Son Preference,Number of Children,Education and Occupational Choice in Rural Nepal

A unique family survey was conducted in Nepal to investigate the economic consequences of having a first‐born girl. Women have more children, but we find no causal effect of number of children on economic outcomes, but independently of the number of children there is a positive effect on boys’ education of having a first‐born sister, who presumably takes care of household work so the boys can focus on school. This indicates a stronger son preference in Nepal than that found in studies from neighboring countries.     

Housing prices and son preference: Evidence from China’s housing reform

Do high housing prices reduce the demand for sons? As Chinese parents need to acquire houses for their sons’ marriage, high housing prices increase the cost of sons relative to daughters. We exploit China's housing reform in the 1990s as a natural experiment to identify the effect of housing prices on demand for sons. We find that housing prices have no effect on the probability of having a son at the first birth. High housing prices reduce the probability of having a son at the second birth, especially when the first-born is a daughter. A 10% increase in housing prices reduces the probability of having a son at the second birth by 0.78 percentage points. The findings remain robust when using aggregate prefecture-cohort data for the post-reform period.     

Assessing sustainable forest management under REDD +: A community-based labour perspective

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation plus (REDD +) encourages economic support for reducing deforestation and conserving or increasing existing forest carbon stocks. The way in which incentives are structured affects trade-offs between local livelihoods, carbon emission reduction, and the cost-effectiveness of a REDD + programme. Looking at first-hand empirical data from 208 farming households in the Bolivian Amazon from a household economy perspective, our study explores two policy options: 1) compensated reduction of emissions from old-growth forest clearing for agriculture, and 2) direct payments for labour input into sustainable forest management combined with a commitment not to clear old-growth forest. Our results indicate that direct payments for sustainable forest management – an approach that focuses on valuing farmers' labour input – can be more cost-effective than compensated reduction and in some cases is the most appropriate choice for achieving improved household incomes, permanence of changes, avoidance of leakages, and community-based institutional enforcement for sustainable forest management.     

International Poverty Comparisons on Unit Record Data of Developing and Developed Countries

Cross country poverty comparisons on unit records have, rarely, involved both developing and developed countries. The present study attempts to fill this gap by comparing poverty across fourteen nations with diverse economic and demographic characteristics and at vastly different stages of economic development. The study contains evidence on (a) cross country variation in the equivalence scales estimated in the presence of both household size economies and adult/child relativities, (b) impact of demographic adjustment of the poverty line, that incorporate household size and composition changes, on the poverty rates, and (c) sensitivity of the poverty estimates and their rankings to the ‘equivalence elasticity’. The study finds that country rankings based on per capita GNP bear very little resemblance with that based on the aggregate poverty rates. The latter hide substantial variation in the poverty estimates across different household types.     

经济增长、收入差距与农村贫困

我国经济转型过程中同时发生的居民收入增长和收入差距扩大对农村贫困减缓具有不同的影响。本文在住户调查数据的基础上,讨论了不同时期经济增长和收入差距对于农村贫困减缓的作用大小,估算了不同年份经济增长和收入差距的贫困减缓弹性,并根据Shapley分解讨论了分项收入对贫困程度的影响以及分项收入不均等性的贫困减缓弹性。     

性别偏好与人口转型

人口转型是工业化发展过程中普遍发生的重要经济和社会现象。本文从性别偏好对生育决策的影响这个角度解释了为什么当经济发展到一定程度后,人口生育率会显著下降。本文通过动态一般均衡模型说明了资本积累和技术进步会缩小男女劳动力在生产效率上的差异,从而使男女工资的不平等减少。而性别偏好程度又取决于男女劳动回报的差异,因此经济发展会降低性别偏好的程度,提高女孩对于家庭效用的贡献,这将影响到家庭的生育决策。数值模拟的结果表明,性别偏好程度的下降对人口转型具有重要的影响,当性别偏好程度显著降低时,人口生育率会下降。     

TIME AND THE COST OF CHILDREN

This paper uses the "adult goods" method to estimate the full costs of children. Full costs include both expenditure and time costs. Adult personal time (comprising pure leisure, sleep and other personal care) is used as the adult good. Previous research has shown that the presence of children in the household leads to a reduction in adult personal time. This paper develops a simple economic model of the household to show how this information can be used to develop an equivalence scale for adult consumption that takes account of both the expenditure and time costs of children. Preliminary estimates using Australian data suggest a very large cost—much higher than that typically assumed for expenditure costs. The full cost of children declines with age, despite the expenditure cost rising. The paper discusses the limitations of the adult good method and the assumptions needed to draw welfare conclusions from these and other estimates of child costs.     

Biases in fiscal multiplier estimates

The size of fiscal multipliers is intensively debated as large (small) multipliers provide arguments to expand (cut) public spending. We use data on multiplier estimates from over a hundred scholarly studies, and ask whether the national imprint and various incentives that the authors face can help explain the large observed variance in these estimates. We complement this meta-analytical data with information on economists’ personal characteristics collected from their biographies and through a self-conducted survey. Our evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that national background and policy orientation of researchers matter for the size of multiplier estimates. We only find weak support for the hypothesis that the interests of donors financing the research are relevant. Significant biases largely disappear for teams of international co-authors.     

Land transfer in rural China: incentives,influencing factors and income effects

ABSTRACT

Land transfer incentives and their effect on farmers’ income in developing countries have been widely examined in the literate, but little is known about the driving mechanism of rural household income effect during land transfer. To fill in this gap, this paper explains the incentives of land transfer, analyses the influencing factors of farmers’ decision on land transfer, then measures the income effects of land transfer and identifies the main sources of income effects, utilizing open-access data collected through the China Family Panel Studies. The empirical results show that land flow out or in is beneficial to raise farmers’ income, indicating that the income effects have a positive feedback to farmers’ decision on land transfer. Further analyses reveal that land flow-out farmers and land flow-in farmers have different main sources of income growth. Our finding suggest that optimizing the incentive role of China’s existing rural land property system can help orderly flow of rural land resources, which subsequently increases rural household income.     

THE SIZE OF HOUSEHOLD PRODUCTION: METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS AND ESTIMATES FOR THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY IN THE PERIOD 1964 TO 19801

Household production as well as other informal economic activities have received scant attention in economic science. In the last decade the view has been taken that there has been a big shift from formal to informal production. In order to examine this trend this article presents estimates for the size of household production for the Federal Republic of Germany which are based on time-budget data collected from 1964 to 1980. To show the sensitivity of the results two different estimating methods the Opportunity Cost Method and the Market Cost Method, are used. Since productivity growth took place not only in the formal economy but also in household production, estimates will be presented which take productivity growth explicitly into account. The article concludes with a comparison of estimates for other countries.     

Structural Change in Rural Croatia—Is Early Retirement An Option?

Structural change in agriculture, although often connected with social hardship of uncompetitive small-scale farms and a loss of tradition, is inevitable. It is the basis for successful rural development. We discuss whether early retirement schemes (ERS) are a good value for public money in terms of the necessary adaptations of the farming sector in the course of economic development, and if they are an option for the EU candidate country Croatia. In Croatia, the small scale farm structure leads to widely uncompetitive farms. A study on farmers’ socioeconomic situation as well as actual and expected reactions to policy support is based on results of a household survey. The sample includes farm households from two Croatian regions: The peri-urban Zagreb county and the typically rural region of Bjelovar-Bilogora. Despite unfavourable economic conditions and insufficient farm incomes, rural people are often reluctant to give up farming. We present results on the age structure, income and production structure of farms and farmers’ likely reactions on ERS. We discuss incentives which push farmers to leave the farming sector and ask in which direction farm families plan their future. We conclude with a synthesis of the theoretical advantages and disadvantages of early retirement schemes and link them with possible outcomes in the Croatian case.     

Unpaid household work and the distribution of extended income: The Norwegian experience

Measurement of unpaid household work is important in order to better understand income distribution as well as to give visibility to women's work and achieve more comprehensive estimates of the level of economic activity. This article surveys estimates of unpaid household work in Norway for use in national accounts and analysis of consumption possibilities. The latter are measured by extended income, defined as income after tax plus the value of unpaid household work. We find that extended income appears to be more evenly distributed than money income.     

CAPITAL REQUIREMENTS FOR HOUSING IN THE 1980s

Massive federal budget deficits and declining personal saving flows portend an acute private-sector capital shortage over the balance of the 1980s decade. Housing is the sector of the economy most likely to bear the brunt of this shortage. Quantifying that shortage and suggesting preventive policy changes are the primary purposes of his paper. The recent, conservative estimates of household formations and housing production requirements of the MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies form the basis for estimates of the net capital requirements for homing during 1984 through 1989. These estimates are compared with estimates of net capital supply for housing to reveal a capital shortage that will preclude the achievement of the housing production requirements without further change in economic policy. The paper concludes with specific recommendations for policy change, including proposals for deficit reduction and a broad-based tax incentive for saving     

Search for financial returns and social security privatization

I develop a general equilibrium model in which the quality of household financial decisions is endogenously determined by the incentives to exert effort in learning about financial opportunities. The model generates predictions for asset market participation and returns across households. Moreover, search for financial returns enables the model to generate a more skewed equilibrium wealth distribution. In this context, social security privatization affects household search effort, asset market participation and the competitiveness of the asset market. Privatization reduces average welfare and this reduction is somewhat magnified by the search friction. While some have suggested that household decision making could be important for the consequences of privatization, my analysis does not bear this out.     

Comparing employment estimates using different minimum wage variables: the case of Brazil

Several minimum wage variables have been suggested in the literature to estimate the effect of the minimum wage on employment. The most common ones are the real minimum wage, the ‘Kaitz index’, the ‘fraction affected’, the ‘fraction at’ and the ‘fraction below’. This diversity of variables makes it difficult to compare the associated estimates across studies. One problem is that these estimates are not always calibrated to represent the employment effect of a 1% minimum wage increase. Another problem is that these estimates measure employment effects for different groups of workers. In this paper we critically compare employment effect estimates using these five minimum wage variables and data from a Brazilian monthly household survey panel from 1982 to 2000. Our principal finding is that the sign of this effect is robust across the different minimum wage variables, but that its magnitude and significance are sensitive to the minimum wage variable used.     

Fewer Fish for Higher Profits? Price Response and Economic Incentives in Global Tuna Fisheries Management

This paper evaluates industry-wide economic incentives arising from changes in product prices in an industry exploiting a common renewable resource (tropical tunas) that is regulated via output limits. Changes in prices alter economic incentives by affecting revenues, profits, conservation, and nonmarket public benefits. Economic incentives in industries exploiting common resources have been examined from multiple angles. However, industry level variation in market prices arising from changes in public regulation has not been explored. We analyse the impact on economic incentives due to changes in output limits and market prices through estimation of ex-vessel price and scale flexibilities for imported skipjack and yellowfin in Thailand’s cannery market. The unitary scale flexibility, estimated from the General Synthetic Inverse Demand Systems, indicates no loss in revenue and even potential profit increases resulting from lower harvest levels that could arise from lower catch limits. However, for a revenue neutral or positive outcome to be achieved, the three inter-governmental tuna Regional Fisheries Management Organizations, which manage the majority of the yellowfin and skipjack tuna in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, would have to coordinate multilaterally to set the catch limits for both species.     

THE TIME LAG IN ANNUAL HOUSEHOLD-BASED INCOME MEASURES: ASSESSING AND CORRECTING THE BIAS

Annual income data are typically provided with a time lag. This article reviews several ways of dealing with this time lag in the construction of annual household-based income measures for individual economic well-being. It also proposes an alternative method that yields better estimates for equivalized household income, especially in the case of household composition change. Next, the two most commonly applied income measures are compared to this alternative measure with empirical income data from the European Community Household Panel. This comparison reveals that ignoring the time lag and household changes leads to substantial bias in income and poverty estimates and to erroneous conclusions about the determinants of poverty entry. The evidence in this article will be useful to researchers who want to make a well-informed choice between different annual income measures.     

Dynamics of female labour force participation in France

This article formulates and estimates a structural intertemporal model of labour force participation. Relying on theoretical characterizations derived from an economic model of lifetime behaviour, we estimate a dynamic probit model with correlated random effects using longitudinal data to allow for a dynamic structure. The model is applied to a panel of married women drawn from the 1997–2002 French Labour Force surveys in order to represent their participation behaviour. It is estimated by maximum simulated likelihood. Our results show that women’s decisions to go out to work are characterized by significant state dependence, unobserved heterogeneity and negative serial correlation in the transitory error component. In addition, we find that the presence of young children in a woman’s household reduces her labour participation, but unequally according to their age and number. As expected, educational level has a positive impact on women’s participation. Last, a rise in the husband’s wage is found to raise female participation initially and to lower it subsequently. This empirical finding suggests that leisure may not systematically be a normal good, contrary to what is frequently assumed in the literature.     

经济利益驱动机制:循环经济发展的根本动力——基于马克思主义利益观的分析

循环经济作为生产方式和生活方式的变革,实质上是利益关系的变革,因此,循环经济驱动机制的研究应以马克思主义利益理论为根本指导。时下学术界用"经济人"范式、技术经济学范式、生态经济学范式来研究循环经济的动力机制,都有失偏颇。循环经济动力机制的构建应在公有制为主体、政府为主导的前提下,围绕利益机制把产权激励、价格激励、财政政策激励、行政激励等结合起来,激活市场主体发展循环经济的主动性。