Geography,health, and the pace of demo-economic development

This paper investigates the impact of subsistence consumption and extrinsic and intrinsic causes of child mortality on fertility and child expenditure. It offers a theory for why mankind multiplies at higher rates at geographically unfavorable, tropical locations. Placed into a macroeconomic framework this behavior creates an indirect channel through which geography shapes economic performance. It is explained why it are countries of low absolute latitude where we observe exceedingly slow (if not stalled) economic development and demographic transition.     

Children as consumers: investigating child diary expenditure data

Abstract.  We investigate expenditure behaviour of school-aged children using child diary information contained in the British Family Expenditure Survey. The estimates from an Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) for child expenditure suggest that drinks, sweets, books, and toys are 'normal' goods for children, but clothes, travel, leisure and vice products are 'luxury' items with income elasticities greater than one. Being a lone-parent child and having a working mother are important factors in determining child expenditure decisions. Importantly, a higher parental budget share on any given commodity is typically associated with an increased child budget share on the same commodity.     

Why ‘Buy American’ is a bad idea but politicians still like it

Abstract When the world economy was recently hit by a severe recession, governments all over the world reacted by initiating stimulus packages. Some countries (among them, most notably, China and the US) tried to put special emphasis on their home industries by including ‘Buy National’ clauses into the stimulus package. By analyzing the dynamics of transitory changes of trade barriers as a short‐run response to an economic downturn, we show that beggar‐thy‐neighbour policies do not work. We then come up with two rationales that help us understand why countries nevertheless consider protectionism to be a good response to a recession: (i) the lobbying of domestic, non‐exporting firms, and (ii) the relationship between vulnerability, the degree of openness and loss aversion of consumers.     

Should we write prenuptial contracts?

A successful marriage requires for both parties to make investments in their relationship and marital assets. How such assets would be divided if and when the parties divorce is an important factor determining each party's ex ante investment incentives. Using the incomplete contracting approach, we characterize the optimal asset division rule, one that provides the parties with the best investment incentives. We then discuss the circumstances under which the spouses would agree, in equilibrium, to contract out state-imposed rules governing the allocation of marital assets upon divorce. We conclude by exploring the implications of our results in the context of various asset division rules currently discussed by policy-makers.     

A theory of rational marriage and divorce

Despite high rates of cohabitation before marriage, and considerable efforts invested in the search for a life partner, a high number of marriages end in divorce. This paper develops a model of household formation and dissolution in which it may be rational for individuals to marry, fully anticipating that they will subsequently divorce. Economies of scale associated with living as a couple rather than in two separate households provide an incentive to marry; problems with free riding in the provision of household collective goods may lead to divorce. Marriages which involve partners who are similar, in tastes or in their productive capacities, and in which private goods are equally shared, are the most likely to be stable. In contrast, marriages which involve very disparate partners, or which share the fruits of market labor very unequally between the partners, are more likely to be shortlived and end in divorce.     

New facts on infidelity

We establish new empirical facts, in line with the recent theoretical literature on infidelity. Infidelity displays seasonality and state dependence. In the US socioeconomic status is not a driver of infidelity and females and males are equally likely to be unfaithful.     

Child abuse: Does public enforcement crowd out private vigilance?

We investigate whether increased public reporting of child abuse crowds out private reporting. We find, despite theoretical models suggesting significant crowding out, that public and private reports have risen nearly equiproportionately and that crowding out is small and not significant.     

Labour migration in the enlarged EU: a new economic geography approach

This paper studies the impact of migration policy liberalisation on international labour migration in the enlarged European Union (EU) in a structural economic geography approach. The liberalisation of migration policy would induce an additional 1.80–2.98% of the total EU workforce to change their country of location, with most of migrant workers relocating from the East to the West. The average net migration rate is decreasing in the level of integration, suggesting that from an economic point of view no regulatory policy responses are necessary to labour migration in the enlarged EU.     

Inequality does cause underdevelopment: Insights from a new instrument

Consistent with the provocative hypothesis of Engerman and Sokoloff [Engermann, Stanley and Kenneth Sokoloff (1997), “Factor Endowments, Institutions, and Differential Paths of Growth Among New World Economies: A View from Economic Historians of the United States,” in Stephen Haber, ed. How Latin America Fell Behind, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press., Sokoloff, Kenneth L. and Stanley L. Engerman (2000), Institutions, Factor Endowments, and Paths of Development in the New World, Journal of Economic Perspectives v14, n3, 217–32.], this paper confirms with cross-country data that agricultural endowments predict inequality and inequality predicts development. The use of agricultural endowments –specifically the abundance of land suitable for growing wheat relative to that suitable for growing sugarcane – as an instrument for inequality is this paper's approach to problems of measurement and endogeneity of inequality. The paper finds inequality also affects other development outcomes – institutions and schooling –which the literature has emphasized as mechanisms by which higher inequality lowers per capita income. It tests the inequality hypothesis for development, institutional quality and schooling against other recent hypotheses in the literature. While finding some evidence consistent with other development fundamentals, the paper finds high inequality to independently be a large and statistically significant barrier to prosperity, good quality institutions, and high schooling.     

The disposition effect and loss aversion: Do gender differences matter?

This paper analyzes gender differences in the disposition effect in an experiment based on Weber and Camerer (1998). The results emphasize that female investors realize less capital losses, have significantly higher disposition effects and are more loss averse than men.     

HIV and fertility revisited

Young (2005) argues that HIV related population declines reinforced by the fertility response to the epidemic will lead to higher capital-labor ratios and to higher per capita incomes in the affected countries of Africa. Using household level data on fertility from South Africa and relying on between cohort variations in country level HIV infection, he estimates a large negative effect of HIV prevalence on fertility. However, the studies that utilize the recent rounds of Demographic Health Surveys, where fertility outcomes are linked to HIV status based on testing, find no effect of the disease on the fertility behavior. This paper tries to bridge this gap by revisiting Young's findings. Young (2005) includes data before 1990, when no data are available on HIV prevalence rates. He assigns all the fertility observations before 1990 with HIV prevalence rates of zero, and this appears to drive the significant negative effect found in his study. When one restricts the sample to the period 1990-1998, where actual HIV data are available, the effect of HIV prevalence on fertility turns out to be positive for South Africa. Simulating Young's model utilizing these new estimates shows that the future generations of South Africa are worse off.     

Is product boycott a good idea for controlling child labor? A theoretical investigation

A popular form of action to curb child labor and uphold international labor standards in general is a ‘product boycott’ by consumers. There are labeling agencies that inform us if, for instance, a carpet or a hand-stitched soccer ball is free of child labor. The presence of a consumer boycott will typically mean that products tainted by child labor will command a lower price on the market than ones certified to be untainted. It is popularly presumed that such consumer activism is desirable. The paper formally investigates this presumption and shows that consumer product boycotts can, in a wide class of situations, have an adverse reaction that causes child labor to rise rather than fall. This happens under weak and plausible assumptions. Hence, there has to be much greater caution in the use of consumer activism, and one has to have much more detailed information about the context where child labor occurs, before using a boycott.     

Supermodularity and preferences

We uncover the complete ordinal implications of supermodularity on finite lattices under the assumption of weak monotonicity. In this environment, we show that supermodularity is ordinally equivalent to the notion of quasisupermodularity introduced by Milgrom and Shannon. We conclude that supermodularity is a weak property, in the sense that many preferences have a supermodular representation.     

On behavioral complementarity and its implications

We study the behavioral definition of complementary goods: if the price of one good increases, demand for a complementary good must decrease. We obtain its full implications for observable demand behavior (its testable implications), and for the consumer's underlying preferences. We characterize those data sets which can be generated by rational preferences exhibiting complementarities. The class of preferences that generate demand complements has Leontief and Cobb-Douglas as its as extreme members.     

Effective global regularity and empirical modelling of direct, inverse, and mixed demand systems

Abstract .  This paper utilizes the notion of 'effective global regularity' and the intuition stemming from Cooper and McLaren (1996)'s General Exponential Form to develop a family of 'composite' (product and ratio) direct, inverse and mixed demand systems. Apart from having larger regularity regions, the resulting specifications are also of potentially arbitrary rank, which can better approximate non-linear Engel curves. We also make extensive use of duality theory and a numerical inversion estimation method to rectify the endogeneity problem encountered in the estimation of the mixed demand systems. We illustrate the techniques by estimating different types of demand systems for Japanese quarterly meat and fish consumption.     

Quasi-stationary cardinal utility and present bias

This note gives an axiomatic foundation for utility exhibiting quasi-geometric discounting. In addition, it introduces a wider class of utility functions satisfying weakened stationarity, called quasi-stationary utility. Both are established as von Neumann-Morgenstern utility indices in a model of risk preference.     

Social Affiliation and the Demand for Health Services: Caste and Child Health in South India

This paper assesses the role of social affiliation, measured by caste, in shaping investments in child health. The special setting that we have chosen for the analysis - tea estates in the South Indian High Range - allows us to control nonparametrically for differences in income, access to health services, and patterns of morbidity across low caste and high caste households. In this controlled setting, low caste households spend more on their children's health than high caste households, reversing the pattern we would expect to find elsewhere in India. Moreover, health expenditures do not vary by gender within either caste group, in contrast once again with the male preference documented throughout the country. A simple explanation, based on differences in the returns to human capital across castes in the tea estates is proposed to explain these striking results.     

Timing constraints and the allocation of time: The effects of changing shopping hours regulations in The Netherlands

A 1996 change in shopping hours regulations in The Netherlands provides an opportunity to study the effects of timing constraints on total time spent in shopping, working, and other activities as well as the timing of these activities. We develop a simple structural model to make predictions about the effects of imposition and relaxation of a timing constraint on time use patterns, and utilize time diary data from 1995, 1997, 1999, and 2000 to examine time use patterns by demographic group before and after the change. In addition to a change in the timing of shopping, we find a nonnegligible increase in the total time spent shopping.