Coffee production effects on child labor and schooling in rural Brazil

I use variation in coffee production to measure changes in local economic conditions, which proxy for the value of children's time. I test how this short-term variation affects child labor and schooling in Brazilian coffee regions using seven rounds of household surveys. Increases in the county-level value of coffee production led to more work among middle-income boys and girls, poorer children were withdrawn from school, while richer children were not affected. Thus, during periods of economic growth, education of the poor may be adversely affected.     

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 role of birth order in child labour and schooling

Does when a child was born relative to his or her siblings affect whether the child attends school or participates in child labour? We investigate this question by estimating the causal effect of birth order on the probabilities of school attendance and child labour participation. To address the potential endogeneity of family size, we use instrumental variable approach where the proportion of boys in the family is used to instrument family size. Using a longitudinal household survey data from Ethiopia, we estimate unobserved effects bivariate probit instrumental variable model of school attendance and child labour choices. The results suggest that the probability of child labour participation decreases with birth order, but we find no evidence that suggests birth order affects the probability of school attendance. However, among children who are going to school, hours spent studying increases with birth order. Results from complementary time-use analysis reveal that there is no birth order effect on hours spent on household chore. However, hours spent on school increases with birth order, where the increase in hours spent on school seems to come from a decrease in hours spent on market work.     

Public and private inputs in aggregate production and growth: a cross-country efficiency approach

In a cross section of OECD countries, we replace the macroeconomic production function by a production possibility frontier, total factor productivity being the composite effect of efficiency scores and possibility frontier changes. We consider, for the periods 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000 one output – GDP per worker – and three inputs – human capital, public physical capital per worker and private physical capital per worker. We use a semi-parametric analysis, computing Malmquist productivity indexes, and we also resort to stochastic frontier analysis. Results show that private capital is important for growth, although public and human capital also contribute positively. A governance indicator, a nondiscretionary input, explains inefficiency. Better governance helps countries to achieve a better performance. Nonparametric and parametric results coincide rather closely on the movements of the countries vis-à-vis the possibility frontier and on their relative distances to the frontier.     

Public provision of private child goods

This paper analyzes the public provision of private goods for children in a politico-economic model with endogenous fertility. The government provides every child with goods that can also be purchased by parents in private markets, and the level of provision is determined by majority rule. Households with many children benefit from the public provision more than those with fewer children; thus, a political conflict arises between them. The distribution of the number of children across households, which is a crucial factor for determining which group is politically dominant, is endogenously determined by households' fertility decision. The sequential interaction between fertility and political decisions might lead to multiple equilibria: equilibrium with high fertility and low-private/public-spending ratio and equilibrium with low fertility and high-private/public-spending ratio. Our model could explain the large differences in fertility and structure of child-related spending across countries.     

Business cycles and schooling

It has been suggested that recessions are the appropriate time for undertaking activities that promote long-term performance (such as re-organization, human capital investments, R&D). In this paper, we study the cyclical patterns of one such activity, namely schooling. In particular, we examine the cyclicality in the school enrollment rates of various age groups in the US. The overall pattern is countercyclical. In addition, schooling seems to respond negatively to the expected real interest rate. Overall, the results seem to support the view that variation in opportunity costs associated with business cycles plays a major role in schooling decisions.     

Public insurance and child hospitalizations: access and efficiency effects

The 1983-1996 period saw enormous expansions in access to public health insurance for low-income children. We explore the impact of these expansions on child hospitalizations. While greater access to inpatient care may increase hospital utilization, improved efficiency of care for children who are also newly eligible for primary care could lower hospitalization rates. We use a large sample of child discharges from the National Hospital Discharge Survey (NHDS) to assess the net impact of Medicaid expansions on hospitalizations during this period. We find that total hospitalizations increased significantly, with each 10 percentage-point rise in eligibility leading to an 8.4% increase in hospitalizations. Thus, the access effect strongly outweighs any efficiency effect produced by expanded coverage. However, we find some support for an efficiency effect: the increase in hospitalizations for unavoidable conditions is much larger than that for avoidable conditions that are most sensitive to outpatient care. Indeed, the increase in avoidable hospitalizations is less than half that of unavoidable hospitalizations, and it is not statistically significant. We also find that expanded Medicaid eligibility reduced the average length of stay, but increased the utilization of inpatient procedures, so that the net impact on total costs per stay is ambiguous.     

Health and schooling investments in Africa.

This paper first outlines an organizing framework for considering how health and schooling affect labor productivity and growth, and how household and community factors can in turn affect the demand for these human capital investments. Both cross-country growth models and various aspects of microeconomic studies of individual productivity as related to education and health are discussed. The conclusion offers some tentative leads for policy in this area based on existing research, and an agenda for future research.     

Returns to schooling in Kazakhstan

This paper examines rates of return to schooling in Kazakhstan using OLS (Ordinary Least Squares) and instrumental variable (IV) methodologies. We use spouse's education and smoking as instruments. We find that spouse's education is a valid instrument and that conventional OLS estimates that assume the exogenous nature of schooling, and hence do not control for endogeneity bias, may underestimate the true rates of return. The results indicate that the returns to schooling in Kazakhstan have increased with transition. This may reflect the relative scarcities of highly educated people in Kazakhstan with human capital that employers require and, following the market reforms, reward accordingly.     

Catholic schooling and further education

Using new estimation methods and data, I find that Catholic schooling substantially increases years of schooling by 0.42 to 0.47. The estimates are robust to various specifications that account for potential selection bias.     

Public Policy,Vested Interest,and Common People in Brazil in the Twenty-First Century

We offer an original institutional approach to analyzing policies meant to regulate the actions of common people in the Brazilian state agenda in recent years. We also address the reactions of vested interests against this agenda. Such vested interests rely on corporations’ ceremonial encapsulation of state policies — policies that were established during the decades when Brazil’s industrialization process took place. Brazilian policies for the common people, however, are a twenty-first-century phenomenon.     

The effect of fair trade affiliation on child schooling: evidence from a sample of Chilean honey producers

We evaluate the impact of Fair Trade (FT) affiliation on child schooling within a sample of Chilean honey producers with a retrospective panel data approach. From a theoretical point of view, we argue that FT should have a positive effect on child schooling since it generates a short-run pure income effect together with a medium-run productivity effect on both adult and child wages. On the other hand, because of the higher productivity generated by the medium-run effect, the opportunity cost of child education increases if they work with their parents. The direction of the impact of FT affiliation on child schooling is therefore uncertain and requires empirical testing. Our econometric findings document a positive and significant impact of affiliation years on child schooling after controlling for endogeneity and heterogeneity between the treatment and control sample.     

Compulsory schooling laws and school crime

Extensive literature demonstrates that compulsory schooling laws improve educational attainment, well-being, civic involvement, and labour market outcomes. However, at-risk youth incapacitated to schools may impact the learning environment and school safety. The purpose of this article is to study whether raising the minimum dropout age (MDA) requirement above 16 increases crime committed within US public high schools. A difference-in-difference estimation exploits changes in state-level MDA laws over time and indicates that schools in states that raise their MDA requirement to 18 incur more overall crime relative to schools in states that do not, while no effect on overall crime is identified when the MDA requirement is raised to 17. Furthermore, these effects persist for 4 years after passage and more intensely in metropolitan areas. Coupling this research with existing literature suggests that when the MDA requirement is raised to 18, only a small portion of the observed reduction in juvenile crime is displaced to schools. Analysis by category of crime reveals schools incur more physical attacks, no change in illegal drug and property crimes, and fewer violent crimes in states that raise their MDA requirement to 18, while illegal drug crimes increase in states that raise their MDA requirement to 17.     

改革地方公共管理的权利路径:巴西的经验

巴西的“公共管理与公民权”项目于1996年建立,其目的是发现和宣传由巴西次国家级政府在服务供给上的创新行为。这些创新时巴西的公民权建设产生了直接的影响。本文根据巴西的经验初步分析了从“权利”的路向改革公共管理,扩大其他机构和公民社会参与的可能性。     

Schooling,wages and profits: Negative pecuniary externalities from schooling and their consequences for schooling investments

This paper tests the hypothesis that the schooling of the poor reduces profits for landowners, and that such negative pecuniary externalities in turn adversely affect schooling investments made by local governments. A theoretical model of occupational choice in the presence of credit and labor market constraints, combined with existing political economy models of the delivery of local public goods delivers such a result. This hypothesis is tested using household data from India. The empirical analysis shows that profits are reduced by the schooling of the poor and that this is primarily because of the effect of schooling on wages. It also shows that the negative effect of wages on profits reduces government provided schooling inputs.     

Incentives and public inputs

Considered in this paper is a mechanism to coordinate the decision to provide a public input to a group of firms designed to overcome the ‘free rider’ problem. The coordinating agent relies on information communicated by the firms and it is shown that the mechanism provides an incentive for each firm to send truthful information so that an optimal quantity of the public input will be provided.     

Quality of schooling and inequality of opportunity in health

This paper explores the role of quality of schooling as a source of inequality of opportunity in health. Substantiating earlier literature that links differences in education to health disparities, the paper uses variation in quality of schooling to test for inequality of opportunity in health. Analysis of the 1958 NCDS cohort exploits the variation in type and quality of schools generated by the comprehensive schooling reforms in England and Wales. The analysis provides evidence of a statistically significant and economically sizable association between some dimensions of quality of education and a range of health and health-related outcomes. For some outcomes the association persists, over and above the effects of measured ability, social development, academic qualifications and adult socioeconomic status and lifestyle.     

Public finance,government spending and economic growth: the case of local governments in Brazil

The impact of local government spending on output growth is estimated using a panel of Brazilian municipalities during 1985–1994. Attention is focused on three expenditure categories, housing/urbanization, health/sanitation, and transport services, which are expected to be growth-enhancing, and their sources of finance (local taxes, intergovernmental transfers, and borrowing). The determinants of these spending categories are also examined. The size of the municipality, measured by the resident population, is shown to affect government spending nonlinearly. This is a contribution to the recent empirical literature on the linkages between decentralized government spending, public finances, and economic growth at the local, rather than national, level.