Transition to market economics: Employment and informal activity in rural areas

According to the neo-liberal model, the high levels of unemployment and collapsing real wages of transition will reallocate labor to new activities. But whether and how households actually reallocate labor is the subject of growing debate. We use survey data from Bulgaria to develop a typology of rural households based on their labor allocation characteristics. We find a diversity of outcomes. A significant share of households experience no change in labor allocation, some shift labor to own commercial enterprises, but a significant minority are displaced from the emerging market economy. Potential for informal activity among these households appears limited. Of great concern is the regional concentration of such households.     

Rural credit and the time allocation of agricultural households: The case of PRONAF in Brazil

This paper evaluates the impact of Brazil's National Program to Strengthen Family Farming (PRONAF) on the time allocation of household members. We use data from the 2014 Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios, and we apply propensity score methods to complex surveys recently recommended in the literature. We find that PRONAF helps to increase focus on agricultural activities, but it also stimulates female partners to engage in unpaid work. The results show significant effects of PRONAF on child labor and on the gender‐specific division of labor within households, although it does not have the usual adverse effects of rural credit programs on school attendance.     

The Labor Market as a Smoothing Device: Labor Supply Responses to Crop Loss

The paper studies the way in which labor supply responses enable households to smooth consumption in the face of crop loss. The 1993 Indonesian Family Life Survey is unusual because it contains self-reported information on crop loss and on household responses to crop loss. Of those households that report a crop loss, 41.6% also report that they responded by taking an extra job. Using these self-reported measures, the authors find evidence which suggests that the income associated with this shock-induced labor supply is important in allowing the household to avoid reducing consumption expenditure. Household members, however, do not seem to increase their total hours of work. They appear to just reallocate their time from household farming to other labor market activities.     

Intra-household labor supply,migration, and subsistence constraints in a risky environment: Evidence from rural El salvador

We investigate the use of intra-household labor allocation as a means of risk coping when subsistence constraints matter in rural El Salvador. We show that households increase the labor supply of its male members to the family farm and abroad in the US after being subjected to adverse agricultural productivity shocks. The latter is the result of a standard substitution effect, whereas the former is the result of subsistence concerns. Theoretically, these results are not at odds with each other if these events differentially impacted rich and poor households. We also show that the earthquakes of 2001 resulted in large reductions in the number of female members who were sent abroad and large increases in hours of domestic labor supplied by female members. We argue that this result is a consequence of subsistence motives because female labor supply at home increased despite lower remuneration.     

New evidence on taxes and portfolio choice

Identifying the effect of differential taxation on portfolio allocation requires exogenous variation in marginal tax rates. Marginal tax rates vary with income, but income surely affects portfolio choice directly. In systems of individual taxation – like Canada's – couples with the same household income can face different effective tax rates on capital income when labor income is distributed differently within households. Using this source of variation we find portfolio responses to taxation among more affluent households. The estimated effects are statistically significant but economically modest. In a “placebo” test, using data from the U.S. (which has joint taxation), we find no effect of the intra-household distribution of labor income on portfolios.     

Remittances, schooling, and child labor in Mexico

This paper studies the effects of remittances from the U.S. on child labor and school attendance in recipient Mexican households. We identify these effects using the impact of the 2008-2009 U.S. recession on remittance receipts. The methodology employed is a differences-in-differences strategy that compares households that were remittance recipients before the crisis with never-recipient households. To avoid possible selection problems, we instrument for membership in the remittance recipient group. We find that the negative shock on remittance receipts caused a significant increase in child labor and a significant reduction of school attendance.     

The effects of welfare vehicle asset rules on vehicle assets

Before 1996, households were typically ineligible for welfare if they had assets worth more than $1000, where $1500 from each vehicle's value was excluded from this determination. However, the 1996 welfare reform act began allowing states to increase their asset limits and vehicle exclusions. This may prompt low-income households to reallocate resources to or from vehicles. We examine the effects of state vehicle asset rules on vehicle assets. Results show that liberalizing asset rules increases vehicle assets and that this increase is driven largely by eligible individuals increasing vehicle assets, with no evidence indicating that ineligible individuals reduce vehicle assets to become eligible.     

Labor market institutions and industrial performance: an evolutionary study

This study investigates the impact of labor market institutions on industrial performance from a Schumpeterian perspective. We suggest that labor market institutions play a very important role in the process of creative destruction, because they may create an environment that encourages and enforces innovation, and help to reallocate resources, most importantly labor, through swift elimination of weak performers. We specifically look at the effects of the quantity of labor market regulations and inter-industry wage differentials on labor productivity for a panel of 44 countries for the period 1965–1999. Our findings suggest that those countries that introduce more regulations on conditions of employment and wages achieve higher levels of productivity. Moreover, wage compression raises productivity by reallocating resources to productive activities.     

Microcredit,Labor, and Poverty Impacts in Urban Mexico

Improved household accessibility to credit is a significant determinant of intra‐household allocation of labor resources with important implications for productivity, income, and poverty status. However, credit accessibility could also have wider impacts on poverty if it leads to new hires outside the household. This paper contributes to the existing literature on microcredit in two important ways. First, it investigates the routes through which microcredit reaches those in poverty outside the household. We test whether by lending to the vulnerable non‐poor microcredit can indirectly benefit poor laborers through increased employment. Second, we conduct the study in the context of urban poverty Mexico. This is relevant when considering that labor often represents the only source of livelihoods to the extreme urban poor. Our findings point to significant trickle‐down effects of microcredit that benefit poor laborers; however, these effects are only observed after loan‐supported enterprising households achieve earnings well above the poverty line.     

The potential of land rental markets in the process of economic development: Evidence from China

We develop a model of land leasing with agents characterized by unobserved heterogeneity in ability and presence of an off-farm labor market. In this case, decentralized land rental may contribute to equity and efficiency goals and may have several advantages over administrative reallocation. The extent to which this is true empirically is explored using data from three of China's poorest provinces. Land rental markets and administrative reallocation reallocate land to those with lower endowments but the former are more effective in doing so and have a bigger productivity-enhancing effect. Information on hypothetical market participation suggests that reducing transaction costs in land rental markets could help to realize significant additional productivity gains.     

Owning capital or being shareholders: An equivalence result with incomplete markets

Many recent papers in macroeconomics have studied the implications of models with household heterogeneity and incomplete financial markets under the assumption that households own the stock of physical capital and undertake the intertemporal investment decisions. In these models, production exhibits constant returns to scale, households maximize expected discounted utility, and firms rent capital and labor from households to maximize period by period profits. This paper considers the case in which infinitely lived firms, rather than households, make the intertemporal investment decisions. Under this assumption, it shows that there exists an objective function for firms that results in the same equilibrium allocation as in the standard setting with one period lived firms. The objective requires that firms maximize their asset value, which is defined as the discounted value of future cash flows using present value processes that do not allow for arbitrage opportunities.     

深化劳动价值论研究的方向和思路

应当把深化劳动价值论研究的方向放在资源配置和利用问题上，正确认识商品价值表达的双重信息，深入探讨现实提出的新问题，全面拓展劳动价值论研究。     

Tax and transfer programs,retirement behavior,and work hours over the life cycle

In this paper, we use a computable overlapping generations model economy to analyze the quantitative effects of some reforms on tax and transfer programs, aimed at easing the tax burden on the labor supply of older workers. We focus on retirement behavior, work hours over the life cycle, and efficiency gains. We find that the labor supply of older workers is very responsive to changes in tax and transfer programs and show that the gains, in terms of old-age work hours, are non-trivial. However, we also find that longer careers may not substantially increase aggregate hours because workers may reallocate labor supply over the life cycle in response to retiring later. Moreover, since longer careers may also reduce saving rates, we also find that changes in tax and transfer programs aimed at boosting the employment rates of the elderly may reduce output per head.     

The Galor–Weil gender-gap model revisited: from home to market

This paper develops an overlapping generations model that incorporates two-sector (market and non-market) production, gender heterogeneity, and fertility choice. We extend the gender-gap model of Galor and Weil (Am Econ Rev 86(3):374–387, 1996) by adding a third use of time, non-market work, into household time allocation. Our model can explain the joint evolution of production structure, household time allocation, and fertility broadly observed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Western world as part of a single process of economic development: (i) production shifted out of households and into the market, (ii) there was first an increase in the supply of male labor to the market, followed by an increase in the female labor supply; married-female participation in paid work outside the home dramatically increased in the latter half of the twentieth century, and (iii) there has been a two-century long secular decline in fertility, interrupted by a temporary rise in the mid-twentieth century (a baby boom). We also provide a quantitative analysis and examine how well our model replicates the patterns observed in U.S. data.     

影子工资率对农村劳动力迁移与就业的影响

利用对陕西省农户所做的调查数据,采用多重分类概率模型,就农民对不同就业方式的参与概率进行估计,重点分析了影子工资率及人力资本、就业成本、收入差距对农民迁移与就业的影响,进而讨论了农村劳动市场的发育状况、农村社区环境的发展、农户家庭特征、个体人力资本积累对劳动力要素有效配置的影响。最后提出了相应的对策建议。     

A Gendered Model of the Peasant Household: Time poverty and Farm Production in Rural Mozambique

Using insights from a case study on the allocation of labor in subsistence households in Mozambique, this study develops a conceptual framework for examining linkages between time poverty and farm production. An unexpected event such as a health crisis increases the demand for labor provided by women, thus making them more time poor. The model and numerical simulations show that a deterioration in a woman's time constraint will have an adverse effect on agricultural output of the household. This occurs because most women respond to an increase in household work by reducing their work hours on the farm and by reducing their leisure time. The latter outcome is expected to have a negative effect on women's physical and mental health, which will then cause a decline in their productivity on the farm.     

Dynamic asset allocation and consumption under inflation inequality: The impacts of inflation experiences and expectations

Differences in spending patterns and in price increases across goods and services lead to the unequal inflation experiences of households (called inflation inequality). These differences then cause disagreements in inflation expectations and eventually have a significant effect on households’ asset allocation and consumption decisions. The asset allocation model in this paper explains how inflation experiences affect household investment and consumption through corresponding inflation expectations, which are characterized by long-term expected inflation, the impact coefficient of the expected inflation and the correlation between expected inflation and the risky return. Using China's economic data, the empirical results show that significant differences in inflation expectation arise from income gap, regional inequality, different inflation measures and economic sector spending differences. Using the estimated coefficients, the calibration results have policy implications that households need more financing channels to resist inflation, especially in rural areas and in the raw material sector.     

Investment Incentives Under Emission Trading: An Experimental Study

This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation on incentives to adopt advanced abatement technology under emissions trading. Our experimental design mimics an industry with small asymmetric polluting firms regulated by different schemes of tradable permits. We consider three allocation/auction policies: auctioning off (costly) permits through an ascending clock auction, grandfathering permits with re-allocation through a single-unit double auction, and grandfathering with re-allocation through an ascending clock auction. Our results confirm both dynamic and static theoretical equivalence of auctioning and grandfathering. We nevertheless find that although the market institution used to reallocate permits does not impact the dynamic efficiency from investment, it affects the static efficiency from permit trading.     

Gender discrimination,inflation, and the business cycle

Empirical evidence suggests that women are discriminated against in the labor market. We analyze the effects of taste-based and statistical gender discrimination on business cycle and inflation dynamics by including unpaid household production, two-agent households, and discriminatory firm behavior in a tractable New Keynesian model. After a negative demand shock, we find that the economic downturn is more severe in comparison to a non-discriminatory environment, as the shock implies an increase in the inefficient utilization of female and male productivity. Furthermore, the working time allocation between women and men becomes more inefficient. Moreover, we show that discrimination implies a lower transmission of expansionary monetary policy shocks on inflation. Overall, taste-based discrimination leads to larger macroeconomic distortions, while statistical discrimination implies higher intra-household inefficiencies.