A Comparison of Household Recycling Behaviors in Norway and the United States

This paper investigates empirically the determinants of household recycling in Norway and compares the results with a similar, recently published, study of households in the United States. The comparison focuses on the relative importance of user fees on waste disposal, community recycling programs, and socioeconomic factors. Both data sources are nationwide, material-specific, and at the household level. One major finding is that a disposal fee provides a significant economic incentive to Norwegian households, whereas its effectiveness in the United States is still up for debate. Providing households with convenient recycling options, such as curbside and drop-off recycling, appears generally effective, but less so in Norway than in the United States. Socioeconomic characteristics are less important predictors of behavior in Norway than in the United States. Qualifications on the comparison are provided throughout and two extensions for future research are suggested at the end.     

Equity in Poverty Program Evaluations

Poverty‐reducing programs often use indicators other than household income to transfer resources to the poor which has important implications in terms of equity of the program. This paper offers a decomposition methodology to analyze the horizontal and vertical equity components of a redistribution policy for subgroups defined according to policy‐relevant characteristics. Our measures are derived by comparing the cost of inequality in terms of equally distributed equivalent poverty gaps in the pre‐transfer income and post‐transfer income distributions. An application to the poverty‐reducing program Oportunidades in Mexico in 2006 reveals that the use of indicator variables more strongly correlated with pre‐transfer incomes in rural households can improve the redistributive effect while it also points out the difficulties of the program in targeting different levels of support among the poor, both within and between groups.     

Inequity in American Schools: A New Perspective on the Distributional Effects of School Expenditures on Economic Well‐Being

This article explores how inequities in public K‐12 school spending impact the distribution of economic well‐being across American households with public school students in 1989 and 2000. Adapting concepts from the public finance literature, I explore the impact of school spending on the vertical and horizontal equity and its impact relative to other types of public spending on social programs and taxation. Conventionally, vertical equity refers to the size of the income gaps between households. Horizontal equity refers to the ranking of households along the income distribution with any change in ranks producing horizontal inequity. My main findings show that school spending, when converted into a component of income, served to reduce extended‐income inequality through improvements in vertical equity without the discriminatory implications of exacerbating horizontal inequity across households. Additionally, this impact was at least as large as that of spending on other social programs. This finding bolsters standard arguments for equity and progressivity of school finance across students.     

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.     

The Gender Impact of Social Protection Policies: A Critical Review of the Evidence

Abstract

Over the course of the neoliberal era, social protection policies have been transformed dramatically; these changes have had profound gender implications. Since the early 1980s, welfare state regimes around the world have shifted away from ‘universalism' towards ‘targeting'. More recently, there has been a further shift—especially in industrialized countries—away from the male-breadwinner to the adult worker model. Despite the progressivity implied by this latter shift, important issues of gender inequality remain unresolved (even in Nordic countries where levels of gender equity are higher than elsewhere). This paper presents a critical review of social protection policies, examined from a gender perspective. The analysis presents a conceptual framework on gender and the welfare state, and examines the experience of major industrialized and developing countries in engendering social policy. In particular, this paper provides a careful examination of care-related programs, since this domain is particularly important to understanding the gendered effects of social protection policies. Finally, the gendered implications of the global crisis and subsequent policy measures are examined.     

Can Certified-Tea Value Chains Deliver Gender Equality in Tanzania?

ABSTRACT

A popular approach over the past twenty years has been to rely upon voluntary standards as a means to make claims, measure, and judge whether a number of social-equity concerns exist in private-sector practices. But can voluntary standards deliver gender equity? This contribution responds to this question by exploring how standards and gendered division of labor interact in certified-tea value chains (for example, Ethical Tea Partnership, Fairtrade, Organic, and Rainforest Alliance) in Tanzania. The results of this mixed-method study (2008–10, 2013) contribute to the literature on gender equity and standards by building on the gendered value-chain approach to analyze these complex and contextual interactions. The study proposes that there is a need to focus on the interactions between men and women with different skills and training that contribute to how equitably their roles are distributed in the certified-tea value chains.     

Remittances and Household Expenditures on Education in Ghana's Northern Region: Why Gender Matters

Studies of the impact of migrant remittances on receiving households assume that these households act as a unit in receiving remittances and making decisions about their use. Thus, many of these studies use the gender of the household head as a key control variable. This study questions this assumption, using original qualitative and quantitative data on rural–urban migration of women in Ghana to show that gendered social norms of household provisioning influence the intrahousehold flow of remittances. Regression results indicate that migrant women are more likely to send remittances to other women, creating female-centered networks of remittance flows even within male-headed households. The implications of this for intrahousehold resource allocation are explored through an analysis of the impact of the gender of the remitter and recipient on education expenditure. The results show that regardless of the gender of the household head, households in which women are the primary recipient of remittances spend more than twice as much on education as households in which men are the primary recipient.     

Recycling and Waste Diversion Effectiveness: Evidence from Canada

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between recycling policy options and recycling behavior to study the most effective methods of diverting post-consumer waste from landfills. We employ data from a unique, micro-data set collected from households in communities across Ontario, Canada. We estimate the relationships between several commonly recycled materials (newsprint, glass, plastics, aluminum cans, tin cans, cardboard, and toxic chemicals) and individual household characteristics, recycling program attributes, and garbage collection financing methods. We find that user fees on garbage collection have significant impacts on recycling levels for all materials except toxic chemicals, and mandatory recycling programs on particular items have significant effects on recycling for almost all materials. Limits on the amount of garbage that can be placed at the curb, and providing free units under user fee systems, however, generally have a negligible or detrimental impact on recycling.JEL classification: D10, H23, Q28     

Child endowments and parental investments: Intra‐household allocation in oportunidades families in Mexico

This paper estimates a family fixed‐effects model to test whether parental educational investments are reinforcing or compensating differences in child height and body mass index (BMI) within Oportunidades households. The results indicate that allocations are not made in response to endowment differences in isolation, but depend on the interaction of child endowment, gender, and beneficiary status. Moreover, investments are made so as to counterbalance efficiency and equity considerations: widening differences in height but closing gaps in BMI, where both strategies maximize returns given the earnings–endowment function for height and BMI in Mexico. Finally, household socio‐economic status matters. Thus, discriminatory responses within the better‐off urban beneficiary households are smaller. In contrast, indigenous beneficiary households, which have the lowest average endowment z‐scores and fraction spent on education, see the largest differences in educational outlay between child subgroups. While the economic effects seem small, these are measured relative to the mean of the base category. In some cases, then, parents are dedicating nearly a quarter of all expenditures to education for a standard deviation increase in endowment over mean sibling endowment. Hence, it seems that the success of the Oportunidades program in improving overall human capital formation may be masking rising inequalities within recipient households.     

Needs-based health care funding: implications for resource distribution in Ontario

Capitation models have been suggested as an alternative to funding methods based on historical utilization patterns. Capitation funding distributes esources to regions or programs according to their population, adjusted for the age and gender composition and relative need. The most commonly used relative needs measure is the Standardized Mortality Ratio (SMR). This paper compares the distribution of resources in Ontario implied by a variety of capitation formula. Another aspect of this research is to design a mechanism that translates the SMR into a funding allocation index. We specify a non‐linear model to capture the relationship between current expenditures and the SMR while controlling for historical utilization factors. In contrast to previous work, in which a linear relationship between expenditures and need was assumed, our estimates suggest that the relationship may actually be highly non‐linear. This non‐linearity ncreases transfers to regions of relative need relative to a linear capitation program. JEL Classification: I0, H51 On a suggéré des modèles de financement per capita des soins de santé pour remplacer les méthodes de financement fondées sur les patterns historiques d'utilisation. Cette solution de rechange distribuerait les ressources aux régions et programmes selon la population (avec des ajustements pour tenir compte de la structure 'âges, de sexes, et de besoins relatifs). La mesure la plus commune des besoins relatifs est le taux de mortalité standardisé (TMS). Ce mémoire compare la répartition des ressources en Ontario qui découlerait de l'emploi d'une variété de formules. On tente aussi de construire un mécanisme qui traduise le TMS en un indice d'allocation des fonds. Les auteurs construisent un odèle non‐linéaire qui saisit la relation entre TMS et épenses courantes tout en normalisant pour tenir compte des facteurs historiques d'utilisation. Contrairement aux résultats des travaux antérieurs qui postulaient une relation linéaire entre épenses et besoins, les résultats de cette étude uggèrent que cette relation peut être fortement non‐linéaire, et que cette non‐linéarité tend à ccroître les transferts aux régions qui ont les besoins les plus grands.     

A Feminist Comparative Economic Systems

Abstract

This study proposes that feminist research be integrated into the field of comparative economic systems (CES) and that CES return to its traditional institutionalist methodologies to facilitate more complete analyses of economic systems and feminist alternatives to these systems and institutions. The study describes the evolution of CES, drawing attention to an increasing reliance on econometric modeling that reflects a shift in focus away from systems. An inventory of research on women and gender that has appeared in CES journals and textbooks finds little on topics other than formal labor markets in transition economies. The study contrasts this literature on women and gender in transition economies to research on this topic by women from transition economies, a literature that CES journal authors do not reference. It concludes by proposing a feminist economics approach that focuses on gender-differentiated impacts of economic systems, analyses of households, and equity as a measure of progress.     

Kenneth Boulding: Economics from a Different Perspective

The article calls attention to gender as a dimension of the expansion of U. S. consumer borrowing. The first section emphasizes that gender is not a dummy variable, but an evolution of habits of thought. The second section discusses how changing gender relations are connected to gendered product differentiation and market expansion. The final section connects gendered market expansion and changing gender habits of thought to the expansion of consumer borrowing. We argue that, in addition to the acknowledged role of credit, gender relations also mask the structural financial fragility of households.     

Health insurance and consumption: Evidence from China’s New Cooperative Medical Scheme

We exploit a quasi-natural experiment arising from the introduction of a health insurance program in rural China to examine how the insurance coverage affects household consumption. Results show that, on average, the health insurance coverage increases nonmedical-related consumption by more than 5%. This insurance effect is observed even in households with no out-of-pocket medical spending. In addition, the insurance effect is stronger in households with worse self-reported health status. These results are consistent with the precautionary savings argument. The insurance effect also varies by household experience with the program. In particular, the effect is significant only in villages where some households have actually obtained reimbursement from the insurance program. The program within these villages stimulates less consumption among new participants than among households that have participated in the program for more than a year.     

Strategic complementarities and social transfers: how do PROGRESA payments impact nonbeneficiaries?

The article examines local economy effects of social transfers by focusing on food consumption and asset holdings of noneligible households in rural Mexico following the introduction of Programa de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA) in 1997. The quasi experimental nature of the evaluation data collected for the purposes of evaluating the impact of PROGRESA enables comparison of welfare indicators among noneligible households in treatment areas and control areas. The analysis finds that noneligible households in treatment areas show significantly higher levels of food consumption and asset holdings following the introduction of PROGRESA, compared to noneligible households in control areas. These results are interpreted to suggest that transfers in poor rural areas in Mexico enable agents to interact more strategically such that nonbeneficiaries, as well as beneficiaries, reap consumption and production advantages.     

Farm Level Effects of On-Farm Irrigation Infrastructure Programs in the Southern Murray–Darling Basin

On-farm irrigation infrastructure programs have become an important method of recovering water for the environment in the Australian Murray–Darling Basin (MDB). These programs offer farmers funding to upgrade infrastructure in return for a portion of their water rights. This study measures the effects of Australian Government on-farm infrastructure programs in the southern MDB between 2009–2010 and 2016–2017, particularly the On-Farm Irrigation Efficiency Program. A novel dataset is constructed combining program administrative data with farm survey data. This data is used to derive econometric estimates on the effects of these programs on various measures of farm productivity, profitability and water demand. On-farm programs are found to have positive effects for participants in terms of higher farm productivity and profitability. However, the study also finds a Jevon's paradox outcome, where farm demand for water is significantly higher post-upgrade.     

医疗保险与消费:来自新型农村合作医疗的证据

本文利用农村引入新型农村合作医疗这一政策变化来研究医疗保险的获得对农村居民消费的影响。结果表明,新农合使得非医疗支出类的家庭消费增加了约5.6个百分点。这一正向作用随医疗保险保障水平的提高而增强,而且在没有医疗支出的家庭中仍然存在。同时,新农合对消费的正向影响在收入较低或健康状况较差的家庭中更强。这些结果都与医疗保险减少了预防性储蓄的假说相一致。另外本文发现,新农合的效果随农户在这个项目中的经历而变化。实际上只有在那些有村民获得保险补偿的村子,保险对消费的正向影响才显著,而且在这些村子中,新农合对新加入农户的消费的影响明显小于对参合一年以上农户的消费的影响。     

Qualitative analysis of Bayes–Nash equilibrium in weak asymmetric auctions

It is now generally accepted that there is a negative relationship between inflation and central bank independence (CBI). This study finds that inflation and CBI are endogenously determined, yet the negative correlation between the two remains robust.     

Equity,externalities and energy subsidies The case of kerosine in Indonesia

This paper examines two arguments used to justify the subsidy provided kerosine, the primary commercial fuel of Indonesian households. One argument holds that the subsidy reduces deforestation externalities resulting from wood gathering. Econometric analysis of a large cross-section of households finds that firewood/kerosene substitution is very limited in Java, where the deforestation problem is most severe, so that kerosene subsidy is not an effective means of alleviating the problem. The second argument holds that social equity requires the subsidization of ‘basic needs’ such as kerosene. It is found that the kerosene subsidy disproportionately benefits urban and wealthier households.     

DO TARGETED VOUCHERS INSTILL HABITS? EVIDENCE FROM WOMEN,INFANTS, AND CHILDREN

We examine whether programs that provide vouchers to households continue to influence behavior after the household leaves the program. Using detailed scanner data, we test whether benefit vouchers received through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) change household purchasing decisions and whether these changes persist even after households are no longer eligible to participate in the program. In 2009, the package of goods available through WIC vouchers changed. Examining variation due to this package change, we show that the WIC vouchers change purchasing decisions during eligibility, but that effects fade after eligibility ends. (JEL I38, I18, J13)     

Some evidence in the trading and pricing of equity LEAPS

This paper documents some evidence in the trading and pricing of equity Long-term Equity AnticiPation Securities (LEAPS). The main findings on trading are that LEAPS open interest, trading volume, and put/call ratio are seasonal on a yearly basis possibly due to the impact of the “melding” process that is unique to equity LEAPS. This paper also finds that the Black–Scholes Option Pricing Model, in general, overprices or underprices out-of-the-money (OTM) or in-the-money (ITM) equity LEAPS calls, respectively, and the model tends to overprice when the options are very deep in-the-money (VDITM). Furthermore, the evidence indicates that the deviations of the Black–Scholes prices from the observed option market prices are more pronounced in equity LEAPS than in standard options, suggesting that the Black–Scholes Option Pricing Model is less well suited to the pricing of equity LEAPS than to the pricing of standard options.