the determinants of teenage schooling in jamaica rich vs poor females vs males the belief that schooling is an important way to reduce poverty and increase social mobility has lead to large government sponsored investment in education in developing countries jamaica has an impressive literacy and primary enrolment rate yet the ability of its secondary school system to enhance social mobility and reduce inequality is limited regression results from a nationally representative household survey show that family background variables parental education and income are important determinants of secondary school enrolment and income is the single most important determinant of enrolment in an elite high school with the impact being twice as large for females part of the income effect is shown to represent unobserved community heterogeneity one conclusion is that the recent cost sharing education policy of the jamaican government if applied selectively to the elite academic high schools will fall disproportionately upon rich households

dynamic coordination failures and the efficiency of the firm this paper examines the role of coordination devices such as work norms in creating and sustaining inefficient organizational practices in firms in a dynamic environment the role of signalling norms and product market competition in alleviating such inefficiencies is also examined in particular we show that cournot competition may increase the inefficiency of organizational practices

economic and other determinants of infant and child mortality in small developing countries the case of central america and the caribbean inter country differences in infant and child mortality are explained by looking at demographic economic health and educational factors a model is presented in which the infant mortality rate the child mortality rate and the birth rate are endogenous the model is tested using cross national multiple regression analysis and simulations the presence of simultaneity is confirmed introducing non economic factors transforms the character of the relationship between exogenous and endogenous variables from a diminishing returns to an increasing returns one the role played by public expenditure in education vaccination coverage low birth weight female schooling number of nurses access to safe water or malnutrition can be assessed as well as that played by structural adjustment variables such as the inflation rate or the external debt to gnp ratio infant and child mortality can be diminished everywhere in the region with relatively small amounts of expenditure disappointing outcomes in som

raising primary school enrolment in developing countries the relative importance of supply and demand abstract few policies are as universally accepted as raising primary school enrolment in developing countries but the policy levers for achieving this goal are not straightforward this paper merges household survey data with detailed school supply characteristics from official sources in order to estimate the relative impact of demand and supply side determinants of rural primary school enrolment in mozambique policy simulations based on a set of plausible interventions show that in rural mozambique building more schools or raising adult literacy will have a larger impact on primary school enrolment rates than interventions that raise household income when relative costs are considered adult literacy campaigns are nearly 10 times more cost effective than the income intervention and 1 5 to 2 5 times better than building more schools

emigration and wages in source countries evidence from mexico abstract this paper examines empirically the effect of mexican emigration to the united states on wages in mexico using data from the mexican and us censuses from 1970 to 2000 the main result in the paper is that emigration has a strong and positive effect on mexican wages there is also evidence for increasing wage inequality in mexico due to emigration simple welfare calculations based on a labor demand supply framework suggest that the aggregate welfare loss to mexico due to emigration is small however there is a significant distributional impact between labor and other factors

international migration and real wages is there any neo classical ambiguity abstract recent research has shown that while labor emigration increases the nominal wage rate the impact on the real wage rate remains quite ambiguous the present paper reexamines the issue under the standard two factor two commodity international trade model normally employed for this purpose the principal finding of this paper is that once the problem is correctly formulated and analyzed introducing utility maximizing consumers no such ambiguity exists indeed labor emigration always leads to an increase in the welfare real wage of labor in the source country

rescuing gender from the poverty trap the new poverty agenda is seen as incorporating gender within a new broader concept of poverty lipton and maxwell 1992 capable of measuring evaluating and redressing gender bias along with poverty reduction policies based on labor intensive growth targeted social services and safety nets multilateral positions on gender and development gad for their part also stress the poverty of women as a primary justification for development interventions designed to improve the position of women it is argued here however that the concept of poverty cannot serve as a proxy for the subordination of women that antipoverty policies cannot be expected to improve necessarily the position of women and that there is no substitute for a gender analysis which transcends class divisions and material definitions of deprivation the instrumental interest in women as the means to achieve development objectives such as poverty reduction may ultimately undermine gad gender appears to have collapsed into a poverty trap this essay raises a call for help or at least a discussion about the relative benefits of captivity vs escape

note on international differences in service prices and some related empirical phenomena abstract this paper provides an alternative explanation of some important stylized facts of development including the phenomenon of international differences in service prices in terms of differences in factor endowments between countries in so doing this paper advances a general equilibrium model of a small open economy which features non traded goods as well as demand factors thereby incorporating important economic aspects which were neglected by many others an interesting finding which emerges from this exercise is that many puzzles in development can be explained simply in terms of differences in factor endowments between countries

determinants of child mortality health and nutrition in a developing country abstract child health and nutrition status are important determinants of adult productivities and earnings and thus are an important channel of intergenerational socioeconomic mobility building upon economic models of household behavior we investigate the determinants of child mortality and health and nutrition status in regions defined by the degree of urbanization in the developing country of nicaragua and offer some policy suggestions our estimates suggest that determinants differ significantly across regions income is not an important factor there is an inverse relation with number of siblings and there are positive associations with calorie intake schooling except in the relatively low income rural areas the availability of refrigeration and the quality of sewage systems

consumer demand and household production the relationship between fertility and child mortality forces which link biological and behavioral factors to infant mortality and fertility in the united states are examined estimates can be arrived at if all of the important types of behavior affecting infant survival prices and income constraints facing households are diligently gathered using equations to determine the relationship between a family health endowment index in conjunction with a childs health information about optimal prenatal and postnatal behavior can be estimated and observed this estimate which is strongly a factor of parental and environmental health related factors attempts to characterize the biological effects of parents behavior on birthweight gestation and the rate of fetal growth another estimate presented is one which establishes a link between biological effects of birth order on infant mortality in this analysis factors such as medical care during pregnancy mothers rate of smoking mothers age duration of breastfeeding mothers race and childs sex were included household socioeconomic and health data were also estimated in order to understand state and county ability to provide adequate health facilities for pre and postnatal maternal care in particular results suggest that child mortality declines in developed countries and that mothers seek prenatal medical care in early stages of their pregnancy when risk is anticipated further study of the differential pattern of black and white fertility behavior in regard to seeking medical care is warranted

international migration non traded goods and economic welfare in the source country abstract this paper examines the economic effects of emigration in a source country producing both traded and non traded commodities it is shown that even if the economy faces fixed terms of trade emigration can still affect the welfare of the non migrants and the direction of the effect in this context will always be negative

uncertain infant mortality learning and life cycle fertility this article examines the links between infant mortality and fertility in an environment with unobserved heterogeneity in infant mortality risk across mothers in such an environment replacement behavior i e the fertility response to an experienced child death might be influenced by mothers learning about a family specific component of infant mortality risk i explicitly introduce learning by mothers in a dynamic stochastic model of life cycle marital fertility and i estimate the model s structural parameters using malaysian panel data the framework is used to estimate replacement rates and to correct for birth selectivity in the estimation of the relationship between infant mortality risk and health inputs

illegal immigration a supply side analysis abstract this paper analyzes the supply side determinants of illegal immigration using a three sector general equilibrium model of the source country agricultural liberalization raises illegal immigration while liberalization of the high tech sector reduces it in contrast capital mobility in the source country renders trade policy ineffective for controlling illegal immigration paradoxically increased enforcement by the host country may raise source country unskilled wages although illegal immigration falls finally under capital mobility a rise in the source country restrictions on capital inflow raises the level of illegal immigration and reduces the effectiveness of border enforcement efforts by the host country

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

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

social cohesion and the evolution of altruism abstract in this paper we propose a stylized model to study how cohesion may affect the spread and consolidation of altruism in a large population where agents are involved in a local public good contribution game with their neighbors we show that if the contribution cost is moderate neither too high nor too low cooperation can invade and dominate the population if and only if group cohesion displays an intermediate value this reflects an interesting non monotonicity of cohesion in the evolution of altruism while some of it is needed to internalize the benefits of cooperation too much cohesion prevents the spread of altruism among the population at large

are urban poverty and undernutrition growing some newly assembled evidence abstract the population of the developing world is becoming more urban are poverty and undernutrition beginning to relocate to urban areas as well we use survey data on poverty from eight countries and on child undernutrition from 14 countries to address this question using data from the past 15 20 years we find that in a majority of countries the absolute number of poor and undernourished individuals living in urban areas has increased as has the share of overall poverty and undernourishment coming from urban areas given these trends and the current stock of knowledge as to the levels determinants and solutions to urban poverty and undernutrition we argue for more research on these issues

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

international migration non traded goods and economic welfare in a two class economy a reply abstract this paper sketches a formal model of an economy producing traded and non traded goods in which two classes of individuals are differentiated each owning different endowments of capital and labor and allocating different proportions of their income to the consumption of each commudity the effects of emigration on prices income distribution and the real income of each class is then examined

can buy me love the effect of child welfare expenditures on maltreatment outcomes i consider the effect of state level child welfare expenditures on child abuse victimization and fatality rates the main result is that these expenditures are strongly associated with improved child maltreatment outcomes further the well known negative association between income and child abuse is overstated if one fails to control for relevant policy differences that are correlated with economic circumstances the effect of income diminishes further upon controlling for social attitudes correlated with income the source of identification is a set of large and explicitly exogenous changes in child welfare expenditures induced by the circa 2000 recession i show that endogeneity problems are small and tend to work against the result

gender poverty and deprivation evidence from the republic of guinea the article examines the relationship between gender and consumption poverty and between gender and deprivation in the republic of guinea national household survey data reveal that women are not more likely than men to be consumption poor or to suffer greater consumption poverty participatory poverty assessment data from the village of kamatiguia reveal that women are worse off than men when deprivation includes inter alia excessive work load and reduced decision making authority when consumption poverty poorly correlates with other dimensions of deprivation it should not be the sole guide for equity based policy intervention

alternative definitions of headship and the feminisation of income poverty in post apartheid south africa abstract in measuring gender differences in the risk of income poverty many studies use female headship as a proxy for gender however a number of well documented concerns with the use of self reported headship as an analytical category have suggested that headship is often a relatively blunt unit of analysis against the backdrop of a large and growing difference in income poverty rates between self reported female and male headed households in post apartheid south africa this study considers several alternative definitions of headship that have been proposed in the development literature the findings suggest that there is an association between self reported female headship and a female household member being identified as the main breadwinner however the conventional definition of headship is likely to underestimate the growing risk of income poverty in female headed households relative to male headed households compared with several alternative definitions the findings also suggest that alte

the impact of education income and mortality on fertility in jamaica abstract the socioeconomic determinants of cumulative and recent fertility are investigated with micro data from jamaica a middle income country with low rates of infant mortality and total fertility infant mortality has a significant nonlinear influence on fertility peaking at a mortality rate of 0 46 both education and income have strong negative effects on births but the impact of education is larger for rural women the birth elasticities are 0 15 and 0 45 for income and education respectively finally the transmission of the education effect appears to be through raising the value of time of the woman rather than changing preferences

the impact of international migration on real wages another look abstract this paper examines the issue of how emigration alters real wages in the source country the analysis is carried out first using the two class framework developed by rivera batiz 1984 and then by means of a simple model of scale economies and imperfect competition our results indicate that within these contexts real wages are likely to decline in response to emigration if 1 the migrants possess a large fraction of physical or human capital that they take with them when migration occurs or 2 emigration reduces the scale of operation of domestic firms our conclusions are compared to those of quibria 1989

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

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 effect of economic opportunity and family background on adolescent cohabitation on adolescent cohabitation and childbearing among low income blacks this article uses a hazards model permitting continuous covariates and fixed effects to estimate the effect of local employment opportunity and family background on the cohabitation and childbearing of black youths from low income households support is found for w j wilson s hypothesis that employment opportunity encourages the formation of cohabitational unions as well as for the opportunity cost hypothesis that employment opportunity discourages childbearing outside such unions however the latter effect appears to be larger suggesting that the opportunity cost hypothesis is the primary channel through which higher employment rates result in lower rates of illegitimacy among underclass youths

the poverty and heterogeneity among female headed households revisited the case of panama abstract investigating whether female headed households fhhs are particularly disadvantaged requires more systematic means of comparing poverty than are typically found in past studies in panama while fhhs as a whole appear to be better off on average such results are somewhat sensitive to assumptions about economies of scale in household consumption more disaggregated analysis reveals that particular segments of fhhs particularly self reported fhhs with common law partners living in urban areas are disadvantaged in both consumption and some nonconsumption dimensions thus less systematic analysis could fail to identify such pockets of poverty that might deserve special policy attention

international migration and real wages a resolution note the authors examine the impact of international labor migration on wages in country of origin two types of emigration are distinguished bundled emigration which can result in a reduction of real wages and pure labor emigration which results in an increase in real wages annotation

the economic and demographic status of female headed households in rural botswana analyzes the economic and demographic status of female headed households in botswana where insufficient economic opportunities force many men to live and work away from home the analysis is based on the rural income distribution survey conducted in 1974 75 by the central statistical office of botswana in which 957 households containing 6475 individuals were interviewed once a month for 23 months the relevant items surveyed were age and sex of household nembers amount and sources of income identity and value of assets use of time extent of education and sex of perceived head of household the analysis recognizes 4 types of households male head with male aged 20 64 present 452 male head with no male 20 64 present 77 female head with male aged 20 64 present 131 and female head with no male aged 20 64 present 277 the primary analysis consists of a comparison of the 1st and 4th of these groups categories 2 and 3 are intermediate positions and their characteristics are less clear cut the income distribution in rural botswana is more unequal than in many other developing countries with female headed households faring especialy poorly on a per adult equivalent basis the welfare attained by members of female headed households is nearly 25 lower than that attained in male headed households such is the case despite the fact that women in botswana have been shown to compare favorably with men in regard to education willingness to work agricultural know how and entrepreneurial ability reasons for womens lower economic status in this country are discussed and policy suggestions to overcome this discrepancy are made

effects of schooling on fertility labor supply and investments in children with evidence from brazil this study examined the impact of schooling on fertility decline in brazil brazils fertility decline began with few organized family planning programs and continued during periods of economic growth and recession it is argued that the link between schooling and fertility decline occurred through parents investment in producing healthy well educated children and trading off quantity for quality data were obtained from retrospective fertility histories among over 100000 women who participated in the pnad household survey in 1984 fertility decline was only weakly associated with increased female labor force participation the theoretical background suggests that schooling affects fertility investments in children and the labor market child survival varied widely between women with no schooling and women with 11 years of schooling mean schooling for males and females rose steadily over time the most rapid increase occurred for 1940 54 birth cohorts the percentage of women with under 1 year of schooling declined steadily for men and women and was faster for women under 10 for the youngest cohort an increase in wifes schooling from 0 4 years was associated with a decline in children by age 30 years of 0 85 births for younger women and 0 60 births for older women a model predicted 68 of actual fertility decline in 1935 39 and 1951 53 cohorts the effect of husbands schooling disappeared after 8 years of schooling while wifes effects continued to be negative labor force participation was less at lower levels of education schooling strongly effected measures of child quality

program conditionality and food security the impact of progresa and procampo transfers in rural mexico this paper examines the progresa and procampo cash transfer programs in mexico and evaluates their impact on household food security and nutrition these two programs differ in their targeting and design progresa is aimed at women and program conditionality is linked to current consumption and human capital investment procampo benefits male farmers and program conditionality is linked to agricultural production the main question addressed by the paper is whether a cash transfer program geared to agricultural production can have the same impact on food security as a cash transfer program geared to consumption through purchases our results suggest that monetary payments linked to a productive asset land can have as large or larger impact on food security as cash transfers not linked to a productive asset we show that both programs boost total food consumption and caloric intake in similar proportions however increased food security is achieved through different channels for progresa through purchases while for procampo through investment in home production this suggests that the choice of program design depends on objectives beyond total food consumption and caloric intake such as consumption from specific food categories diversity of food consumption investment in agricultural production and the degree of access to retail food markets

competition and culture in an evolutionary process of equilibrium selection a simple example abstract competition tends to promote efficient equilibrium behavior through the higher survival of the organizations say firms that adopt it on the other hand culture understood as the inherited social pattern of behavior may induce certain short run inertias this paper analyzes a dynamic model of the struggle between these two forces in the evolution of alternative stable configurations of social behavior journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 l20

competition and the evolution of efficiency abstract this paper presents an evolutionary model of the relationship between inter firm competition and intra firm organizational or x efficiency we model x inefficiency within the firm as a prisoner s dilemma effort monitoring problem whose evolution is influenced by external competitive pressure from other firms a closed form stochastic equilibrium displaying survival of the fittest dynastic cycles is derived and analyzed the main result is that there exists a well defined sense in which competition is a surprisingly powerful force for efficiency

governmental interventions and household behavior in a developing country anticipating the unanticipated consequences of social programs abstract estimates of the joint effects of governmental health education and family planning programs as well as sources of water on fertility child mortality and schooling are obtained from combined district level and household level data from rural india the estimates are used both to test the implications of a model of household decision making and to assess the effectiveness of the joint public provision of such services in shifting resources from increasing family size to augmenting human capital per person the results appear consistent with household optimizing behavior and suggest that reductions in the costs of medical services contraceptives and schooling and the improvement of water sources are mutually reinforcing alternatives for implementing the joint policy goals of reduced population growth and increased human capital formation

household food security and child nutrition the interaction of income and gender of household head abstract data from kenya and malawi suggest that food security and preschooler nutritional status are influenced by the interaction of income and gender of the head of household rather than simply one or the other not only is household food security influenced by total household income but the proportion of income controlled by women has a positive and significant influence on household caloric intake households were disaggregated not simply in male and female headed households but female headed households were further disaggregated into de jure legal head of household is a woman and de facto female headed households male head of household is absent more than 50 of the time in both kenya and malawi the de facto female headed households had the lowest income despite this low income preschoolers nutritional status was significantly better than in the higher income male headed and de jure female headed households the ability to improve nutritional status in a low income environment in the de facto female headed households is related to a combination of child feeding practices and other nurturing behavior the findings suggest that interventions that exploit incentives to invest in children can provide more immediate improvements in child health and nutrition where sustained income growth is possible only in the long term

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

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

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

the effects of male and female labor supply on commodity demands we examine the effects of male and female labor supply on household demands and present a simple and robust test for the separability of commodity demands from labor supply using data on individual households from six years of the uk fes we estimate a demand system for seven goods which includes hours and participation dummies as conditioning variables allowance is made for the possible endogeneity of these conditioning labor supply variables we find that separability is rejected furthermore we present evidence that ignoring the effects of labor supply leads to bias in the parameter estimates

neoliberal economic policies and infant and child mortality simulation analysis of a chilean paradox abstract the paradox of deteriorating living standards for the poorest coexisting with declining infant and child mortality rates during the 1970s is explained by a simultaneous model where these rates and the birth rate are endogenous partial and general equilibrium results conflict some apparently satisfactory policy tools have counterproductive impacts action on small groups of selected policy variables is more effective than overall economic and social welfare expansion and policy effects differ according to social class the role of midwife visits average real earnings and cheap energy for poor urban households are emphasized perversely high unemployment also contributed to the actual mortality decline during the period

the effects of employment while pregnant on health at birth today many pregnant women take a brief period of time off from work to give birth in this paper i identify the effects of pregnancy employment on health at birth my initial results show that pregnancy employment has beneficial effects however these effects often become statistically insignificant when i control for earnings from pregnancy employment when i exclusively examine women employed prior to the pregnancy and when i examine siblings in fixed effects models i conclude that beneficial effects of pregnancy employment are partially due to increased family income via earnings during the pregnancy and partially due to unobserved heterogeneity there is no evidence that increased female labor force participation adversely affects health at birth

gender headship and intrahousehold resource allocation abstract household head as reported in household surveys may not always identify the main economic provider and decision maker within the household research based on this definition of headship may lead to misleading conclusions on the link between gender and poverty treating female headed households as a homogenous group can also be inappropriate results from jamaica show that it is not female headedness per se that is associated with child welfare but the absence of a potential female decision maker within the household

heterogeneity in the intrahousehold allocation of international remittances evidence from philippine households abstractthis article shows that heterogeneity in the intrahousehold allocation of remittances sent by temporary international migrant workers exists among households in the philippines and may be attributable to the absence of the spouse suggesting moral hazard and to the gender and educational attainment of the household head indicating differences in preferences glm estimates and post estimation tests reveal that male heads spend more on alcohol and tobacco that the presence of a female decision maker in a household increases allocations to goods that improve the welfare of the children and that household heads with less formal education allocate more to education

mortality decline in the low income world causes and consequences the causes and consequences of the mortality decline that has occurred in developing countries over the course of the twentieth century are reviewed influential factors identified include female education and improved nutrition annotation

longevity complementarities under competing risks many of the high expenditure health programs established by international organizations or national and subnational governments involve disease specific interventions such as measles vaccinations hiv education programs mammogram screening malaria prevention and lung cancer research typically these programs are evaluated solely upon the success or failure of their impact on the targeted disease this paper argues that such an exclusive evaluation may significantly underestimate the overall effect of disease specific interventions when multiple risks act as competing forces on life we suggest that programs that target one disease may have important spillover effects on the mortality and morbidity of other causes of death in order to better understand and evaluate the overall effects of disease specific programs it is necessary to understand and measure these spillover effects this paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the incentives introduced by disease specific mortality interventions more precisely we discuss predictions about health investment incentives as implied by the competing risk model which is the empirical framework almost exclusively used to study multiple cause mortality we show that important complementary effects between niultiple causes of death operate to equalize the occurrence of the causes we argue that this complementarity should alter the evaluation of cause specific interventions by discrediting the argument that interventions are wasted because competing mortality risks are just around the corner in support of the existence of such complementarities we present substantive evidence from one of the most important public health programs ever introduced in developing countries the expanded programme on immunization epi of the united nations the paper is organized as follows section i provides a theoretical analysis arguing that the competing risk model of multiple causes of mortality corresponds to the leontief production function of survival this implies that there are inherent complementarities between investments in the prevention of cause specific mortality risks both on the individual level and on the aggregate level for competing risks the marginal benefit of investing to avoid one cause of death increases as a function of the survival rates of other causes the implications of this complementarity are important and have not received sufficient attention in theoretical or practical evaluations of causespecific interventions when mortality is treated as exogenous a disease specific intervention may seem wasteful if members of the targeted group are likely to die from a second cause as soon as the first has been eliminated then reducing the mortality from one cause of death would not appear to substantially increase life expectancy indeed this argument is repeatedly made by economists and demographers about medical care interventions in old age however it is sguided to use the preintervention background mortality when assessing the effectiveness of an interventionbehavior under one policy should not be assumed to prevail under a new policy as the leontief nature of competing risks predicts health investments will be focused upon he most immediate cause of death so that there are dow department of health policy and administration cb 7400 university of north carolina chapel hill nc 27599 philipson irving b harris graduate school of public policy studies department of economics and the law school university of chicago 1155 east 60th street chicago il 60637 sala i martin department of econornics columbia university 420 west 118th street 1005 new york ny 10027 and universitat pompeu fabra we are thankful to three anonymous referees for comments that substantially improved the paper and we especially acknowledge the contributions of jessica holmes who was a research assistant and co author on early drafts of this work we also thank gary becker kate howe steen jorgenson casey mulligan sherwin rosen paul schultz and participants at numerous workshops for discussions dow acknowledges financial support from national institute on aging grant no t32 ag00244 philipson from the national science foundation and the rockefeller foundation this research was begun while all authors were at yale university during 1994

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

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

income distribution and infant mortality comparing two countries in which the poor have equal real incomes the one in which the rich are wealthier is likely to have a higher infant mortality rate this anomalous result does not appear to spring from measurement error in estimating the income of the poor and the association between high infant mortality and income inequality is still present after controlling for other factors such as education medical personnel and fertility the positive association of infant mortality and the income of the rich suggests that measured real incomes may be a poor measure of social welfare this paper considers and tests several possible explanations such as the provision of medical services the degree of urbanization the extent of female literacy and differences in the composition of births among different income groups none of these factors adequately accounts for the positive association between the incomes of the rich and infant mortality the geographical scope is worldwide excerpt

international migration non traded goods and economic welfare in the source country a comment abstract labor emigration redistributes income in a two factor two good economy where one good is internationally non traded labor s nominal wage rises as nominal capital payments fall recent research has shown that the prices of non traded goods rise causing society s welfare to decline here the induced change in the real income of each factor is considered separately there is an ambiguity with regard to the real income of non emigrating labor if labor spends a relatively small fraction of income on the non traded good its real income may rise even though society suffers the loss of welfare

women headed households and household welfare an empirical deconstruction for uganda abstract analysis of the first nationally representative household survey of uganda shows that women headed households are not poorer when assessed by consumption or income nor do they appear consistently disadvantaged on social indicators some subgroups of women headed households do have lower economic welfare including those headed by widows and those in urban areas gender inequalities in educational attainment appears to be the major source of what economic disadvantage such women headed households do face high remittances receipts play a key role in maintaining economic parity between women and men headed households

rigidity of social systems the tendency for the members of a corporation or government to be resistant to change is explored in a model that encompasses two endemic features of such systems first the social system is modeled as a hierarchy and implicit within it is a selection process that determines who advances to higher levels second an agent s behavior is partially determined by imitating those who have risen in the ranks a behavioral norm of being rigid is found to be more prevalent and robust than one of being flexible a more volatile environment may also induce agents to be more resistant to change admirandi sed imitandi to be admired but not imitated st augustine

population growth and human capital investments theory and evidence this paper presents evidence from empirical studies that test hypotheses derived from models of household behavior pertaining to the interrelationships among population growth human capital and economic development these studies have exploited quasi natural experiments embodied in the cross area variability in the wage rates of children in a number of low income countries the intercouple variation in the biological propensity to conceive and the geographically selective introduction of new high yielding seed varieties in india in the period 1961 71 the different varieties of evidence support the hypotheses that alterations in the returns to human capital associated with exogenous technical change lead simultaneously to increases in human capital investments and to reductions in fertility and that the costliness of fertility control is a significant but modest factor in inhibiting human capital investments

decentralization and the coordination problem abstract this paper addresses the relationship between the degree of decentralization in a population and the probability of coordinating on an efficient outcome rather than the risk dominant outcome in a coordination game the model here extends the literature on evolutionary games by supposing that players interact in groups but that occasionally they may change groups the main innovation is the group changing assumption which allows players to vote with their feet in contrast to most of the recent literature e g kandori et al 1993 in which the risk dominant equilibrium is selected in the long run the model here predicts convergence to the efficient equilibrium if interaction is decentralized enough furthermore it is shown how the model can be applied to the problem of product standardization

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

expenditure behavior and children s welfare an analysis of female headed households in jamaica abstract evidence from jamaica shows that the sex and union status of the household head can have a significant influence on household expenditure behavior with implications for individual household members while the presence of a female decision maker generally increases the share of the household budget allocated to child and family goods female headed households fhhs also spend more on adult wear and less on health lower health expenditures are partially offset by the differential use of other health inputs in fhhs these differences in resource allocation may explain why poorer fhhs do not necessarily have lower children s outcomes in developing countries

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

working women in an urban setting traders vendors and food security in accra abstract data collected from a 1997 household survey carried out in accra ghana are used to look at the crucial role that women play as income earners and securing access to food in urban areas one third of the households surveyed are headed by women for all households women s labor force participation is high with 75 of all households having at least one working woman the high number of female headed households and the large percentage of working women in the sample provide a good backdrop for looking at how women earn and spend income differently than men in an urban area livelihood strategies for both men and women are predominantly labor based and dependent on social networks for all households in the sample food is still the single most important item in the total budget yet important and striking differences between men s and women s livelihoods and expenditure patterns exist compared to men women are less likely to be employed as wage earners and more likely to work as street food vendors or petty traders women earn lower incomes but tend to allocate more of their budget to basic goods for themselves and their children while men spend more on entertainment for themselves only despite lower incomes and additional demands on their time as housewives and mothers female headed households petty traders and street food vendors have the largest percentage of food secure households women may be achieving household food security but at what cost this paper explores differences in income expenditure and consumption patterns in an effort to answer this question and suggests ways that urban planners and policy makers can address special concerns to working women in urban areas

the great mexican emigration abstract in this paper we examine net emigration from mexico over the period 1960 to 2000 the data are consistent with labor supply shocks having made a substantial contribution to mexican emigration accounting for two fifths of mexican labor flows to the united states over the last two decades of the twentieth century net emigration rates by mexican state birth year cohort display a strong positive correlation with the initial size of the mexican cohort relative to the corresponding u s cohort in states with long histories of emigration the effects of cohort size on emigration are relatively strong consistent with the existence of preexisting networks

evolution of infant and child mortality in chile a model a model in which the birth rate and the infant and child mortality rates are jointly determined is used to explain the coexistence of declining infant and child mortality with increasing unemployment and falling living standards for at least part of the population the causes of the mortality decline are complex and include economic health care welfare urbanization and other aspects unemployment affected the birth rate and therefore the child mortality rate but the fall in infant mortality obeyed different factors such as midwife visits health expenditure and access to cheap energy policies require careful designing since often there is a trade off between infant and child mortality specially if the birth rate is high progress in one of these areas may prove counterproductive in the other if choices along the economy s phillips curve are possible solely on infant and child mortality grounds higher earnings should be preferred to lower unemployment

more evidence on nutrition demand income seems overrated and women s schooling underemphasized abstract malnutrition is widespread in the developing world controversy continues concerning the roles of income household size and women s schooling on nutrient demand empirical estimates for nicaragua suggest that income elasticities are small and inversely associated with income levels there are some economies of scale in household size the elasticity for women s schooling is higher than those for income or household size and women s backgrounds are important the results cast doubt on the strong emphasis the world bank and others have placed on income and suggest that schooling may be working through tastes not only through productivity

market access by smallholder farmers in malawi implications for technology adoption agricultural productivity and crop income abstract in malawi maize is the major crop and food staple given limited off farm employment opportunities much needed increases in household income for improving food security must come from gains in agricultural productivity through better technology and more profitable crops in the past hybrid maize and more recently tobacco were promoted by policy for increasing smallholder income an analysis of determinants of adoption of these two crops and related income effects is presented apart from factor endowment and exposure to agroecological risks differences in the household s access to financial and commodity markets significantly influence its cropping shares and farm income