Essays on the Economics of Child Labor and Fertility PDF Download
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Author: Ramona Bruhns
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Author: Ramona Bruhns
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Author: Liang Choon Wang
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ISBN:
Category : Fertility, Human
Languages : en
Pages : 140
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This dissertation is comprised of three autonomous chapters on topics in labor economics. The first chapter exploits the quasi-random assignment of students into classrooms in a large secondary school in Malaysia to estimate the effects of peers on student outcomes. The estimates show that having better achieving classmates improves a student's math achievement and reduces the student's incidence of class absences and discipline violations. There is also evidence of non-linear peer effects and that average achievement may increase as a result of ability grouping. The second chapter extends Iannaccone's (1992) religious club model to explain why the Amish would collectively object to high school education and refuse to comply with compulsory schooling laws. I utilize the surprising 1972 U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Wisconsin vs. Yoder, which exempts Amish children from compulsory high school education, as a policy shock to test the predictions of the model. The results show that the successful restriction on high school education helped the Amish sect exclude individuals who have high labor productivity and would lower the quality of the sect from joining. The evidence supports the idea that the Amish use the restriction on secular education as a religious sacrifice to screen out uncommitted members. The third chapter investigates the effect of higher immigration on native fertility. Previous research shows that immigration affects wages, income, and the cost of child rearing, while standard fertility model predicts that changes in wages, income, and the cost of child rearing would affect fertility. Using the cross-state variation in the total fertility rates of native-born American women and the share of immigrants in the population between 1970 and 2005, this chapter estimates that for every one percentage point increase in the share of immigrants in the population, native total fertility rate is predicted to increase by roughly 0.01 children. The negative effect of immigration on wages is the most likely explanation, because the fertility of less educated women and women who resided in their states of birth is most affected.
Author: Anupam B. Jena
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ISBN:
Category : AIDS (Disease)
Languages : en
Pages : 134
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Author: Megan de Linde Leonard
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Women, on average, are found in systematically different careers than men. The reason for this phenomenon is not fully understood, in part because expectations play a vital role in the process of career choice. Different religious groups have different beliefs on the importance of child bearing, so fertility expectations should differ by religious group. I include a woman's religious denomination in regressions on mea- sures of occupational flexibility. Jehovah's Witnesses choose the most flexible careers followed by Pentecostal, Catholic, Baptist, and Mainline Protestant women. Jewish women generally choose the least flexible careers. This is consistent with the human capital notion that women are choosing different careers than men rather than being forced into different job paths. If women are choosing jobs that allow them to take responsibility for home pro- duction, how does this affect their husbands? Male wage regressions that include marital status dummy variables find a marriage wage premium of 10 to 40%. This premium may occur because wives are taking responsibility for home production and husbands are free to focus their attention on productivity at work. It may also be that factors unobserved to the researcher may make a man more productive and more likely to marry. I use religious denomination as a proxy for specialization within the home. Men in more traditional religious denominations enjoy a higher marriage wage premium, which is evidence that household specialization of labor is an important cause of the wage premium. The choice of a career, whether to marry, and most other important life decisions are dependent on one's risk tolerance. The role of risk preferences in such choices is not fully understood, largely because relative risk aversion (y) is hard to empirically quantify. Chetty (2006) derives a formula for ° based on the link between utility and labor supply decisions. I estimate y at the micro level using the 1996 Panel Study of Income Dynamics. I compare y to an estimate based on hypothetical gambles and find the measures substantially different. This supports Chetty's claim that ex- pected utility theory cannot suffciently explain choices under uncertainty in different domains.
Author: Shamma Adeeb Alam
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 87
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This dissertation is on three essays on issues in development and health economics. In these essays, I try to examine how different health issues affect economic outcomes and vice versa. I examine individual and household responses to different economic and health issues in Bangladesh and Tanzania. In the first two chapters, I examine how different shocks affect family's fertility decisions and decision to make investments on their children in Tanzania. In the third chapter, I examine how information regarding dangers of pesticide affects the likelihood of pesticide exposure for farmers in Bangladesh. In the first chapter, I examine how parental illness affects child labor and schooling outcomes using panel data from Tanzania. Prior literature provides limited empirical evidence on the impact of parental illness on child labor and schooling outcomes. I examine if parental illness causes households to reallocate children's time from school to work. I find that a father's illness hinders child schooling by decreasing attendance and hours spent in school. These effects on schooling are substantially greater for severe illnesses. There is also evidence that a father's illness has long-term impact on child education, as it decreases their likelihood of completing primary school and leads to fewer total years of schooling. However, a father's illness has no effect on child labor. In contrast, a mother's illness does not affect child education, but does cause a small increase in children's work. Surprisingly, parental illness does not have a differential impact by children's gender. Additionally, illness of other household members, such as grandparents, adult siblings, and child siblings, has no effect on children's schooling. Thus, overall, there is no evidence that parental illness or illness of other household members affects children's schooling through increased child labor. Instead, the results suggest that only illness of fathers, who are typically the primary income earners in Tanzanian households, reduces household income and severely decreases the family's ability to afford child education. In the second chapter, which is a joint work with Claus Portner, we examine the relationship between household income shocks and fertility decisions. Using panel data from Tanzania, we estimate the impact of agricultural shocks on contraception use, pregnancy, and the likelihood of childbirth. To account for unobserved household characteristics that potentially affect both shocks and fertility decisions we employ a fixed effects model. Households significantly increase their contraception use in response to income shocks from crop loss. Furthermore, pregnancies and childbirth are significantly delayed for households experiencing a crop shock. We argue that these changes in behavior are the result of deliberate decisions of the households rather than income shocks' effects on other factors that in influence fertility, such as women's health status, the absence or migration of spouse, and dissolution of partnerships. In the third chapter, which is a joint work with Hendrik Wolff, we examine how different information sources influence precautionary behavior when using pesticide and likelihood of pesticide exposure. Modern agriculture heavily depends on the use of pesticides and has successfully increased productivity, but also led to increasing concerns regarding farmers' health. Mishandling of pesticides continues to pose a serious health problem for farmers especially in developing countries. This chapter describes supply side and demand side regulations for pesticide handling, health outcomes and adoption of health technologies using a detailed household level dataset from Bangladesh. The dataset is unique as it spans the chain from: `where do farmers obtain information from', `which precautionary tools (i.e. masks, gloves) are used' and `what are subsequent health outcomes after spraying'. Previous studies hypothesized that pesticide sellers in developing countries misguide farmers regarding pesticide use. On the other hand, government field extension workers reduce pesticide exposure by training farmers in Integrated Pest Management (IPM) techniques. In our dataset we cannot confirm these hypotheses. In contrast, we find that those famers that use information from pesticide sellers increase the adoption of precautionary tools. These same farmers also enjoy subsequently improved health outcomes. Further, our results show that the agricultural extension program does not significantly impact technology adoption or health. We find instead evidence of social learning as peer farmers, especially those trained in handling pesticides, have a substantial influence. We conclude with policy recommendations.
Author:
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Category : Crops and climate
Languages : en
Pages : 24
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Author: Philip Rosenbaum
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ISBN: 9788793744615
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 161
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Author: Jennifer Elizabeth Muz
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ISBN: 9781339820279
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 137
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This thesis uses the tools of applied econometrics to study the impact of economic incentives on household welfare and decision-making and health and risk behaviors in the U.S. and in developing countries.The first chapter studies the impact of increasing access to credit among low-income households in Mexico. Banco Azteca opened 815 branches simultaneously in a popular retail chain store, Grupo Elektra, in October 2002. Although access to credit increased, affected households experience negative or null impacts on consumption expenditures and asset holdings. I argue that this because the bank encourages individual borrowers to use loans for consumption use at Grupo Elektra. This research demonstrates that the package within which the loan is offered is as important as the loan itself.The second chapter focuses on the impact of job loss to dual-earner married couples on household fertility decisions, drawing upon the recent experience of job loss during the Great Recession. I build two datasets, covering the years 2003-2011 that match job losses due to mass layoff events to fertility rates among married couples at the county-year and state-quarter level. I find that job losses have a negative impact on fertility. However, areas with more dual-earner households experience lesser declines in fertility rates in response to job losses, suggesting that dual-earner households are more likely to substitute toward child-rearing in response to job loss compared to single-earner households.The third chapter, joint with Lisa Cameron and Manisha Shah, exploits the criminalization of sex work in a district in East Java, Indonesia, and utilizes a unique dataset comprised of the first panel data on female sex workers and the first data on clients to estimate the impact of criminalizing sex work on health and risk behaviors. Criminalization increased STI rates among female sex workers by 58 percent. The main mechanism driving this increase is decreased access to condoms and increased non-condom use during commercial sex transactions. We rule out other mechanisms, such as increased transactions or clients per sex worker. This research presents new evidence that criminalizing sex work can put an already vulnerable population in a more precarious situation.
Author: Hui Wang
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781339322858
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 185
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Author: Cristina Adelaida Bellés Obrero
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 197
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This dissertation consists of three chapters that investigate students' and teachers' incentive programs, and the intergenerational infant health consequences of a labor market policy. In the first chapter, I perform a randomized control trial at a distance learning university to compare three different monetary incentive schemes varying students' performance target in the same educational environment. I show that the performance target implemented interacts with some of the characteristics of the students incentivized, such as intrinsic motivation and experience with the incentivized task. Moreover, a novel finding of this study is that incentives foster students' strategic behavior that is triggered by the way performance is measured. In the second chapter, I examine how tying teachers' pay to students' performance affects the latter's achievements. I show that a nationwide program implemented in Peru giving monetary rewards to teachers conditional on their students' performance, has a precisely estimated zero impact on students' grades. Finally, in the third chapter I investigate the effect of a child labor regulation that increased the minimum legal age to work from 14 to 16 years old, on fertility and infant health outcomes. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, I find that the reform increased educational attainment, and decreased marriage and fertility. Interestingly, I show that the reform was detrimental for the health of the offspring at the moment of delivery.
