their adult children however this assumption has been questioned by a number of scholars who find that medical expenditures on the elderly are closely correlated with the elderly s individual incomes and wealth household data from pakistan support such claims data on individual medical expenditures and days of illness are available from two household surveys a panel data set collected by the international food policy research institute ifpri and from the pakistan living standards measurement survey lsms both data sets reveal a strong correlation between the number of days of illness reported by adult males and age leading one to expect a similarly strong correlation between medical expenditures and age instead the ifpri data yield a correlation that is less than one would expect given the relationship between illness and age the lsms data set which provides information on many more

changes in the distribution of male and female wages accounting for employment composition using bounds this paper examines changes in the distribution of wages using bounds to allow for the impact of nonrandom selection into work we show that worst case bounds can be informative however because employment rates in the united kingdom are often low they are not informative about changes in educational or gender wage differentials thus we explore ways to tighten these bounds using restrictions motivated from economic theory with these assumptions we find convincing evidence of an increase in inequality within education groups changes in educational differentials and increases in the relative wages of women

gender of children bargaining power and intrahousehold resource allocation in china abstract based on the prevalent son preference in china this paper proposes a new measure of relative bargaining power within the household using data from china health and nutrition survey we show that a woman with a first born son has a 3 9 percentage points greater role in household decision making than a woman with a first born daughter having a first born son improves the mother s nutrition intakes and reduces her likelihood of being underweight while thinking of these impacts as being channeled through intrahousehold bargaining power we cannot fully rule out other possible direct effects of a first born son on the outcomes

alimony rights and intrahousehold allocation of resources evidence from brazil can family policy affect well being of individuals without altering the resources available to their families this article examines the extension of alimony rights and obligations to cohabiting couples in brazil for women in intact relationships alimony rights upon dissolution should improve outside options strengthening their negotiating positions and increasing their influence over intrahousehold allocation of resources robust econometric evidence indicates that more decision power in the hands of women impacts hours worked by female adults and investments in the education of children this suggests that family policy and models of family decision making should take intrahousehold heterogeneity of preferences into account

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

estimating a household production function heterogeneity the demand for health inputs and their effects on birth weight the household production literature emphasizes that technical or biological processes condition input selection by households in their production activities along with prices and income exogenous variations in health to the extent that they are perceived by individuals heterogeneity lead to correlations between inputs and health outcomes that cannot be used to derive causal conclusions therefore estimates of health technology must be obtained from a behavioral model in which health inputs are themselves choices consistent estimates are reported of the effect of endogenous inputs such as medical care smoking and fertility on birth weight and fetal growth in the presence of health heterogeneity

reverse gender gap in schooling in bangladesh insights from urban and rural households this paper documents a reverse gender gap in secondary schooling outcomes in bangladesh drawing upon several rounds of nationally representative household survey data in terms of enrolment status and years of schooling completed boys are found to lag behind girls in the rural as well as in the urban area within the urban sample the gender gap is widest in the non metropolitan area these findings are robust to extensive control for demand and supply side determinants of schooling and remain unchanged even when we use a within household estimator we consider one hypothesis namely gender differentiated response to a conditional cash transfer program to reconcile the findings of this reverse gender gap

do parents favor boys in an optimizing model of parental allocation systematic differences in human capital investments betwen the sexes may originate in at least 3 ways 1 parents may respond to expected gender wage differentials 2 parents may respond to systematic differences by gender in the price of human capital investments 3 parental preferences may favor girls or boys in the sense that they value identical outcomes at the same cost more highly for one sex than for the other this paper analyzes the role of parental preferences in general and unequal concern in particular in the allocation of human capital investments among children the authors generalize their earlier model of the human capital investments among children to incorporate the possibility that the returns to such investments may include not only the childs own ecpected earnings but also the expected earnings of his or her spouse thus the model assumes that parents may value returns that accrue trough the marriage market as well as through education the relevant returns to education may include marrying a spouse with higher expected earnings the empirical analysis indicates that gender wage differentials like endowment differentials are mildly reinforced by the parental allocation of human capital investments marriage market outcomes are significant determinants of the allocation of human capital investments among children there is no evidence that parental preferences favor boys this study shows that parental preferences either exhibit equal concern or slightly favor gils

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

resource depletion and sustainability in small open economies abstract exogenous price changes affect the amount that a small country exporting natural resource commodities must invest to sustain its consumption level the necessary amount is given by the difference between hotelling rent and the discounted sum of future terms of trade effects capital gains the latter term is found to be large relative to the former in the case of petroleum depletion in indonesia this suggests that resource rich countries will need to invest more than previously expected to sustain their consumption levels if natural resource prices continue their long term historical decline

intrahousehold inequalities in child rights and well being a barrier to progress this paper uses unicef s multiple indicators cluster surveys cross country data to shed light on unequal investments in the wellbeing of children boys and girls within the household the paper proposes a new methodology to measure the extent of gender intrahousehold inequality and its contribution to overall levels of inequality using an l theil index decomposition the individual and joint distribution of inequality in four key indicators of child wellbeing is analyzed stunting birth registration school attendance and time spent on work and chores working hours in the search for evidence of gender bias evidence from various separate county studies had shown that the direction of the gender bias is not universal such conclusion holds when using a consistent methodology and comparable cross country datasets this paper shows that disparities inside households do not follow the same bias toward one or the other gender in all countries and the direction of the bias is not the same across indicators of wellbeing while progress in improving child wellbeing has occurred in many countries inequalities remain intrahousehold inequalities might still be considered a priority in an agenda focused on closing these progress gaps

endowments and the allocation of schooling in the family and in the marriage market the twins experiment 03 we show how comparisons between the within twin correlations of human capital outcomes across identical and nonidentical twins can be used to identify the variability in the individual specific component of endowments and the responsiveness of schooling to individual specific endowments in the family and in the marriage market even when schooling is measured with error estimates from two twins samples indicate that 27 42 percent of the variance in log earnings obesity is due to variability in individual specific endowments allocations of schooling reinforce specific endowments and individual specific earnings endowments of men and their wives schooling are negatively associated

gender inequality endogenous cultural norms and economic development this research focuses on the role played by cultural norms in the long run persistence of gender inequalities cultural norms about gender roles are considered to be endogenous and can generate gender inequality and low development traps indeed when the gender gap is internalized it leads to inegalitarian views about gender roles due to these inegalitarian beliefs boys receive more education and the initial gender gap is reinforced the existence of gender inequality traps is pointed out by the world bank as a major obstacle for economic development wdr 2006 the present article allows for a better understanding of the persistence of such traps and the means to escape

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

the impact of exogenous child mortality on fertility a waiting time regression with dynamic regressors in this paper the authors develop and implement an econometric methodology estimating a family specific exogenous component of life expectancy in order to determine the responsiveness of fertility to exogenous changes in child mortality they use a generalized waiting time regression model applied to length of life which is viewed as the output of a production process they allow for family specific heterogeneity in duration of life and for time varying explanatory variables the heterogeneity component retrieved from the production function estimation is used to estimate the impact of exogenous child mortality on a measure of fertility the data concern 1938 children from 311 families included in the 1976 malaysian family life survey this paper was previously published in econometrica chicago ill vol 51 no 3 may 1983 pp 731 49 excerpt

an existence theorem on the stationary state of income distribution and population growth through a utility maximizing process individuals derive their optimal fertility and bequest decisions both as functions of their initial socioeconomic backgrounds the combination of these two decisions form a multi type galton watson process under weak assumptions it is proved that the economy will converge to a unique stationary state which implies both a constant population growth rate and a time invariant income distribution as such this paper extends the becker willis static micro level fertility demand model to a dynamic macro level population growth model alternatively our model can be viewed as a generalization of laitners stochastic income theory where no differential fertility is allowed excerpt

heterogeneity intrafamily distribution and child health data were collected in candelaria colombia from 1968 to 1974 to evaluate the impact of child health services in all households in which there were any children under 6 years old to estimate the birth outcome equation and post birth health equation a subsample of 109 households was selected in which at least 2 children were born during the 7 year program the sample size was 238 children estimates of the parameters of the normalized weight equations were obtained using seemingly unrelated regression sur the family fixed effects procedure ffe and the lagged instrumental fixed effects technique life an illustrative dynamic model of intra family allocative behavior incorporating variations in individual child characteristics was formulated to show how both the timing of childbearing and child specific allocations vary with both family and child specific health endowments the information restrictions were used in the model associated with the sequencing of births to develop an estimation procedure which takes into account both intrafamily and interfamily heterogeneity longitudinal data on children and households compared estimates of the effects of birth order birth spacing and timing per capita food consumption inoculations and the incidence of breast feeding on the age standardized weight of children at 2 life cycle points at birth and within 6 months after birth the estimates indicated that healthier families for given income had more children and more closely spaced children but consumed no more food per capita than did less well endowed families these results imply that families behave so as to reduce inherent interfamily inequalities in child health however while the estimates suggest that the healthier the prior surviving child the more quickly parents are likely to have a subsequent child parents are also more likely to breastfeed an inherently healthier child

the power of tv cable television and women s status in india cable and satellite television have grown rapidly throughout the developing world the availability of cable and satellite television exposes viewers to new information about the outside world which may affect individual attitudes and behaviors this paper explores the effect of the introduction of cable television on gender attitudes in rural india using a three year individual level panel dataset we find that the introduction of cable television is associated with improvements in womens status we find significant increases in reported autonomy decreases in the reported acceptability of beating and decreases in reported son preference we also find increases in female school enrollment and decreases in fertility primarily via increased birth spacing the effects are large equivalent in some cases to about five years of education in the cross section and move gender attitudes of individuals in rural areas much closer to those in urban areas we argue that the results are not driven by pre existing differential trends these results have important policy implications as india and other countries attempt to decrease bias against women authors

swimming upstream trends in the gender wage differential in the 1980s using michigan panel study of income dynamics data for 1979 and 1988 we analyze how a falling gender wage gap occurred despite changes in wage structure unfavorable to low wage workers the decrease is traced to gender specific factors which more than counterbalanced changes in measured and unmeasured prices working against women supply shifts net of demand were unfavorable for women generally and hurt high skilled more than middle and low skilled women by analyzing wages we find support for the notion of a gender twist in supply and demand having its largest negative effect on high skilled women

cleaning house new perspectives on households and economic development abstract this paper provides a critical review of the recent literature on households and economic development three related points are developed 1 household activities can be analyzed in economic terms particularly if these terms are broadly defined to encompass such factors as risk and uncertainty 2 significant differences between the economic position of men women and children within the patriarchal household mean that it cannot be treated as an undifferentiated unit of analysis 3 microeconomic analysis of the household must be situated within a larger structural analysis of gender and age based inequalities and their interaction with class structure and national position within the world capitalist system

towards a theory of famine relief policy abstract this paper examines how famine mortality is related to the distribution of food consumption a theoretical model is proposed of how individual survival chances are affected by changes in consumption uncertainty in survival prospects arises from the errors made by any observer in assessing health at given current consumption the theory is used to explore two policy issues in famine relief the choice of budgetary rules for allocating emergency aid and the case for price stabilization policies during famines applications to data for two famines in south asia suggest that successful price stabilization would have had substantial benefits in reducing mortality

missing women and the price of tea in china the effect of sex specific earnings on sex imbalance economists have long argued that the sex imbalance in developing countries is caused by underlying economic conditions this paper uses exogenous increases in sex specific agricultural income caused by post mao reforms in china to estimate the effects of total income and sex specific income on sex differential survival of children increasing female income holding male income constant improves survival rates for girls whereas increasing male income holding female income constant worsens survival rates for girls increasing female income increases educational attainment of all children whereas increasing male income decreases educational attainment for girls and has no effect on boys educational attainment