The Impact of Transportation Infrastructure on Women's Employment in India

ABSTRACT

Indian women's labor force participation is extremely low, and women are much less likely than men to work in the nonfarm sector. Earlier research has explained women's labor supply by individual characteristics, social institutions, and cultural norms, but not enough attention has been paid to the labor market opportunity structure that constrains women's labor market activities. Using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) in 2004–05 and 2011–12, this study examines how village transportation infrastructure affects women's and men's agricultural and nonagricultural employment. Results from fixed-effect analysis show that access by paved or unpaved roads and frequent bus services increase the odds of nonagricultural employment among men and women. The effect of road access on nonfarm employment (relative to not working) is stronger among women than among men. Improved transportation infrastructure has a stronger positive effect on women's nonfarm employment in communities with more egalitarian gender norms.     

Equitable and Efficient Federal Structures with Decentralized Leadership,Spillovers, and Attachment of Heterogeneous Labor

Relying on differentiability assumptions and on conditions that guarantee interior solutions, we show that a federation featuring decentralized leadership, interregional spillovers, and labor attachment allocates resources efficiently under two sets of circumstances. The first is when the center is Rawlsian. The second is when individual utilities are quasi‐linear, regional welfare functions are Benthamite, and the center's objective function is a Bergson–Samuelson transformation of regional welfare levels, which also satisfies conditions needed for the center to view regional welfare levels as normal goods. In both sets of circumstances, efficient behavior follows from incentive equivalence promoted by the center's egalitarian transfers.     

Sticky Norms,Endogenous Preferences,and Shareable Goods

The Internet has reduced the cost of borrowing and lending “shareable goods,” including tools, gear, toys, lodging, and vehicles. Online platforms can better match people with underutilized goods, but it may take time for people to develop sticky norms and endogenous preferences that are conducive to greater peer-to-peer sharing. This study estimates the current and potential value of sharing items across households. Data from the General Social Survey, the website NeighborGoods, and a new survey show that peer-to-peer borrowing is already worth at least $179 a year for 30% of Americans. Spending on shareable goods provides an upper bound on the potential gains from sharing. The consumer expenditure survey reveals that the average household spends $9,090 each year on shareable goods. Private vehicles account for 80% of these expenses, which suggests that the largest opportunities may be in greater car-sharing and ride-sharing.     

Exploring the Production of Social Order

In this article, we consider the production of order. Social order is a product of community action, which is to say it is deliberately produced; its production can be explored with the tools of price theory. There are two categories of inputs—informal and formal, where the first involves customs, traditions and social norms and the latter involves regulation, statutes, and police. We argue that people seek to form homogeneous communities where order is produced at low cost, using informal means. Communities that can produce order at relatively low cost will use less of the formal input, unless required to do so by legislation. Formal efforts to force the production of order by a larger heterogeneous polity paradoxically can erode the ability of homogeneous communities to produce order by informal means. In our statistical examination of the relationship between homogeneity and order using U.S. data, we find support for these notions.     

The effect of luck framing on distributional preferences

This paper experimentally investigated luck framing. Specifically, we analyzed the difference between being assigned an advantageous role in a distribution game and being assigned the same role while being explicitly told that you were lucky to be in that favorable position. We tested this difference by implementing a dictator game and a no-veto-cost ultimatum game. We observed that: a) dictators transferred larger amounts in the game when they were explicitly told they were lucky to be the dictator compared to dictators who did not receive this message, and b) responders in the no-veto-cost ultimatum game who were explicitly told they were lucky to be in that role were significantly less likely to reject a particular offer compared to responders in the game who did not receive this message. The combination of these results is consistent with the hypothesis that people are more likely to behave in a more prosocial and egalitarian manner when they are reminded that they are lucky to be in a particular position.     

Reproductive health,fairness, and optimal policies

We consider an overlapping generations economy in which agents differ through their ability to procreate. Ex‐ante infertile households may incur health expenditure to increase their chances of parenthood. This health heterogeneity generates welfare inequalities that deserve to be ruled out. We explore three different criteria of social evaluation in the long‐run: the utilitarian approach, the ex‐ante egalitarian criterion and the ex‐post egalitarian one. We propose a set of economic instruments to decentralize each solution. To correct for the externalities and health inequalities, both a preventive (a taxation of capital) and a redistributive policy are required. We show that a more egalitarian allocation is associated with higher productive investment but reduced health expenditure and thus, lower population growth.     

Gender Norms and the Gendered Distribution of Total Work in Latin American Households

This study uses time-use survey data for Mexico, Peru, and Ecuador (from 2009, 2010, and 2012, respectively) to analyze differences between countries in terms of the gendered distribution of total work, which includes both paid and unpaid work. It explores whether the variations in the total time worked by women and men, and, particularly, the gender gap unfavorable to women, can be explained by substantive national differences in gendered social norms. Using data from the World Values Survey (WVS; 2010–14), this study computes a gender norms index to measure cross-country differences in gender norms. It finds that more egalitarian countries exhibit higher levels of equality in the gendered distribution of total work.     

Efficiency of Payments for Environmental Services: Equity and additionality in a case study from a Biosphere Reserve in Chiapas, Mexico

Payments for Environmental Services (PES) have been claimed as a more efficient way of accomplishing conservation and development goals than other indirect strategies, reaching their optimum when the buyer pays the opportunity costs of the foregone benefits. Different inefficient situations have been described, like lack of additionality, where payments are given for practices that would have been adopted anyway. Trade-offs between efficiency and equity of PES have usually emerged as well. In this paper we assess the equity, additionality and stakeholders' perceptions of a PES scheme in a Mexican community inside a Biosphere Reserve. We applied structured interviews to all adults, a total of 66 people from 31 households. Our results show a dual response in equity and additionality, depending on land tenure. PES have an egalitarian effect within landowners and landless groups, but it broadens the gap between them. Additionality is low for landowners and high for the landless people in the community, even though the former are the ones with full decision over the land. Although the scheme does not seem efficient under the classical PES paradigm, it is perceived as a reward, reinforcing conservation attitudes even though most of the interviewees claim it to be insufficient.     

Efficiency, monotonicity and rationality in public goods economies

Summary. In economies with public goods, we identify a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of cost monotonic, Pareto optimal and individually rational mechanisms. These exist if and only if the preferences of the agents satisfy what we call the equal ordering property. We also show that when this condition holds the egalitarian equivalent correspondence is the only cost monotonic selection from the core of the economy. Furthermore, it is unambiguous in the sense that the agents are indifferent among all the allocations in it. Received: February 26, 1996; revised version: January 31, 1997     

The community : Perspectives for its sustainability

The community has been the core social planning unit throughout history. It was through a process of dialogue and consensus building within the community that problems were perceived and defined, and plans for solutions agreed upon and implemented.The rural communities of the Maya zone of Mexico and Central America are undergoing an accelerated transformation of their economic and political context and physical environment. However, after decades of neglect or domination by the centralized bureaucracies, existing communities and new social groups often lack the experience necessary to address the new opportunities for participation, planning, and management to achieve the goals and objectives of the people.This article reports on the problems and results of a program of community participation and sustainable development. In the participatory planning process the social group can create its own shared unity of purpose and sense of achievement. Thus, the participatory planning process is not only a tool for the identification and resolution of problems at the local level but is also means for creating a sense of social well being, and recreating the community.     

Entrepreneurship,fear of failure,and economic policy

The previous literature finds that self-reported ‘fear of failure’ has a significant negative effect on individuals’ choice to become entrepreneurs. We hypothesize this effect is lessened in economies with a larger number of additional, alternative, entrepreneurial opportunities to pursue if a failure occurs. Prior literature also concludes the number of entrepreneurial opportunities is enhanced significantly by having policies and institutions consistent with higher levels of economic freedom. We therefore test and confirm that fear of failure hurts the entrepreneurial process less when levels of economic freedom are higher as there are more additional chances for failed entrepreneurs to pursue.     

WHY SOCIAL PREFERENCES MATTER – THE IMPACT OF NON-SELFISH MOTIVES ON COMPETITION, COOPERATION AND INCENTIVES

A substantial number of people exhibit social preferences, which means they are not solely motivated by material self-interest but also care positively or negatively for the material payoffs of relevant reference agents. We show empirically that economists fail to understand fundamental economic questions when they disregard social preferences, in particular, that without taking social preferences into account, it is not possible to understand adequately (i) effects of competition on market outcomes, (ii) laws governing cooperation and collective action, (iii) effects and the determinants of material incentives, (iv) which contracts and property rights arrangements are optimal, and (v) important forces shaping social norms and market failures.     

Social norms and individual savings in the context of informal insurance

This paper develops a theory of informal insurance in the presence of an intertemporal technology. It is shown that when an insurance agreement suffers from enforcement problems, constraints on individual savings behaviour can enable the group to sustain greater cooperation. This result provides a motivation for a variety of social norms observed in traditional societies which discourage ‘excessive’ accumulation of wealth by individuals. The paper also shows that social norms that discourage savings are more likely to benefit poorer communities and thus, paradoxically, cause them to fall further behind even as it serves a useful purpose.     

Defining residual risk-sharing opportunities: Pooling world income components

We construct a new method of decomposing the variance of national incomes into components in such a way as to indicate the most important ‘residual’ risk-sharing opportunities among peoples of the world. The risk-sharing opportunities we study are nonsystematic risk-sharing opportunities. These are the risk-sharing opportunities that would remain if systematic risk were already shared, see 2. The new method developed here uses a simpler approach to deriving the components based on pure variance reduction. With the new method, the income component securities are derived in terms of eigenvectors of a transformed variance matrix of world incomes, but with this method, the transformation is to use the residuals when incomes are regressed on world income instead of deviations of incomes from average world income as in 3. The method is applied using 16 data on national incomes for large countries 1950–1990, using two different methods of estimating variances.     

Cultural norms and values and purchases of counterfeits

We conjecture that an important driver of individual purchases of counterfeit products is cultural norms and values. To put this conjecture to an empirical test, we make use of the unique situation of Surinamese people who live in Suriname and in the Netherlands and who might share the same norms and values but certainly not their respective income levels and demographics. Holding newly collected data from surveys amongst Surinamese individuals in the Netherlands and in Suriname against a control group of Dutch individuals in the Netherlands, we present evidence that cultural norms are indeed a key driver for purchases of counterfeit products. Implications for policy are discussed.     

Consumption dynamics and inequality of opportunity with an application to Uganda

This paper proposes the adoption of an opportunity egalitarian perspective to assess and compare growth processes and their distributional implications. To this aim, a set of graphical tools are introduced that allow one to evaluate the role of growth and recessions in the evolution of individuals’ opportunities over time. These tools satisfy the ex post principle of equality of opportunity and represent an extension of the “opportunity growth incidence curve,” a framework proposed by the literature to evaluate growth according to the ex ante principle of equality of opportunity. This measurement framework is applied to evaluate the economic dynamic between 2009 and 2011 in Uganda. The results show that despite a reduction in the real value of household consumption and a surge in outcome inequality, its effects appear to be less dramatic when the ex post equality of opportunity perspective is invoked.     

Equality of Opportunity in Four Measures of Well‐Being

A growing literature has tried to measure the extent to which individuals have equal opportunities to acquire income. At the same time, policymakers have doubled down on efforts to go beyond income when designing policies to enhance well‐being. We attempt to bridge these two areas by measuring the extent to which individuals have equal opportunities to achieve a high level of well‐being. We use the German Socio‐Economic Panel to measure well‐being in four different ways, including incomes. This makes it possible to determine if the way in which well‐being is measured matters for identifying who the opportunity‐deprived are and for tracking inequality of opportunity over time. We find that, regardless of how well‐being is measured, the same people are opportunity‐deprived and equality of opportunity has improved over the past 10 years. This suggests that going beyond income has little relevance if the objective is to provide equal opportunities.     

REFERENCE NORMS,STAGGERED WAGES,AND WAGE LEADERSHIP: THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE*

This article presents an extension of the Taylor model with staggered wages in which wage setting is also influenced by reference norms. We show that reference norms can considerably increase the persistence of inflation but that the size of this effect depends on the exact definition (e.g., external vs. internal, symmetric vs. asymmetric norms). Using data on collectively bargained wages in Austria from 1980 to 2006 we show that wage setting is strongly influenced by reference norms, that external norms seem to matter more than internal norms, and that there is a clear indication for the existence of wage leadership (asymmetric norms).     

Poverty,competition, democracy,and ownership: A general equilibrium model with vertical preferences

We consider a general equilibrium model where individuals are simultaneously workers, consumers, and shareholders, with two possible market structures: Monopoly and Duopoly, and two extreme ownership structures: egalitarian and concentrated. Considering three standard poverty indicators, the questions are, whether more competition generates more or less poverty for a given ownership structure; and whether a democratic choice between Monopoly and Duopoly leads to the alternative with less poverty. When the ownership is concentrated, we show that Duopoly generates less poverty than Monopoly and the majority votes for the alternative with less poverty. When the ownership is egalitarian, Duopoly may generate more or less poverty and democratic choice alleviates poverty regarding at least one poverty indicator and worsens poverty regarding at least another one, the three poverty indicators never converging. An empirical study on the effect of competition on poverty supports to some extent our theoretical findings.     

Testing theories of behavior for extensive-form two-player two-stage games

We examine choices in two-player extensive-form games that give subjects opportunities for individualistic as well as other-regarding behavior, and where each subject makes choices in a variety of games. Following an extensive search over models, where we estimate a single parameter vector for all the games rather than different parameter vectors for each game, we find that (1) the level-n model organizes the data well, (2) other-regarding behaviors in these games appear to consist primarily of egalitarian and utilitarian behaviors, and (3) there is no significant evidence for reciprocal behavior. Electronic Supplementary Material  The online version of this article () contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.