where has all the bias gone detecting gender bias in the intrahousehold allocation of educational expenditure abstract the reliability of the household consumption based engel curve methodology in detecting gender bias has been called into question because it has generally failed to confirm bias even where it exists this article seeks to find explanations for this failure by exploiting a data set that has educational expenditure information at the individual level and also by aggregation at the household level i find that in the basic education age groups the discriminatory mechanism in education is via differential enrollment rates for boys and girls education expenditure conditional on enrollment is equal for boys and girls the engel curve method fails for two reasons first it models a single equation for the two stage process second even when we make individual and household level expenditure equations as similar as possible the household level equation still fails to pick up gender bias in about one third of the cases where the individual level equation shows significant bias this article

an assessment of the current structure of food demand in urban china we evaluate the current structure of food demand in urban china by using household expenditure survey data from five provinces two complementary analyses are undertaken first an aggregate analysis based on a fractional logit model is used to examine how households allocate food expenditures across the food at home fah and food away from home fafh categories this is followed by a disaggregated analysis of how households allocated their fah expenditures across 12 commodity categories a quadratic almost ideal demand system quaids is used we find evidence of significant food purchase substitution and complementarity

food preferences and nutrition in rural bangladesh t he dietary choice of households near subsistence levels of nutrient intake is one of obvious policy importance in many countries such as bangladesh national goals are set in terms of nutritional intake and there is heavy intervention in the markets for foods however little is known about the manner in which food preferences vary with food expenditure and nutrient intake the design of efficient programs to aid nutritionally deficient households in attaining minimal levels of nutrient intake requires information on all ownand cross price elasticities for both target and non target groups the net effect of a food price subsidy on the consumption of food nutrients cannot be predicted without knowledge of the complete elasticity matrix results presented below demonstrate that substitution effects can be so strong that the subsidization of certain foods quite often reduces nutrient consumption in this study demand equations for nine foods which allow for extremely flexible consumer price response are estimated from the individual budgets of 5 750 rural bangladeshi households estimation at the household level is preferred because it more readily permits the incorporation of household composition variables into the demand analysis such as household size occupation and employment status that are typically lost in aggregation there is also a greater range and variation in expenditure levels than found in grouped data this is of particular importance in the study of nutritional well being as it is the poorest households which are of special interest moreover the household sample provides sufficient degrees of freedom to estimate a simple varying parameter model which requires the estimation of 270 parameters previous econometric analysis of income class specific dietary choice has been limited and not altogether satisfactory pinstrup anderson de londono and hoover 1976 estimated complete sets of price elasticities for different income strata using frisch s scheme in order to study the impact of changes in relative prices on nutrient consumption their results are suspect because of the assumption of want independence necessary for this methodology to be valid alderman and timmer 1980 who were also concerned with studying the relationship between food price policy and nutrient intake by income classes econometrically estimated separate price coefficients for each income group by including slope dummy variables in their demand equations for rice and cassava in indonesia the inclusion of these dummy variables revealed surprisingly large differences in compensated price response across income groups although their results support the notion that poorer households respond differently to prices than the rich the limitations of their data constrained them to consider only two foods and to specify changes in price response which are discontinuous with respect to income i the formulation and estimation of the food demand equations is discussed in section ii below section iii presents the results of the estimation and discusses the nutritional implications of movements in relative food prices and other exogenous variables section iv summarizes our findings

demand for food fats and oils the role of demographic variables and government donations a systems model of u s food fats and oils demand is estimated using quarterly time series data for the period 1962 87 demographic scaling is used to incorporate demographic variables and per capita government butter donations in addition to price income and demographic demand elasticities dietary fat intake elasticities are calculated for each of the demographic characteristics included in the study all of the five own price elasticities are statistically significant as are fifteen of the twenty cross price elasticities fourteen of the fifteen demographic elasticities are statistically significant

effects of food prices and consumer income on nutrient availability economic factors such as food prices and consumer income affect food choices with consequences for the availability of nutrients a new research model is developed to estimate how the availability of 28 nutrients would change as consumers alter their food purchases in response to changes in food prices and income through the interdependent food demand relationships

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

the testing and estimation of complete demand systems on household budget surveys a recent demand system aids is extended to include family size explicitly and then estimated on indian budget data the estimation using non linear fiml is performed first on pure time series and then on pooled cross section data within and across equation restrictions are imposed and tested the principal results include u a significant price and family size effects on the budget share of an item b sensitivity of test results on homogeneity and symmetry to i rural urban data ii time series cross section and iii inclusion omission of family size c considerable difference between pure time series and pooled cross section estimates and d difference between the expenditure responses of the rural and urban consumer

sticky price models of the business cycle can the contract multiplier solve the persistence problem we construct a quantitative equilibrium model with firms setting prices in a staggered fashion and use it to ask whether monetary shocks can generate business cycle fluctuations these fluctuations include persistent movements in output along with the other defining features of business cycles like volatile investment and smooth consumption we assume that prices are exogenously sticky for a short time persistent output fluctuations require endogenous price stickiness in the sense that firms choose not to change prices much when they can do so we find that for a wide range of parameter values the amount of endogenous stickiness is small thus we find that in a standard quantitative model staggered price setting alone does not generate business cycle fluctuations

tales of fiscal adjustment fiscal adjustments why they can be expansionary this paper examines the evidence on fiscal adjustments in oecd countries from the early 1960s to today the results shed light on the recently observed phenomenon of fiscal tightening that produces non keynesian expansionary effects one interpretation is that a serious fiscal tightening increases demand wealth rises when future tax burdens decline and when interest rates decline credibility is restored and inflation or default risks abate both consumption and investment rise for this effect to produce an expansion the tightening must be sizeable and occur after a period of stress when the budget is quickly deteriorating and public debt is building up another interpretation emphasizes the supply side typically a fiscal consolidation based on tax increases is short lived to be long lasting it must include cuts in public employment transfers and government wages to be politically possible such a policy must be supported by trade unions these measures result in more efficient labour markets and boost the supply side based both on statistical evidence and on a detailed analysis of ten cases of major fiscal adjustment this article provides cautious support to the supply side view without denying a more limited role for the demand side channel alberto alesina and silvia ardagna

household demand for convenience and nonconvenience foods states the budget shares are generally more responsive to prices than to real total expenditure additionally the quantities demanded of convenience and nonconvenience foods are generally more sensitive to changes in income and own prices than to changes in cross prices with regard to demographic variates primary users of convenience foods are white households with employed household managers less than 35 years of age

the welfare state and competitiveness in all industrial countries fiscal policy is increasingly about redistribution in this paper the authors study redistribution across different types of agents in a world characterized by the presence of labor unions and distortionary taxation they show that an increase in transfers financed by distortionary taxation has nonlinear effects on unit labor costs relative to the other countries depending on the degree of centralization of the wage setting process in the labor market the authors find considerable empirical support for the model in a sample of fourteen oecd countries copyright 1997 by american economic association

the permanent effects of fiscal consolidations abstract the global financial crisis has permanently lowered the path of gdp in all advanced economies at the same time and in response to rising government debt levels many of these countries have been engaging in fiscal consolidations that have had a negative impact on growth rates we empirically explore the connections between these two facts by extending to longer horizons the methodology of blanchard and leigh 2013 regarding fiscal policy multipliers our results provide support for the presence of strong hysteresis effects of fiscal policy the large size of the effects points in the direction of self defeating fiscal consolidations as suggested by delong and summers 2012 attempts to reduce debt via fiscal consolidations have very likely resulted in a higher debt to gdp ratio through their long term negative impact on output

household demand for fats and oils two step estimation of a censored demand system a censored system of household fat and oil demand equations is estimated with a two step procedure using cross sectional data from the 1987 1988 us nationwide food consumption survey own price and total expenditure elasticities are close to unity and there is no evidence of gross substitutability compensated elasticities suggest net substitution among the products considered

effective tax rates in macroeconomics cross country estimates of tax rates on factor incomes and consumption abstract this paper proposes a method for computing tax rates using national accounts and revenue statistics using this method we construct time series of tax rates for large industrial countries the method identifies the revenue raised by different taxes at the general government level and defines aggregate measures of the corresponding tax bases this method yields estimates of effective tax rates on factor incomes and consumption consistent with the tax distortions faced by a representative agent in a general equilibrium framework these tax rates compare favorably with existing estimates of marginal tax rates and highlight important international differences in tax policy

the effect of price and income changes on food energy intake in sri lanka data is used to analyze the food acquisition behavior of households from a 1980 81 survey designed to be nationally sectorally and regionally representative of sri lanka the poor are shown to be much more responsive to price and income changes than other income groups the urban population generally exhibits lower income elasticities of demand for food commodities the poor appear to efficient substitutors thereby mitigating the effects of a price change on caloric intake the important exception is rice whose elasticity of calorie consumption with respect to price was about 4 times higher than for any other commodity the reluctance of households to substitute for rice even when faced with rising prices coupled with its large budget share show rice to be the most important consumption good higher rice prices are an important determinant of poverty for landless and urban workers moderating food prices preferably through technological change is a key ingredient to raising consumption among the poor simulations show that even if there are rapid and proportional increases in expenditures of all income groups this will not dramatically increase caloric intake among the poor however if the absolute value of the increase in real expenditures were distributed equally to all households there would be a marked increase in the of households consuming an adequate diet

demand for beef and chicken products separability and structural change several studies have indicated that the recent shift from beef to poultry in consumption is not entirely caused by changes in rela tive prices or income braschler chavas dahlgran hudson and vertin moschini and meilke frank thurman most studies of structural change have focused on red meat consumption only thurman has looked closely at the poultry market and no one has considered poultry products yet the mix of chicken products marketed changed dramat ically during the last twenty years and should have influenced aggregate meat demand the share of broiler slaughter marketed as whole birds declined from 74 in 1965 to 28 in 1985 while cut up parts and processed chick en products increased from 26 to 72 whole birds are inferior goods and cut up parts and processed chicken are normal goods haidacher et al the shift in chicken prod uct mix away from whole birds should have increased the preference for total chicken in this article two related questions are ad dressed first do consumers allocate expendi tures among meats by animal origin or by product type second does disaggregation of meat into products in a meat demand model give insight into the causes of structural

macroeconomic effects from government purchases and taxes for u s annual data that include world war ii the estimated multiplier for temporary defense spending is 0 4 0 5 contemporaneously and 0 6 0 7 over 2 years if the change in defense spending is permanent gauged by ramey s defense news variable the multipliers are higher by 0 1 0 2 since all estimated multipliers are significantly less than 1 greater spending crowds out other components of gdp particularly investment the lack of good instruments prevents estimation of reliable multipliers for nondefense purchases multipliers in the literature of two or more likely reflect reverse causation from gdp to nondefense purchases increases in average marginal income tax rates measured by a newly constructed time series have significantly negative effects on gdp when interpreted as a tax multiplier the magnitude is around 1 1 the combination of the estimated spending and tax multipliers implies that the balanced budget multiplier for defense spending is negative we have some evidence that tax changes affect gdp mainly through substitution effects rather than wealth effects

austerity in the aftermath of the great recession abstract cross country differences in austerity defined as government purchases below forecast account for 75 of the observed cross sectional variation in gdp in advanced economies during 2010 2014 statistically austerity is associated with lower gdp lower inflation and higher net exports a multi country dsge model calibrated to 29 advanced economies generates effects of austerity consistent with the data counterfactuals suggest that eliminating austerity would have substantially reduced output losses in europe austerity was so contractionary that debt to gdp ratios in some countries increased as a result of endogenous reductions in gdp and tax revenue

the demand for canadian fats and oils a case study of advertising effectiveness the fats and oils market in canada is characterized by generic butter and brand margarine shortening vegetable oils advertising in this study the economic interrelationships in the consumption of fats and oils are examined and the effectiveness of the advertising programs is evaluated the two stage demand model used is made up of a single equation determining canadian aggregate expenditure on fats and oils and an expenditure share system derived from a translog indirect utility function for each of four products butter margarine shortening and vegetable oils the demand for individual fats and oils is significantly affected by lagged advertising expenditure levels habit persistence and a time trend as well as the traditional variables of price and expenditure

an empirical analysis of gender bias in education spending in paraguay summary gender affects household spending in two areas that have been widely studied in the literature one strand documents that greater female bargaining power within households results in a variety of shifts in household production and consumption one important source of bargaining power is ownership of assets especially land another strand examines the gender bias in spending on children this paper addresses both strands simultaneously in this paper differences in spending on education are examined empirically both at the household and individual levels results are mixed though the balance of evidence weighs toward pro male bias in spending on education at the household level results also indicate that the relationship between asset ownership and female bargaining power within the household are contingent on the type of asset

factors affecting the timing of purchasing of butter margarine and blends a competing goods analysis the purchase dynamics of a subset of food fats and oils are investigated using event history analysis applied to a panel of u s households the consumer behavior examined is the switching between purchases of butter margarine and butter margarine blends across purchase occasions we find that price previous purchases seasonality and household size and composition affect product switching probability

demographic variables in demand analysis in this paper the authors discuss five procedures for incorporating demographic variables into theoretically plausible demand systems translating scaling and the gorman reverse gorman and implicit prais houthakker procedures these five procedures are used to incorporate a single demographic variable the number of children in a household into the generalized ces demand system using household budget data for the united kingdom for the period 1966 1972 excerpt

sticky prices in the euro area a summary of new micro evidence this paper summarises the vast evidence on micro price setting recently obtained for euro area countries we consider studies with micro data on consumer and producer prices as well as survey information the main findings are 1 prices in the euro area are sticky and stickier than in the us 2 downward price rigidity is only slightly more marked than upward price rigidity 3 heterogeneity and asymmetries are observed in price setting and 4 the relevance of theories that explain price stickiness such as implicit or explicit contracts marginal costs and coordination failure is confirmed whereas menu costs pricing thresholds and costly information explanations are judged much less relevant by firms jel c25 d40 e31

household production in the philippines a non neoclassical approach the starting point of any economic analysis is a microeconomic theory of the decision making unit by providing a set of explicit assumptions regarding individual choices a microeconomic theory lays the necessary foundation for the explanation of economic behavior just as a theory of the firm underlies analyses of market production a theory of the family underlies analyses of household production explanations of long run trends such as fertility decline grow out of assumptions regarding the nature of household decision making developing what they term the economic approach to human behavior gary becker and other neoclassical economists forcefully argue that household behavior is motivated primarily by a collective concern for economic efficiency they assume that households seek to maximize exogenously given joint utility functions and they hypothesize that differences in household behavior represent efficient responses to differences in the prices and incomes which households face this approach provides the foundation for an explanation of fertility decline based on long run changes in relative prices associated with economic development simply stated the argument runs as follows as the rate of return to human capital rises and levels of education increase the cost of rearing children goes up as higher wages draw women out of the household into the labor force the opportunity cost of mothers time goes up further increasing the cost of children the demand for children decreases and fertility levels gradually adjust 2 the assumption that joint utility functions are exogenous constant over time and vary randomly if at all across households is crucial to this argument systematic differences in unobservable joint utility functions could seriously confound the interpretation of observed relationships between changes in household behavior and changes in rela

can government purchases stimulate the economy this essay briefly reviews the state of knowledge about the government spending multiplier drawing on theoretical work aggregate empirical estimates from the united states as well as cross locality estimates i assess the likely range of multiplier values for the experiment most relevant to the stimulus package debate a temporary deficit financed increase in government purchases i conclude that the multiplier for this type of spending is probably between 0 8 and 1 5 jel e23 e62 h50

deficits public debt dynamics and tax and spending multipliers cutting government spending can increase the budget defi cit at zero interest rates according to a standard new keynesian model calibrated with bayesian methods similarly increasing sales taxes can increase the budget defi cit rather than reduce it both results suggest limitations of austerity measures at zero interest rates running budget defi cits can be either expansionary or contractionary depending on how they interact with expectations about long run taxes and spending the effect of fi scal policy action is thus highly dependent on the policy regime a successful stimulus therefore needs to specify how the budget is managed not only in the short but also in the medium and long runs

gender biased redistribution and intra household distribution abstract this paper examines the implications of income redistribution from men to women for the welfare of married women and children we develop a cournot model of a two person household where agents provide market labor and allocate their spending between a private consumption good and goods for children we show that under plausible restrictions on individual preferences small redistributions to married women reduce their welfare this happens because the income redistribution induces men to reduce their own spending on children by more than the amount redistributed a relative increase in women s independent earnings may however improve children s welfare

nutrient elasticities in a complete food demand system this study explores the linkage of the determinants of food choice with consumer nutrient availability by developing a procedure to measure changes in nutrient availability as the demand for food items change it uses demand elasticities from traditional demand analysis to estimate elasticities of changes in the nutritional content of consumer diets the procedure is applied to estimate nutrient elasticities for fifteen nutrients in response to changes in thirty five food prices and per capita income

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

modeling farmers decisions on child labor and schooling in the cocoa sector a multinomial logit analysis in cote d ivoire since 2000 children working in the cocoa sector of c ote d ivoire have found themselves in the media spotlight this situation has assumed particular importance because approximately 40 of the world s cocoa production occurs in c ote d ivoire concerned parties have since taken great interest in this thorny issue there is a need to better understand the reality of child labor utilization in this sector this article investigates child labor issues in the cocoa sector of c ote d ivoire in conjunction with schooling status of children the study is based on a survey done in 2002 over a representative sample of more than 11 000 members of cocoa households the multinomial logit model is used to capture choice probabilities across work and or school options the results reveal that child labor in cocoa farms and nonenrollment in schools are significant moreover many children are involved in potentially dangerous and or harmful tasks data also highlight gender and age dimensions in the participation of children in tasks and the way labor is allocated econometric results generally indicate that the gender and age of children whether or not the child is the biological child of the household head parents education the origin of the farmer household welfare household size the household dependency ratio the size of other perennial crop farms the number of sharecroppers working with the household head and communities characteristics are all pertinent in explaining the child work schooling outcome in the cocoa sector of c ote d ivoire

fiscal policy profits and investment this paper evaluates the effects of fiscal policy on investment using a panel of oecd countries we find a sizeable negative effect of public spending and in particular of its wage component on profits and on business investment this result is consistent with different theoretical models in which government employment creates wage pressure for the private sector various types of taxes also have negative effects on profits but interestingly the effects of government spending on investment are larger than those of taxes our results can explain the so called non keynesian i e expansionary effects of fiscal adjustments jel e22 e62

demographic effects in demand analysis estimation of the quadratic expenditure system using microdata the purpose of this paper is to estimate a complete theoretically plausible system of demand equations on microdata using the rich detail of these data to investigate the impact of demographic variables on demand behavior the system which we estimate is the quadratic expenditure system qes introduced by howe pollak and wales we evaluate four methods for incorporating demographic variables into the demand system three of these procedures imply parameter restrictions while the fourth does not tests on the restrictions imply that for our data unrestricted estimation yields significantly greater explanatory power

the laffer curve revisited abstract laffer curves for the us the eu 14 and individual european countries are compared using a neoclassical growth model featuring constant frisch elasticity cfe preferences new tax rate data is provided the us can maximally increase tax revenues by 30 with labor taxes and 6 with capital taxes we obtain 8 and 1 for the eu 14 there 54 of a labor tax cut and 79 of a capital tax cut are self financing the consumption tax laffer curve does not peak endogenous growth and human capital accumulation affect the results quantitatively household heterogeneity may not be important while transition matters greatly

quantity and quality effects of advertising a demand system approach quantity and quality effects of advertising are investigated in this article a censored demand system is estimated for fish beef pork and other meats using norwegian household data in the demand model generic fish advertising and meat advertising is introduced as demand shifters and at the same time unit values are treated as endogenous the unit values capture the quality of the commodities empirical findings show that advertising can have both quantity and quality effects on household demand

women s income and household expenditure patterns gender or flow evidence from niger be targeted for credit and small enterprise programs not only because their income boosts household income but also because it meets global societal objectives such as increased spending on food and children s goods some researchers however have speculated that the observed impact of female income share on household expenditure patterns does not reflect gender differentiated preferences but rather reflects the differential lumpiness seasonality of male and female income flows that is women may earn income in flows that ensure a higher propensity to purchase certain items

are government spending multipliers greater during periods of slack evidence from 20th century historical data a key question that has arisen during recent debates is whether government spending multipliers are larger during periods of slack some researchers and policymakers have argued that while government spending multipliers are estimated to be modest on average they might become greater during times when resources are underutilized auerbach and gorodnichenko 2012 forthcoming henceforth ag test this hypothesis and find larger multipliers dur

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

fiscal policy in general equilibrium this paper studies four classic fiscal policy experiments within a quantitatively restricted neoclassical model the authors main findings are as follows 1 permanent changes in government purchases can lead to short run and long run output multipliers that exceed one 2 permanent changes in government purchases induce larger effects than temporary changes 3 the financing decision is quantitatively more important than the resource cost of changes in government purchases and 4 public investment has dramatic effects on private output and investment these findings stem from important dynamic interactions of capital and labor absent in earlier equilibrium analyses of fiscal policy copyright 1993 by american economic association

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

output spillovers from fiscal policy in this paper we estimate the cross country spillover effects of government purchases on output for a large number of oecd countries following the methodology in auerbach and gorodnichenko 2012a b we allow these multipliers to vary smoothly according to the state of the economy and use real time forecast data to purge policy innovations of their predictable components we also consider the responses of other key macroeconomic variables our findings suggest that cross country spillovers have an important impact and also confirm those of our earlier papers that fiscal shocks have a larger impact when the affected country is in recession

the output effect of fiscal consolidation plans abstract we show that the correct experiment to evaluate the effects of a fiscal adjustment is the simulation of a multi year fiscal plan rather than of individual fiscal shocks simulation of fiscal plans adopted by 16 oecd countries over a 30 year period supports the hypothesis that the effects of consolidations depend on their design fiscal adjustments based upon spending cuts are much less costly in terms of output losses than tax based ones and have especially low output costs when they consist of permanent rather than stop and go changes in taxes and spending the difference between tax based and spending based adjustments appears not to be explained by accompanying policies including monetary policy it is mainly due to the different responses of business confidence and private investment

hysteresis and fiscal policy abstract empirical studies support the hysteresis hypothesis that recessions have a permanent effect on the level of output we analyze the implications of hysteresis for fiscal policy in a dsge model we assume a simple learning by doing mechanism where demand driven changes in employment can affect the level of productivity permanently leading to hysteresis in output we show that the fiscal output multiplier is much larger in the presence of hysteresis and that the welfare multiplier of fiscal policy the consumption equivalent change in welfare for one dollar change in public spending is positive negative in the presence absence of hysteresis the main benefit of accommodative fiscal policy in the presence of hysteresis is to diminish the damage of a recession to the long term level of productivity and thus output

budget share demographic translation and the aggregate almost ideal demand system abstract this paper introduces budget share demographic translation in the almost ideal demand system aids and explores its implications for aggregation over consuming units it os shown that under certain conditions the joint distribution of expenditure and demographic characteristics plays an explicit role in the aggregate aids empirical evidence based on italian data is provided and the implied expenditure pattern for a number of combinations of expenditures and household characteristics derived from the estimated aggregate aids the empirical results suggest that the usual rejection of the homogeneity restriction in aggregate demand systems might have to do with the improper treatment of the aggregation issue

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

gender bias investments in children and bequests the impacts of pure sex preference and differential earnings opportunities by gender on investments in children are modelled with altruism if bequest constraints do not bind human investments are privately efficient with the higher earning gender receiving more education education does not depend on parental wealth the gender differential in bequests is ambiguous however even in this case when bequest constraints bind education may depend on wealth and it is also possible for the gender with better earnings opportunities to get less education the model is tested with data from philippine villages where bequest constraints are generally nonbinding the schooling differential slightly favors daughters estimated bequest behavior however reflects pure sex preference in terms of our model copyright 1995 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

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

do measures of monetary policy in a var make sense no in many vector autoregressions vars monetary policy shocks are identified with the least squares residuals from a regression of the federal funds rate on an assortment of variables such regressions appear to be structurally fragile and are at odds with other evidence on the nature of the u s federal reserve s reaction function furthermore the residuals from these regressions show little correlation across various vars or with funds rate shocks that are derived from forward looking financial markets my results provide a sharp critique of current monetary vars

family decision making for educational expenditure new evidence from survey data for nigeria this study examines the determinants of educational expenditures by households in nigeria data from the nigerian general household survey panel 2012 2013 wave 2 was used and a double hurdle mode

fiscal policy with limited time commitment we propose a theory of optimal fiscal policy consistent with the observation that governments typically inherit their predecessors plans and formulate their policies over a finite future horizon we use this framework which we call limited time commitment ltc to make two contributions first in a general stochastic model we show that under an intuitive sufficient condition a chain of successive governments with ltc sustains the full commitment fc ramsey equilibrium this equivalence result clarifies in which cases existing recursive methods to solve for fc plans have a positive interpretation based on partial commitment we apply this result in two benchmark models of optimal fiscal policy with and without capital in which the fc policy is time inconsistent second we investigate the implications of ltc in a model of capital taxation in which the fc outcome cannot be achieved with finite commitment we show that the internalisation of near future tax distortions represents a key distinction with respect to the literature on no commitment nc in a calibrated version of the model we find that a single year of fiscal commitment leads to large welfare gains approximately a third of the difference between fc and nc finally we use ltc to analyse commitment to different fiscal instruments and to study the importance of state contingency in fiscal plans