Migration consequences of welfare reform

We investigate whether recent changes in welfare policy affect the migration of low-educated unmarried mothers. Estimates indicate that welfare reform is associated with an increase in employment-related intrastate migration, and a decrease in non-employment related migration, both within and between states. The net effect was a small increase in intrastate migration and a small decrease in interstate migration. The close link between migration and employment suggests that welfare reform has motivated low-income women to move for economic reasons. In general, welfare policy appears to have a much larger effect on residential location because of its relationship to employment than because of benefit differences between states.     

On estimating the mean of the selected normal population under the LINEX loss function

Following Parsian and Farsipour (1999), we consider the problem of estimating the mean of the selected normal population, from two normal populations with unknown means and common known variance, under the LINEX loss function. Some admissibility results for a subclass of equivariant estimators are derived and a sufficient condition for the inadmissibility of an arbitrary equivariant estimator is provided. As a consequence, several of the estimators proposed by Parsian and Farsipour (1999) are shown to be inadmissible and better estimators are obtained. Received January 2001/Revised May 2002     

Dynamic Currency Linkages and Their Determinants: An Empirical Study for East Asian Economic Community Region

In this article, Copula GARCH models have been employed to study the inter-temporal process of currency market co-movements between ASEAN+6 countries (referred to in this study as East Asian Economic Community) and ASEAN+6 currency market index. Empirical results show that the sample countries of the region exhibit varying levels of currency co-movements with the Asian benchmark. Markov regime switching results show that many of the countries which had high dependences with the regional currency index as was found in copula estimations had also overlapping currency market cycles. Using Principal Component Analysis, we find that three statistical factors explain exchange rate co-movements which came out to be trade linkages, economic risk, and currency market openness in our dynamic panel data estimation.     

Empirical Assessment of Money Demand Stability Under India’s Open Economy: Non-linear ARDL Approach

Journal of Quantitative Economics - This study explores stability issues of money demand in the wake of a new economic policy regime of India’s open economy, particularly since the 1990s. The...     

Manufacturing productivity in China and India: The role of institutional changes

In this paper we undertake a comparative study of productivity in the manufacturing sector for China and India using data from survey of manufacturing industries for the two countries. We find that productivity of manufacturing industries in China relative to that in India improved substantially over the 1998–2003 period. Specifically, the average total factor productivity (TFP) growth for the manufacturing sector over this period was about 11% higher in China than in India. We document two substantial changes in government policies in China that were not witnessed in India. First, the late 1990s saw an enormous wave of ownership restructuring due to the formal endorsement of private property rights by the Chinese central government. Second, in 1997 a large scale labour retrenchment program was launched to address the long standing problem of labour redundancy in the public sector. Using data from the Chinese survey of manufacturing industries, we quantify the impact of these large scale institutional changes on TFP of Chinese manufacturing industries. We find that these policy changes can explain about 30% of the growth in TFP of manufacturing industries. Hence we conclude that these institutional changes in China can account for a significant part of the gains in productivity of manufacturing industries in China relative to that in India over the 1998–2003 period.     

Gender and labor retrenchment in Chinese state owned enterprises: Investigation using firm-level panel data

In the late 1990s, China's state-owned enterprises (SOEs) underwent dramatic labor retrenchment, drawing considerable attention to how women fared relative to men during the retrenchment process. However, almost all the existing studies on the subject rely on individual-level data. In this paper, we study the gender patterns of SOE labor retrenchment using a unique enterprise-level dataset for the period from 1995 to 2001. We find that disproportionately large share of discharge was borne by female workers and that female discharge rates were more sensitive to output growth than male discharge rates. Further, estimating dynamic labor demand equations by gender, we find that female employment was more sensitive to negative output shocks experienced by enterprises than male employment but less sensitive to positive output shocks. Further, we find that sensitivity of female employment to output was greater for reformed than non-reformed enterprises and for male-intensive than female-intensive sectors. These results provide new insights into the gender patterns of employment adjustment of Chinese SOEs to output shocks during the retrenchment period.     

DISCRIMINANT FUNCTION ANALYSIS OF SMALL FARMERS AND LANDLESS IN INDIA*

The small farmers and landless in India are faced with the vicious cycle of low incomes, low savings, low investment and uneconomic size of operational holdings and often are nonviable. Using data for the Haryana State of Northern India for 1977/78, the linear discriminant function was used to identify those factors which will make the majority of small farmers and landless in India a viable entity. Analysis of these data indicated that per hectare fertiliser use, area under high yielding crop varieties, operational size of holding and working capital are the factors which affect the viability of the small farmers and landless. As compared to the simple regression analysis discriminant function approach has been found an effective tool for discriminating the two social groups and for predicting the sponsored social change. However, the use of the discriminant function may be limited if the qualitative independent variable has more than two classes and its orderings are not in sequence.     

Opportunity is not everything

We experimentally investigate in village India how belief systems that hierarchize social groups affect the groups’ responses to economic opportunities. Earlier we found that making caste salient hurt low caste performance both absolutely and relative to the high caste's. To examine the possible role of mistrust, we manipulate the scope for discretion in rewarding performance. When offered a gamble in which success mechanically triggers rewards, making caste salient has no significant effect. Instead, it is in the case with scope for discretion that making caste salient creates a large caste gap in the proportion of subjects who refuse the gamble.