Women's Wealth and Intimate Partner Violence: Insights from Ecuador and Ghana

Intimate partner violence (IPV) by men against their partners is one of the most glaring indicators of women's lack of empowerment. Drawing upon the 2010 Ecuador Household Asset Survey (EAFF) and the 2010 Ghana Household Asset Survey (GHAS), nationally representative surveys for Ecuador and Ghana, respectively, this study investigates the relationship between women's ownership of assets and physical and emotional abuse by spouses against currently partnered women over the previous twelve months. It uses the value of a woman's total assets compared to those of her partner as the main proxy for a woman's bargaining power. Differentiating between physical and emotional violence in both countries, the study finds that women's share of couple wealth is significantly associated with lower odds of physical violence in Ecuador and emotional violence in Ghana. Moreover, the association between women's share of couple wealth and IPV is contingent on the household's position in the wealth distribution.     

Women self-help groups and intra-household decision-making in agriculture

This study examines the effect of women-centric agricultural self-help groups (SHGs) on intra-household decision-making in agriculture. Using data collected from an intra-household survey of 815 households, we analyze the effect of women's membership in different types of SHGs on 14 decisions related to farms and households. Specifically, we investigate the discord in decision-making, which is the difference in the perceived decision-making roles of spouses within a household. Our results show that women's participation in SHGs has increased their role in decision-making by 8–13%. However, the effects vary according to the type of intervention and the decision. We found fewer discords in intra-household decision-making in seed SHGs than in micro-finance SHGs. In conclusion, our study suggests that women's engagement in agriculture-based SHG interventions can encourage joint decision-making, but the magnitude of this effect depends on the type of SHG. Development agencies can use this information to design interventions targeted at empowering women through the improvement of the agricultural value chain.     

Gender Differences in Time-Poverty in Rural Mozambique

Based on time-use data from a 2013 primary household survey, this study examines the nature and extent of time-poverty experienced by men and women in peasant households in Mozambique. The main findings indicate that while women's labor allocation to economic activities is comparable to that of men, household chores and care work are almost entirely women's responsibility. The heavy burden of responsibilities leave women significantly time-poorer compared to men. Women's time-poverty worsens when the burden of simultaneous care work is taken into account. In addition, due to multitasking, the work tends to be more taxing. The examination of determinants of time-poverty shows that common measures of individual economic power, such as assets and education, do not necessarily affect the time-poverty faced by women.     

Taxation and household portfolio composition: US evidence from the 1980s and 1990s

This paper explores the relationship between household marginal income tax rates, the set of financial assets that households own, and the portfolio shares accounted for by each of these assets. It analyzes data from the 1983, 1989, 1992, 1995, and 1998 Surveys of Consumer Finances and develops a new algorithm for imputing federal marginal tax rates to households in these surveys. The empirical findings suggest that marginal tax rates have important effects on asset allocation decisions. The probability that a household owns tax-advantaged assets, such as tax-exempt bonds or assets held in tax-deferred accounts, is positively related to its tax rate on ordinary income. In addition, the portfolio share invested in corporate stock, which is taxed less heavily than interest bearing assets, is increasing in the household’s ordinary income tax rate. Holdings of heavily taxed assets, such as interest-bearing accounts, decline as a share of wealth as a household’s marginal tax rate increases.     

Exploring Alternative Measures of Welfare in the Absence of Expenditure Data

We consider an asset-based alternative to the standard use of expenditures in defining well-being and poverty. Our motivation is to see if there exist simpler and less demanding ways to collect data to measure economic welfare and rank households. This is particularly important in poor regions where there is limited capacity to collect consumption, expenditure and price data. We evaluate an index derived from a factor analysis on household assets using multipurpose surveys from several countries. We find that the asset index is a valid predictor of a crucial manifestation of poverty—child health and nutrition. Indicators of relative measurement error show that the asset index is measured as a proxy for long-term wealth with less error than expenditures. Analysts may thus prefer to use the asset index as an explanatory variable or as a means of mapping economic welfare to other living standards and capabilities such as health and nutrition.     

ESTIMATES OF HOUSEHOLD SECTOR WEALTH FOR SOUTH AFRICA, 1970–2003

Market values of components of household sector wealth are important explanatory variables for aggregate consumer expenditure and household debt in macro-econometric models. We construct the first coherent set of the main elements of household-sector balance sheet estimates at market value for South Africa. Our quarterly estimates derive from published data on financial flows, and other capital market data, often at book value. Our methods rely, where relevant, on accumulating flow of funds data using appropriate benchmarks, and, where necessary, converting book to market values using appropriate asset price indices. Relating asset to income ratios for various asset classes to asset price movements and other features of the economic environment, throws light on the changing composition of household sector wealth. Most striking are the relative rise in the value of pension wealth and the trend decline of directly held securities, the decline and recent recovery of housing wealth, and the rise in household debt and concomitant decline of liquid assets from the early 1980s to the late 1990s.     

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.     

健康与家庭资产选择

本文采用中国居民家庭微观调查数据,运用资产参与和资产分配模型,分别讨论健康状况对居民家庭资产配置行为的影响。研究结果表明:投资者的健康状况不显著影响其参与股票市场和风险资产市场的决定,但影响家庭的股票或风险资产在总财富中的比重,健康状况不佳会导致这两个比重较低,在控制了参保情况或时间展望期后这一影响仍然显著;而投资者风险态度和遗赠动机能够一定程度上解释健康风险的影响。     

Racial/Ethnic disparities in high return investment ownership: a Heckman selection model

This study investigates racial/ethnic differences in high return investment ownership in the U.S. Households with low levels of financial assets might not be able to meaningfully make investment choices, so a Heckman two-stage selection model was used to separate the minimum asset level status from the allocation decision, specifically in whether households owned at least one high return investment. We found that households with White respondents were more likely than households with Black and Hispanic respondents to have adequate financial assets for investment. Conditional on having adequate financial assets, and controlling for household characteristics and financial literacy, White households were more likely to own high return investments than Black, Hispanic and Asian/other households. Policies to nudge households to invest some wealth in high return investment assets would benefit minority households.     

Child Benefit Payments and Household Wealth Accumulation

Using the life‐cycle/permanent income hypothesis, we theoretically and empirically assess the impact of child benefit payments on household wealth accumulation. Consistent with the predictions of the model, we find that higher cumulative benefits received increase current assets, higher future benefit payments lower asset holding, and that these effects systematically vary over the life cycle. We find different wealth responses to child benefit payments for liquidity constrained and unconstrained households, as predicted by the model.     

农户金融资产配置的门槛效应对收入差距的影响机制——基于微观面板门限协整模型的经验与证据

基于2100户农户2005-2009年的微观面板数据,本文构建了农户金融资产配置与收入差距间的两阶段面板门限协整回归,对金融资产配置作用于农户收入差距的机制进行了分析和检验。论文从数理模型上证明了金融资产配置差异对农户收入差距的影响机制;利用非线性门限协整回归的极大似然估计量,本文估计了我国农户金融资产配置与收入差距的两阶段门限模型,并对其模型选择及其门槛效应进行了检验,模型的回归结果及门限参数的变化轨迹证实了金融资产配置的门槛前后农户收入的差异性,农户金融资产配置的差异确实对农户收入产生了重要影响;因此,改善农户金融资产配置的环境及结构可能有助于消减农户间的收入差距。     

Aspirations and women's empowerment: Evidence from Kyrgyzstan

There is an enormous interest in development interventions aimed at reducing behavioural poverty traps, including by raising women's and girls' aspirations, or future-oriented goals. However, little is known about how women's aspirations influence their gender attitudes, the marriages into which they select and their involvement in intra-household decision-making. We find that women in Kyrgyzstan with higher aspirations are more likely to espouse egalitarian gender attitudes, as are their husbands, and their husbands have higher aspirations. They also live in households in which women play a greater role in decision-making, and in which spouses are more likely to agree about women's roles in decision-making.     

Saving Accounts versus Stocks and Bonds in Household Portfolio Allocation

We study the structure of household portfolios of financial wealth by analyzing both the determinants of total financial wealth and the choice between risky (stocks and bonds) and riskfree assets (saving accounts). The econometric specification is a generalized trivariate Tobit model, estimated on a cross section of 3,077 households in the Netherlands in 1988. We account for endogeneity of financial wealth and for selectivity due to nonreporting. Results show that the level of financial wealth and the marginal tax rate are major determinants of the allocation between riskfree and risky assets.     

Spousal Wealth and Fathers’ Involvement in Childcare in Uganda

ABSTRACT

The redistribution of household work is considered essential for effectively empowering women. This study examines the extent to which fathers’ evaluation of their wealth in relation to their wives’ influences fathers’ willingness to participate in childcare, a domain traditionally gender ascribed to wives. Data were gathered from a mothers’ survey and a fathers’ survey, each with a sample of 200, conducted in a rural and an urban district in Uganda in 2008. The study compares mean scores for perception and practice indices across three wealth categories: “wife is wealthier than husband,” “husband is wealthier than wife,” and “shared or equal wealth.” Data show that fathers are more likely to engage in childcare when husbands and wives share or have equal wealth than when there are wealth differences between spouses. The results suggest that policy should focus on raising women's economic endowment as well as public education that encourages progressive perceptions of gender roles.     

Using sparse categorical principal components to estimate asset indices: new methods with an application to rural southeast asia

Asset indices have been used since the late 1990s to measure wealth in developing countries. We extend the standard methodology for estimating asset indices using principal component analysis in two ways: by introducing constraints that force the indices to have increasing value as the number of assets owned increases, and by estimating sparse indices with a few key assets. This is achieved by combining categorical and sparse principal component analysis. We also apply this methodology to the estimation of per capita level asset indices. Using household survey data from northwest Vietnam and northeast Laos, we show that the resulting asset indices improve the prediction and ranking of income both at household and per capita level.     

Precautionary Saving,Financial Risk,and Portfolio Choice

Relying on a direct question about the desired amount of precautionary wealth from the 2002 wave of the Italian “Survey of Household Income and Wealth,” I assess the main determinants of the precautionary motive for saving, focusing on the role played by financial risk on households' saving decisions. Households that invest mainly in safe assets do not need to protect themselves against future and unexpected financial losses. Consequently, once we control for households' sources of risk beside financial ones, the amount of precautionary savings of a household investing exclusively in safe assets should be lower compared to households who detain a non‐negligible share of risky assets in their portfolio. Results show that, as expected, a strong and negative correlation exists between the desired amount of precautionary wealth and the ownership of a portfolio made exclusively of safe assets.     

Women's Economic Participation on the Eve of Industrialization: Bizkaia,Spain, 1825

This contribution discusses, from the regional perspective of Bizkaia, Spain, adult women's labor force participation prior to industrialization, including the impact of economic, social, and demographic variables, such as family life cycle, marriage, and the presence of minor children in the household. Women's high level of participation – 68.6 percent for the entire province – varies considerably, depending on local economic conditions. Job opportunities for women and socioeconomic characteristics of households act as first-order explanatory factors. Women in proto-industrial economies, like Bizkaia's, which combined the extraction, transport, and marketing of iron with agriculture and fishing, show greater participation. Demand for women's labor was linked to jobs without recognized qualifications. The association of women's participation with demographic variables is not manifest in the historical data. The results show that supply factors do not explain the variance in women's activity.     

ANNUITIZED ASSET ADEQUACY IN JAPAN: THE DEMAND FOR INDIVIDUAL PENSIONS

In this paper, I analyze the impact of social security wealth, retirement payments, and living expenses during retirement on people's retirement savings in general, and on their individual pension holdings in particular, using micro data from a 1996 Japanese household survey. I confirm a replacement effect of social security on saving for all types of households and on individual pensions for self‐employed households only. This suggests that the social security assets of self‐employed households are less than their optimal level of annuitized assets and that they would increase their demand for individual pensions if social security benefits were to be reduced.     

HOUSEHOLD SAVING AND PORTFOLIO CHANGE: EVIDENCE FROM THE 1983–89 SCF PANEL

There are few sources of high-quality data on the dynamics of wealth accumulation. This paper uses newly available data from the 1983 89 panel of the Survey of Consumer Finances to examine household saving and portfolio change over the 1980s. Our main findings are as follows. First, median household wealth rose modestly over the period. Second, while overall wealth inequality increased, households in the top 1 percent of the wealth distribution in 1983 saw their share of total wealth decline, probably reflecting turnover among the very wealthy. Third, although age, income, and initial wealth had significant effects in regressions on household saving, a large part of the variation in saving was unexplained. Finally, there were clear life-cycle patterns in the portfolios of assets and liabilities held by households, with younger households acquiring homes, businesses and all types of debts, and older households divesting themselves of these assets and debts.     

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.