a simple estimator for simultaneous models with censored endogenous reggressors this paper presents a simple two step estimator for models with censored endogenous regressors and sample selection bias the approach unifies the literature on censored endogenous regressors and sample selection bias and provides extensions the procedure employs generalized residuals to adjust for the inconsistency caused by the endogeneity of the censored regressors the paper also provides two new tests of weak exogeneity an empirical example examining the trade off between fringe benefits and wages indicates that the estimation procedure works well a monte carlo experiment suggests that the proposed tests have good power properties copyright 1993 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

does the gap in family friendly policies drive the family gap a segregation of the labour market into a family friendly and a non family friendly sector has the effect that women self select into the sectors depending on institutional constraints preferences for family friendly working conditions and expected wage differences we find that neglecting the sector dimension tends to understate the effect of birth related interruptions in both sectors the combined effect of a large depreciation effect and no recovery means that females in the non family friendly sector e g private sector are punished severely after childbirth in the family friendly sector e g public sector we find complete catch up

the economics of iron deficiency abstract this paper examines the evidence for a causal relationship between iron deficiency and a variety of functional consequences with economic implications motor and mental impairment in children and low work productivity in adults to the extent that we can be confident that iron deficiency does cause a consequence with economic implications this effect is quantified in economic terms illustrative calculations for 10 developing countries suggest that the median value of annual physical productivity losses due to iron deficiency is around 2 32 per capita or 0 57 of gdp median total losses physical and cognitive combined are 16 78 per capita 4 05 of gdp using a cost of 1 33 per case of anemia prevented from one of the few effectiveness studies of national fortification allows us to calculate the benefit cost ratio for long term iron fortification programs the median value is 6 1 for the 10 countries examined and rises to 36 1 including the discounted future benefits attributable to cognitive improvements this paper improves on previous work by including a much more thorough survey of the quantitative magnitudes involved and by incorporating effects of iron deficiency on cognition however more research is needed to verify the accuracy of the assumptions needed for this type of analysis

food insecurity poverty and the malawian starter pack fresh start or false start abstract chronic food insecurity and chronic poverty are closely related in malawi since independence in 1964 national food security has been a key policy objective however until the 1990s less emphasis was placed on the household dimensions of food security and its links with chronic poverty in the last decade a number of initiatives have been used in malawi to tackle the issue of household food insecurity one of the most controversial has been the starter pack programme launched in 1998 initially consisting of a free handout of packs of improved maize seed legumes and fertiliser to every small holder farm household in malawi the scheme under donor pressure was subsequently scaled down to become a form of targeted social safety net programme this paper analyses the strengths and weakness of both the original programme and its scaled down version and assesses the reason for the considerable opposition to the programme from malawi s donor community although starter pack is no longer operative in malawi the malawian experience is used to derive lessons for other countries where household food insecurity is an important dimension of chronic poverty

fertilizer subsidies and private market participation the case of kano state nigeria this article estimates the effect of a fertilizer voucher program on farmer participation in the private fertilizer market in nigeria using a double hurdle model to address corner solution challenges with estimating input demand and a control function approach to account for the endogeneity of subsidized fertilizer acquired the study finds evidence that receiving subsidized fertilizer in kano nigeria increased both the probability and extent of participation in the private fertilizer market findings demonstrate that under certain circumstances e g where input dealers links to farmer are weak there could be significant gains from the temporary use of voucher programs to strengthen such links

the progress of school education in india this paper provides an overview of school education in india first it places india s educational achievements in international perspective particularly against countries with which it is now increasingly compared especially china second the paper examines schooling access in terms of enrolment and school attendance rates and schooling quality in terms of literacy rates learning achievement levels school resources and teacher inputs third the paper investigates the role of private schooling in india examining the extent of growth of private schooling and surveying evidence on the relative effectiveness and unit costs of private and public schools last the paper discusses some major public education initiatives the concluding section suggests a future research agenda and appeals for rigorous evaluation of the impacts and costs of the numerous existing educational interventions in order to learn about their relative cost effectiveness for evidence based policy making

does public insurance crowd out private insurance the cost of expanding public sector health programs depends critically on the extent to which public eligibility will cover just the uninsured or will crowd out existing private insurance coverage we estimate the extent of crowd out arising from the expansions of medicaid to pregnant women and children over the 1987 1992 period we estimate that approximately 50 percent of the increase in medicaid coverage was associated with a reduction in private insurance coverage this occurred largely because employees took up employer based insurance less frequently there is also some evidence that employers contributed less for insurance and that workers dropped coverage of dependents

input subsidy programs in sub saharan africa a synthesis of recent evidence input subsidy programs have once again become a major plank of agricultural development strategies in africa ten african governments spend roughly us 1 billion annually on input subsidy programs isps amounting to 28 6 of their public expenditures on agriculture this article reviews the microlevel evidence on isps undertaken since the mid 2000s we examine the characteristics of subsidy beneficiaries crop response rates to fertilizer application and their influence on the performance of subsidy programs the impacts of subsidy programs on national fertilizer use and the development of commercial input distribution systems and finally the impact of isps on food price levels and poverty rates the weight of the evidence indicates that the costs of the programs generally outweigh their benefits findings from other developing areas with a higher proportion of crop area under irrigation and with lower fertilizer prices factors that should provide higher returns to fertilizer subsidies than in africa indicate that at least a partial reallocation of expenditures from fertilizer subsidies to r d and infrastructure would provide higher returns to agricultural growth and poverty reduction however because isps enable governments to demonstrate tangible support to constituents they are likely to remain on the african landscape for the foreseeable future hence the study identifies ways in which benefits can be enhanced through changes in implementation modalities and complementary investments within a holistic agricultural intensification strategy among the most important of these are efforts to reduce the crowding out of commercial fertilizer distribution systems and programs to improve soil fertility to enable farmers to use fertilizer more efficiently the challenges associated with achieving these gains are likely to be formidable

education and freedom of choice evidence from arranged marriages in vietnam abstractusing household data from vietnam we provide evidence on the effects of education on freedom of spouse choice we use war disruptions and spatial indicators of schooling supply as instruments the point estimates indicate that a year of additional schooling reduces the probability of an arranged marriage by about 14 percentage points for an individual with eight years of schooling we also estimate bounds on the effect of education on arranged marriage when exclusion restrictions are violated locally the lower bound is six to seven percentage points the impact of education is strong for women but significantly weaker for men

government fertilizer subsidy and commercial sector fertilizer demand evidence from the federal market stabilization program fmsp in nigeria abstract we examine how the previous fertilizer subsidy program in nigeria fmsp affected the demand for commercial fertilizer we apply an endogenous double hurdle model to a pseudo panel and cross section data of farm households the methodology accounts for potential endogeneity of commercial fertilizer price with subsidy our specification is also appropriate where few farmers report the use of both subsidized and commercial fertilizer we find that 100 kg of subsidized fertilizer supplied to a farm household reduced the probability of its participation into commercial fertilizer market by 10 21 points while not affecting fertilizer use upon participation

the determinants of earnings a behavioral approach we survey the determinants of earnings and propose a framework for understanding labor market success we suggest that the advantages of the children of successful parents go considerably beyond the benefits of superior education the inheritance of wealth or the genetic inheritance of cognitive ability we suggest that noncognitive personality variables such as attitudes towards risk ability to adapt to new economic conditions hard work and the rate of time preference affect both earning and the transmission of economic status across generations

education and economic performance simplistic theories and their policy consequences a largely unquestioned consensus proclaims that educational policy is an effective tool for delivering prosperity and increasing rates of economic growth this consensus rests on far less secure foundations than is commonly supposed international comparisons confirm that as they become richer people seek ever more education for their children but provide no clear cut evidence of economic benefits accruing to countries which are high spending in education terms analyses which extrapolate from the incomes of educated individuals rest on assumptions about how wages are determined and the extent to which rewards are for skills acquired in schooling which are highly questionable moreover an uncritical belief in educational expansion leads to target driven policies with serious negative effects on educational quality a more realistic view of education s economic impact and a move away from centralized planning for economic ends would actually improve the quality of education copyright 2004 oxford university press

federal deficits and the real rate of interest in the united states a note this brief note provides strong empirical evidence that federal govern ment deficits can indeed have a positive and significant impact upon short term interest rates the findings in this paper thereby establish another mechanism for the transmission of crowding out this study differs from most other studies in the adoption of two particular procedures first unlike most although not all other related studies the rate of interest is expressed as a real rate this is done in simple fashion by subtracting the inflation rate of the gnp deflator from the nominal rate of interest taken to be the 3 month t bill rate second also unlike most although not all other related studies the deficit is expressed in real terms and then divided by the real gnp level expressing the deficit in this ratio form enables us to judge the deficit relative to the size of the economy which must finance it no previous related study to date has adopted both of these procedures and most studies of this topic have adopted neither procedure

labor shortages on small landholdings in malawi implications for policy reforms abstract a simple linear programming model of representative smallholder households is used to investigate the sources of relative scarcity of labor and land in malawi the paradox of on farm labor shortages on small landholdings can be explained by the multiple constraints smallholders face these multiple constraints including lack of finance concerns for food security and others lead to suboptimal allocations of household resources in turn the low returns to labor and land contribute to household food insecurity and a vicious cycle of poverty the findings of the paper provide a clear signal to policymakers and research and extension institutions that these constraints are all linked and addressing one cannot be effective without addressing the others

schooling and economic well being the role of nonmarket effects standard estimates of the economic value of additional schooling based on earnings differences associated with differences in the level of schooling attained cover only a portion of the total effects of education that are valued by citizens we first identify a catalog of nonmarketed effects many of which have been recently studied by economists and then propose a procedure for estimating a willingness to pay value for these effects using empirical estimates of the magnitude of a selection of these effects found in the literature we calculate willingness to pay values using our proposed procedure these illustrative calculations suggest that standard estimates of the benefit of incremental schooling substantially understate the full value of such investments

returns to education a further international update and implications this paper updates evidence on the returns to investment in education by adding estimates for new countries and refining existing estimates to bring the total number of country cases to over 60 the new cross country evidence confirms and reinforces earlier patterns namely that returns are highest for primary education the general curricula the education of women and countries with the lowest per capita income the findings have important implications for directing future investment in education which for efficiency and equity purposes should concentrate on these priority areas

is school the best route to skills returns to vocational school and vocational skills in egypt this paper tests the assumption that formal education is the best route to job skills the returns to formal vocational secondary schooling are compared to the returns to acquiring skills outside the education system such as undertaking an apprenticeship for male wage workers in egypt a unique longitudinal dataset with information on schooling and skills allows for causal inference about returns by comparing siblings for recent cohorts the estimated returns to formal vocational secondary education are the same as attaining no formal education however the returns to skills obtained outside of formal education are substantial

early childhood nutrition and academic achievement a longitudinal analysis abstract many policymakers propose early childhood nutrition programs as a way to increase students academic achievement this paper investigates the nutrition learning nexus using a unique longitudinal data set that follows a large sample of filipino children from birth until the end of their primary education we find that better nourished children perform significantly better in school partly because they enter school earlier and thus have more time to learn but mostly because of greater learning productivity per year of schooling our cost benefit analysis suggests that a dollar invested in an early childhood nutrition program in a developing country could potentially return at least three dollars worth of gains in academic achievement and perhaps much more

peasant household behaviour with missing markets some paradoxes explained a model of peasant household behavior under varying degrees of household specific food and labor market failures is constructed to show that these structural features can explain several well known patterns of peasant response which have often been attributed to peculiar motives presumed specific to peasants the model explains sluggish response to cash crops prices and high instability in perceived food and labor scarcities the key role of manufactured consumer goods prices in stimulating peasants effort in cash crops production the effectiveness of taxation as opposed to incentives in stimulating cash crops production and the key role of technological change in food production to enhance cash crop production results are obtained analytically in the case of one market failure and by numerical simulation with more than one

wage and employment effects of malawi s fertilizer subsidy program this article uses three waves of nationally representative household level panel data from malawi to estimate how a large scale fertilizer subsidy program impacts the agricultural labor market known as ganyu in that country i find that when looking across the entire population of smallholders receiving an additional 100 kg of subsidized fertilizer causes the average household to supply about three fewer days of ganyu the fertilizer subsidy program also has a small positive effect on the probability that a household demands agricultural labor with the results approaching statistical significance in addition a 10 kg increase in the average amount of subsidized fertilizer acquired per household in a community boosts the median agricultural wage rate by 1 4 in that community the increase in wage rates translates to a us 1 40 per year increase in average household income in the years after malawi s subsidy program was scaled up and a us 1 86 per year increase in average household income for those who sold their labor before the subsidy program was scaled up this finding suggests that households who sell their labor off farm may experience some small spillover benefit from the program in the form of higher agricultural wage rates

are educated workers really more productive abstract this paper presents a new method for examining the productive nature of education it outlines an econometric model which simultaneously estimates an earnings function and a production function for workers and the firms where they are employed this approach permits a direct comparison to be made between the relative wage and relative productivity of workers with different levels of education using a unique data set from ghana two primary questions are addressed 1 are educated workers more productive than workers with no formal education and 2 do earnings differentials between workers with different levels of education reflect genuine productivity differentials the results suggest that education is positively correlated with productivity in ghanaian manufacturing and that firms pay workers according to their productivity

markets and pro poor agricultural growth insights from livelihood and informal rural economy models in malawi this article presents the development of a set of programming models describing the major features of different rural livelihoods and of the informal rural economy they together make up in malawi the models allow for differentiated responses by different household types to change and for the partial equilibrium effects of consequent supply demand and price adjustments in labor and grain markets the models provide insights into the relations between own farm and nonown farm activities in different households livelihoods and in the informal rural economy as a whole and are used to investigate possible impacts of increasing cash crop prices and of a more open rural economy impacts of these changes on the poor are found to be critically dependent upon supply and demand elasticities in labor and grain markets but the poor could potentially suffer significant losses from increased openness of the local economy leading to increased expenditure by less poor households on imported goods and services

subsidies and crowding out a double hurdle model of fertilizer demand in malawi this article uses a double hurdle model with panel data from malawi to investigate how fertilizer subsidies affect farmer demand for commercial fertilizer the article controls for potential endogeneity caused by the nonrandom targeting of fertilizer subsidy recipients results show that on average 1 additional kilogram of subsidized fertilizer crowds out 0 22 kg of commercial fertilizer but crowding out ranges from 0 18 among the poorest farmers to 0 30 among relatively nonpoor farmers this indicates that targeting fertilizer subsidies to the rural poor is likely to maximize the contribution of the subsidy program to total fertilizer use

transactions costs and agricultural household supply response we develop and estimate a model of supply response when transactions costs create a situation where some producers buy others sell and others do not participate in markets we present two rationales for why producing households may have different relationships to the market proportional and fixed transactions costs using data on mexican corn producers we estimate an empirical model that allows for separate tests of the significance of both types of transactions costs revealing that both fixed and proportional transactions costs matter for the estimation the results provide consistent estimates of supply elasticity and measures of the relative importance of factors determining both proportional and fixed transactions costs

an empirical analysis of fertilizer use in pakistan one of the stylized facts in developing countries is the wide variation in agricultural per acre input and output levels across farm households here we focus on the variation in the level of chemical fertilizer applied in particular to high yielding wheat the model used to explain the variation in fertilizer input across farms incorporates the process by which zeros are generated in particular differentiating between households who do not apply because of lack of access and those who do not apply out of choice we find that access is positively correlated with farm size but that among users per acre fertilizer levels decrease with farm size we interpret the latter by appealing to input choice under uncertainty with this interpretation our results suggest that although larger farms have a higher level of non stochastic wealth which in the presence of decreasing absolute risk aversion has the effect of increasing fertilizer intensity with farm size the presence of increasing relative risk aversion means that the net relationship between farm size and fertilizer intensity is negative this latter affect appears to dominate any tendancy for higher fertilizer intensity on larger farms arising from better knowledge or irrigation facilities

human capital and economic development abstract this paper develops a general equilibrium model of fertility and human capital investment with young adult mortality because young adult mortality is negatively related to average young adult human capital human capital accumulation lowers mortality inducing demographic transition and industrial revolution data confirm that young adult mortality is related negatively to schooling and the rate of return to schooling and positively to fertility the data indicate a negative relationship between tfp growth and schooling accumulation the model fits the data on country populations per capita incomes human capital total fertility rates infant mortality life expectancy and conditional life expectancy

an ordered tobit model of market participation evidence from kenya and ethiopia do rural households in developing countries make market participation and volume decisions simultaneously or sequentially this article develops a two stage econometric method to test between these two competing hypotheses regarding household level marketing behavior the first stage models the household s choice of whether to be a net buyer autarkic or a net seller in the market the second stage models the quantity bought sold for net buyers sellers based on observable household characteristics using household data from kenyan and ethiopian livestock markets we find evidence in favor of sequential decision making the welfare implications of which we discuss

earnings inequality and the intersectionality of gender and ethnicity in sub saharan africa the case of tanzanian manufacturing nordman robilliard and roubaud 2011 conclude that there is a broad consensus regard ing the magnitude and explanation of earnings differentials based on ethnicity and gender in sub saharan africa across the small but grow ing literature however to date none have consid ered the intersectionality of gender and ethnicity as a source of earnings inequality in sub saharan africa as far as we can determine

can good projects succeed in bad communities abstract the lack of social capital is frequently given as an explanation for why communities perform poorly yet to what extent can project design compensate for these community specific constraints i address this question by examining determinants of collective success in a costly problem for developing economies the upkeep of local public goods it is often difficult to obtain reliable outcome measures for comparable collective tasks across well defined communities in order to address this i conducted detailed surveys of community maintained infrastructure projects in northern pakistan the findings show that while community specific constraints do matter their impact can be mitigated by better project design inequality social fragmentation and lack of leadership in the community do have adverse consequences but these can be overcome by changes in project complexity community participation and return distribution moreover the evidence suggests that better design matters even more for communities with poorer attributes the use of community fixed effects and instrumental variables offers a significant improvement in empirical identification over previous studies these results provide evidence that appropriate design can enable projects to succeed even in bad communities

rates of return on physical and human capital in africa s manufacturing sector in this paper two sets of issues are addressed using panel data from the manufacturing sector of five african countries first how high are the returns to human relative to physical capital second what is the relative importance of technology and endowments of human and physical capital in determining differences in earnings and productivity across the countries evidence from earnings functions shows that the private returns to both experience and education rise with the level of education private returns rise from 3 per cent at the primary level to 10 per cent at the secondary level and 35 per cent for tertiary evidence from the production function gives lower returns on education than from the earnings function rates of return on physical capital exceed 20 per cent and greatly exceed the average return on human capital data is available on the stocks of human and physical capital across the countries productivity and earnings differentials are shown to be large between cameroon and ghana these differences are due almost entirely to differences in physical not human capital endowments this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

child farm labor the wealth paradox this article is motivated by the remarkable observation that children of land rich households are often more likely to be in work than the children of land poor households the vast majority of working children in developing economies are in agricultural work predominantly on farms operated by their families land is the most important store of wealth in agrarian societies and it is typically distributed very unequally these facts challenge the common presumption that child labor emerges from the poorest households this article suggests that this apparent paradox can be explained by failures of the markets for labor and land credit market failure will tend to weaken the force of this paradox these effects are modeled and estimates obtained using survey data from rural pakistan and ghana the main result is that the wealth paradox persists for girls in both countries whereas for boys it disappears after conditioning on other covariates

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

the relevance of standard estimates of rates of return to schooling for education policy a critical assessment abstract this paper examines the accuracy and usefulness of estimated rates of return to schooling based on the standard human capital model of becker and mincer regarding accuracy it investigates whether failure to account for differences in ability and school quality lead to significant biases estimates using ghanaian data confirm this possibility even when accurate estimated rates of return to additional years of schooling may have limited policy implications more useful for governments are rates of return to investments in school quality the paper uses data on cognitive skills to estimate rates of return to three types of school quality improvements

africa s education enigma the nigerian story abstract in the last two decades the social and economic benefits of formal education in sub saharan africa have been debated anecdotal evidence points to low returns to education in africa unfortunately there is limited econometric evidence to support these claims at the micro level in this study i focus on nigeria a country that holds 1 5 of africa s population i use instruments based on the exogenous timing of the implementation and withdrawal of free primary education across regions in this country to consistently estimate the returns to education in the late 1990s the results show the average returns to education are particularly low in the 90s in contrast to conventional wisdom for developing countries 2 8 for every extra year of schooling between 1997 and 1999 surprisingly i find no significant differences between ols and iv estimates of returns to education when necessary controls are included in the wage equation the low returns to education results shed new light on both the changes in demand for education in nigeria and the increased emigration rates from african countries that characterized the 90s

a triple hurdle model of production and market participation in kenya s dairy market existing analyses of market participation are based on a double hurdle modeling approach such models are appropriate only when all members of the population of interest actually produce the good in some contexts however e g smallholder farmers many members of the population do not produce particular goods that they could produce and that their neighbors do produce policies influencing market participation among producers may thus also induce additional farmers to become producers previous double hurdle approaches do not allow explicitly for this possibility to address these limitations this article presents a triple hurdle approach with an initial stage that includes nonproducers the model is used to identify the factors associated with kenyan smallholder farmers choosing to participate in dairy production and the role that these producers choose to play or not in the marketplace in the midst of debates underway over the privatization of the parastatal kenya creameries company new knowledge about smallholder participation in dairy could be an important contribution results suggest the importance of rural electrification training and improved grazing practices we find that expected net sales are significantly higher when farmers have access to informal private markets we also describe a version of the ordered tobit model that includes nonproducers and is nested in our triple hurdle model a likelihood ratio test shows the latter to be a significantly better fit to our data we discuss how insights gained from this study differ from the insights that would come from a double hurdle ordered tobit that also includes nonproducers

the effects of adaptation measures on hurricane induced property losses which fema investments have the highest returns abstract this paper evaluates the relative effectiveness of fema expenditures on hurricane induced property losses we find that spending on fema ex ante mitigation and planning projects leads to greater reductions in property losses than spending on ex post adaptation programs specifically a one percent increase in annual spending on ex ante risk reduction and warning projects reduces damages by 0 21 percent while a one percent increase in ex post recovery and clean up spending reduces damages by 0 12 although both types of program spending are effective we find the marginal return from spending on programs that target long term mitigation and risk management to be almost twice that of spending on ex post recovery programs with the predicted increases in the frequency and severity of north atlantic hurricanes in the future our findings suggest there are important potential gains that could be realized from the further diversification of fema spending across project categories

smallholder participation in vegetable exports and age disaggregated labor allocation in northern tanzania modern agricultural supply chains have been playing an increasingly important role in developing countries and have had significant effects on rural labor markets this article analyses the effects of smallholder farmer participation in export vegetable supply chains in northern tanzania on both household hired labor demand and off farm labor supply using an age disaggregated approach in our sample neither separability nor exogeneity of smallholder farmer participation in export supply chains can be rejected hence we apply lognormal double hurdle models and find that participation in export supply chains positively affects households decision to hire labor from all age groups we also find that it increases the unconditional overall level of hired labor demand while the age disaggregated analysis shows that these effects mostly benefit rural youth however our sample does not allow us to establish statistically significant evidence of an effect on household off farm labor supply although the point estimates point to nonnegligible positive effect sizes

what are the effects of input subsidy programs on maize prices evidence from malawi and zambia an important hypothesized benefit of large scale input subsidy programs in africa is that by raising maize production the subsidies should put downward pressure on retail maize prices to the benefit of urban consumers and the rural poor who tend to be net food buyers to inform debates related to this rationale for input subsidies this study estimates the effects of fertilizer subsidies on retail maize prices in malawi and zambia using market or district level panel data covering the 2000 2001 to 2011 2012 maize marketing years results indicate that roughly doubling the size of malawi s subsidy program reduces maize prices by 1 2 2 5 on average in zambia roughly doubling the scale of the country s subsidy program reduces maize prices by 1 8 2 8 on average the results are robust across countries and model specifications and indicate that the fertilizer subsidy programs in malawi and zambia have had a minimal effect on retail maize prices

does the labour market explain lower female schooling in india labour market discrimination against women and parental discrimination against daughters are two of the most commonly cited explanations of the gender gap in education in developing countries this study empirically tests the labour market explanation for india using recent household survey data the results reveal substantial omitted family background bias in the estimates of rates of return to education the findings suggest that as well as overall labour market discrimination girls face poorer economic incentives to invest in schooling than boys because they reap lower labour market returns to education than boys

social learning neighborhood effects and investment in human capital evidence from green revolution india abstract this paper empirically identifies social learning and neighborhood effects in schooling investments in a new technology regime social learning implies that learning is most efficient when observed heterogeneity in schooling is greatest the estimates of learning investment rule from farm household panel data at the onset of the green revolution in india show that i agents learn about schooling returns from income realizations of their neighbors and ii the speed of learning is high when the variation of schooling is large thus schooling distribution of the parents generation in a community has externalities to schooling investments in children simulations show that the variations in schooling within and across communities generate variations in child enrollment rate and average household income

fertilizer subsidies political influence and local food prices in sub saharan africa evidence from nigeria abstract the last decade has seen a resurgence in the use of fertilizer subsidies in sub saharan africa however there is limited empirical evidence on the effects of fertilizer subsidy programs on local food prices using an instrumental variables approach we explore the effect of a fertilizer subsidy program on the seasonal growth rates of grain prices in nigeria our results suggest that the fertilizer subsidy program had very small effects on the growth rates of grain prices between the post planting and post harvesting seasons we also find that political influence played a role in the distribution of subsidized fertilizer we discuss how the weak effects on the price growth rates may be caused by low market orientation output market structures greater focus on farmers incomes low marginal productivity of fertilizer and politically influenced targeting

an analysis of sample attrition in panel data the michigan panel study of income dynamics by 1989 the michigan panel study on income dynamics psid had experienced approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership we study the effect of this attrition on the unconditional distributions of several socioeconomic variables and on the estimates of several sets of regression coefficients we provide a statistical framework for conducting tests for attrition bias that draws a sharp distinction between selection on unobservables and on observables and that shows that weighted least squares can generate consistent parameter estimates when selection is based on observables even when they are endogenous our empirical analysis shows that attrition is highly selective and is concentrated among lower socioeconomic status individuals we also show that attrition is concentrated among those with more unstable earnings marriage and migration histories nevertheless we find that these variables explain very little of the attrition in the sample and that the selection that occurs is moderated by regression to the mean effects from selection on transitory components that fade over time consequently despite the large amount of attrition we find no strong evidence that attrition has seriously distorted the representativeness of the psid through 1989 and considerable evidence that its cross sectional representativeness has remained roughly intact

household income and child schooling in vietnam the stronger are the associations between household income and child schooling the lower is intergenerational social mobility and the less equal is opportunity this study estimates the associations between household income and children s school success in vietnam the estimates indicate that these associations are considerable this article also investigates some ways in which policies relate to household incomes school fees are progressive but school fees are only about one third of what households pay directly to schools and are a much smaller proportion of a household s total school related expenditures total household expenditures paid directly to schools increase with household income less proportionately than do school fees alone so the overall structure of such payments is less progressive than is the structure of school fees because school enrollment is positively related to household income moreover the structure of school fees is less progressive for the entire population than for the selected subset that has children enrolled in school further the two school quality measures that have the strongest positive association with children s school success are much more available to higher income households meaning that higher income households have greater school expenditures in part because they are obtaining higher quality schooling and not because charges for the same quality schooling are progressive across income classes

do input subsidy programs crowd in or crowd out commercial market development modeling fertilizer demand in a two channel marketing system many governments in developing countries distribute fertilizer at subsidized prices in an effort to stimulate small farmers agricultural productivity and food security prior fertilizer demand studies have largely failed to account for the effects of government programs on farmers commercial purchases using a double hurdle model and nationally representative rural household panel data in zambia we distinguish between these sources and measure the contemporaneous crowding in and crowding out effects of government input programs on commercial fertilizer sales where the private sector is relatively active and average wealth is higher areas seemingly more likely to be targeted by government programs results indicate that subsidies have substantially crowded out the private sector in some cases to the point that such programs could actually lower overall fertilizer use on the other hand in poorer areas where the private sector is relatively inactive subsidies help to generate demand and crowd in private sector retailers empirical studies explicitly modeling farmers fertilizer purchase behavior within a dual marketing framework can provide important insights for agricultural policy discussions in developing countries

bayes estimates of distance to market transactions costs cooperatives and milk market development in the ethiopian highlands rationalizing non participation as a resource deficiency in the household this paper identifies strategies for milk market development in the ethiopian highlands the additional amounts of covariates required for positive marketable surplus distances to market are computed from a model in which production and sales are correlated sales are left censored at some unobserved threshold production efficiencies are heterogeneous and the data are in the form of a panel incorporating these features into the modeling exercise is important because they are fundamental to the data generating environment there are four reasons first because production and sales decisions are enacted within the same household both decisions are affected by the same exogenous shocks and production and sales are therefore likely to be correlated second because selling involves time and time is arguably the most important resource available to a subsistence household the minimum sales amount is not zero but rather some unobserved threshold that lies beyond zero third the potential existence of heterogeneous abilities in management ones that lie latent from the econometrician s perspective suggest that production efficiencies should be permitted to vary across households fourth we observe a single set of households during multiple visits in a single production year the results convey clearly that institutional and production innovations alone are insufficient to encourage participation market precipitating innovation requires complementary inputs especially improvements in human capital and reductions in risk copyright 2008 john wiley sons ltd

rejoinder to the comment by andrew dorward and ephraim chirwa on jayne t s d mather n mason and j ricker gilbert 2013 how do fertilizer subsidy program affect total fertilizer use in sub saharan africa crowding out diversion and benefit cost assessments agricultural economics 44 6 687 703

education employment and earnings of secondary school and university leavers in tanzania evidence from a tracer study this study uses a tracer survey of secondary school completers in tanzania to analyse the impact of educational qualifications on labour market earnings we show that the rates of return to the highest educational qualifications for wage employees are not negligible and at the margin provide an investment incentive however we find little evidence of human capital effects in the earnings determination process for the self employment sector introducing controls for father s educational background and a set of school fixed effects designed to proxy for school quality and potential labour market network effects reduces the estimated rates of return to educational qualifications a comparison of our results with the available evidence from other countries in the region suggest that despite an extremely small secondary and university education system the private rates of return to education in the tanzanian wage employment sector are comparatively low

data watch the world bank s living standards measurement study household surveys since 1985 the world bank has been collecting household survey data in developing countries that provide a rich source of information for assessing household welfare understanding household behavior and evaluating the impact of government policies this article describes these household surveys known as living standards measurement study lsms surveys and explains how to obtain their data lsms surveys have been implemented in over twenty developing countries and have been used to analyze poverty labor markets health and education pricing policies determinants of school performance savings and consumption smoothing health and nutrition policies and gender and fertility issues

the quality of schooling quantity alone is misleading although much research discusses the quantity of schooling as an effective impact on productivity and earnings most such research leaves out the idea of the quality of schooling which may cause biases in the estimated returns to schooling this paper consequently attempts to extend the standard mincerian approach to incorporate school quality as well as quantity it demonstrates how exclusion of quality in the standard procedure may cause biases in the estimated returns to years of schooling probably in the upward direction the paper explores the implications of this extension of the standard model for the case of young brazilian males it shows that the estimate of the private return to years of schooling using the preferred quality inclusive specification is only one half the estimate using the standard procedure indicating substantial upward bias in the standard estimates it further outlines a method for estimating a social return to quality and finds that it exceeds substantially the social return to quantity the paper then shows why this in turn suggests there may be an equity productivity trade off in schooling investments

earnings schooling ability and cognitive skills conventional estimates now available for a large number of countries generally indicate that the social returns to education are positive large and competitive with returns to investment in physical capital that such estimates are good guides for public resource allocation has however been questioned the heart of the problem lies in the interpretation of the positive relationship between the education and the earnings of workers whether as the conventional estimates assume the coefficient of the education variable in the earnings function measures the effect on the productivity of workers of human capital acquired in school it has been hypothesized that education in part or instead represents screening for native ability and motivation or credentialism and that as a consequence conventional measures of the social benefit of education are substantially upward biased 2 in this paper we attempt to distinguish the influence on earnings of cognitive achievement native ability and years of education as a means of adjudicating the human capital screening and credentialist hypotheses our econometric analysis is based on two rigorously comparable micro data sets from kenya and tanzania generated by surveys of the urban wage labor force specifically for this study these data sets contain the usual variables found in earnings function estimates of the benefits of schooling individual earnings years of education and years of employment experience in addition they contain two variables measures of the worker s cognitive skills and of his or her reasoning ability not previously found in studies of developing countries and only rarely found in studies of the education earnings relationship in developed countries 3 with these variables we can estimate the direct effects on earnings of cognitive skills ability and years of schooling by using them to estimate educational production functions and educational attainment functions and linking these functions with the earnings function in a recursive framework we can also assess the various indirect effects on earnings of ability and years of schooling having data sets from two countries very similar with respect to size resource endowments structure of production and employment and level of development means that not only can we subject our results to the usual statistical tests but we can also assess their replicability both kenya and tanzania have nearly achieved the objective of universal primary education while university enrollments remain at less than 1 percent of the relevant age group the important policy issues re boissiere development research department the world bank 1818 h street washington d c 20433 knight institute of economics and statistics oxford university sabot williams college williamstown ma 01267 we are grateful to the educational testing service of princeton for the design of tests used in this study and to j armitage j behrman j hausman d hendry d jamison and an anonymous referee for their insights and advice helpful comments were also received from participants in seminars at oxford and yale universities the views presented here are our own they should not be interpreted as reflecting those of the world bank george psacharopoulos 1973 1981 contains a listing of 44 countries in which rate of return studies had been conducted and of the estimates obtained 2for instance kenneth arrow 1973 mark blaug 1976 samuel bowles and herbert gintis 1976 john riley 1979 michael spence 1976 and lester thurow 1975 3for attempts to control for ability and or for cognitive achievement in studies for the united states see jere behrman et al 1980 gary chamberlain and zvi griliches 1977 griliches and william mason 1972 michael olneck 1977 paul taubman and terence wales 1974 taubman 1975 and david wise 1975 see also the survey articles by griliches 1977 1979 in most instances the data refer to special subgroups in the population and clear distinction cannot be made between natural ability and cognitive skills acquired in school

an exogeneity test for a simultaneous equation tobit model with an application to labor supply a test of weak exogeneity in the simultaneous equation tobit model is proposed and illustrated using a female labour supply model estimated using cross section data the test statistic can be simply output from any standard tobit maximum likelihood package and is asymptotically efficient the procedure provides consistent estimators for the simultaneous tobit model whose asymptotic covariance matrix is a simple extension of the usual tobit formula we also provide the lagrange multiplier test of weak exogeneity this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

non farm income gender and inequality evidence from rural ghana and uganda abstract this paper examines how the distribution of earnings in rural ghana and uganda differs by income type and by gender we find that non farm earnings contribute to rising inequality but that lower income groups also benefit due to strong overall growth in non farm earnings the inequality inducing effect is driven by self employment income wage income on the other hand reduces inequality the tendency of non farm income to contribute to inequality is greater among female headed households for whom self employment is important and non farm opportunities more constrained determinants of non farm income are estimated and appear to be strongly related to location education age and distance to market estimates of the linkages to agriculture in ghana are weaker than expected showing the non farm sector to be functioning more as an alternative activity to agriculture than as a complement

returns to investment in education a global update the author updates compilations of rate of return estimates to investment in education published since 1985 and discusses methodological issues surrounding those estimates some key patterns among the three main levels of education primary education continues to exhibit the highest social profitability in all world regions private returns are considerably higher than social returns because of the public subsidization of education the degree of public subsidy increases with the level of education which is regressive social and private returns at all levels generally decline by the level of a country s per capita income overall the returns to female education are higher than those to male education but at individual levels of education the pattern is more mixed the returns to the academic secondary school track are higher than the vocational track since unit cost of vocational education is much higher and the returns for those who work in the private competitive sector of the economy are higher than in the public noncompetitive sector and the returns in the self employment unregulated sector of the economy are higher than in the dependent employment sector controversies in the literature are discussed in the light of the new evidence the undisputable and universal positive correlation between education and earnings can be interpreted in many ways the causation issue on whether education really affects earnings can be answered only with experimental data generated by randomly exposing different people to various amounts of education given the fact that moral and pragmatic considerations prevent the generation of such pure data researchers have to make do with indirect inferences or natural experiments some have been attempted the author looks at the research on overeducation or surplus schooling the conclusions reinforce earlier patterns they confirm that primary education continues to be the number one investment priority in developing countries they also show that educating females is marginally more profitable than educating males that the academic secondary school curriculum is a better investment than the technical vocational tract and that the returns to education obey the same rules as investment in conventional capital that is they decline as investment is expanded