7,359 research outputs found

    Fiscal Decentralization and Urbanization in Indonesia

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    Indonesia went through a process of fiscal decentralization in 2001 involving the devolution of several policymaking and service delivery functions to the subnational tiers of government (provinces and districts). This process is likely to have affected rIndonesia, minimum wage, federalism, urbanization

    Complexity in daily life – a 3D-visualization showing activity patterns in their contexts

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    This article attacks the difficulties to make well informed empirically grounded descriptions and analyses of everyday life activity patterns. At a first glance, everyday life seems to be very simple and everybody has experiences from it, but when we try to investigate it from a scientific perspective, its complexity is overwhelming. There are enormous variations in interests and activity patterns among individuals, between households and socio-economic groups in the population. Therefore, and in spite of good intentions, traditional methods and means to visualize and analyze often lead to over-simplifications. The aim of this article is to present a visualization method that might inspire social scientists to tackle the complexity of everyday life from a new angle, starting with a visual overview of the individual's time use in her daily life, subsequently aggregating to time use in her household, further at group and population levels without leaving the individual out of sight. Thereby variations and complexity might be treated as assets in the interpretation rather than obstacles. To exemplify the method we show how activities in a daily life project are distributed among household members and between men and women in a population.household division of labour, time-geography, 3D method, visualization, diaries, everyday life, activity patterns. Complexity in daily life – a 3D-visualization showing activity patterns in their contexts

    Intra-family time allocation to housework - French evidence

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    We analyse new time diary data from France to explore the relationship between economic variables and husbands’ share of housework time. Consistent with both bargaining and specialization models of the family, we find that the greater the husband’s share of labor income, the lower his share of housework time; the greater the wife’s market hours, the lower his housework time, but the larger his share of housework time. Treating market work as endogenous substantially lowers the size of these estimates, but they remain statistically significant. A parsimonious specification based on the specialization model generates estimates for housework share wage elasticities. The own wage elasticity of wives’ housework is -0.3 and the elasticity of husbands’ housework share with respect to wives’ wages is +0.25.Time allocation, intra-family, time use, home production, bargaining, elasticities

    Population and Health Policies

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    The literature evaluating population and health policies is in flux, with many disciplines exploring biological and behavioral linkages from fetal development to chronic disease, disability, and late life mortality. The focus here is on research methods, findings, and questions that economists can clarify regarding the causal relationships between economic development, health outcomes, and reproductive behavior, which operate in many directions. The connection between conditions under which people live and their expected life span and health status refer to “health production functions”. The relationships between an individual’s stock of health and productivity, well being, and life span encompasses the “returns to health human capital”. The control of reproduction improves the well being of women, the economic opportunities of her offspring, and slows population growth. Evaluation of policy interventions is more than a question of technological efficiency, but also involves the behavioral responsiveness of individuals, families, social networks, and communities.Health, Fertility and Family Planning, Biology of Health Human Capital, Economic Development

    Releasing multiply-imputed synthetic data generated in two stages to protect confidentiality

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    "To protect the cofidentiality of survey respondents' identities and sensitive attributes, statistical agencies can release data in which cofidential values are replaced with multiple imputations. These are called synthetic data. We propose a two-stage approach to generating synthetic data that enables agencies to release different numbers of imputations for different variables. Generation in two stages can reduce computational burdens, decrease disclosure risk, and increase inferential accuracy relative to generation in one stage. We present methods for obtaining inferences from such data. We describe the application of two stage synthesis to creating a public use file for a German business database." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))IAB-Betriebspanel, Datenaufbereitung, Datenanonymisierung, Datenschutz, angewandte Statistik, statistische Methode, Arbeitsmarktforschung, Imputationsverfahren

    A new approach for disclosure control in the IAB Establishment Panel : multiple imputation for a better data access

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    "For micro-datasets considered for release as scientific or public use files, statistical agencies have to face the dilemma of guaranteeing the confidentiality of survey respondents on the one hand and offering sufficiently detailed data on the other hand. For that reason a variety of methods to guarantee disclosure control is discussed in the literature. In this paper, we present an application of Rubin's (1993) idea to generate synthetic datasets from existing confidential survey data for public release. We use a set of variables from the 1997 wave of the German IAB Establishment Panel and evaluate the quality of the approach by comparing results from an analysis by Zwick (2005) with the original data with the results we achieve for the same analysis run on the dataset after the imputation procedure. The comparison shows that valid inferences can be obtained using the synthetic datasets in this context, while confidentiality is guaranteed for the survey participants." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))IAB-Betriebspanel, Datensicherheit, Datenschutz, Datenaufbereitung, Datenanonymisierung, Imputationsverfahren

    The Gender and Generational Consquences of the Demographic Transition and Population Policy: An Assessment of the Micro and Macro Linkages

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    The demographic transition changes the age composition of a population, affecting resource allocations at the household and aggregate level. If age profiles of income, consumption, savings and investments were stable and estimable for the entire population, they might suggest how the demographic transition would affects inputs to growth. However, existing macro and micro simulations are estimated from unrepresentative samples of wage earners that do not distinguish sex, schooling, etc. The “demographic dividend” is better evaluated through case studies of household surveys and long-run social experiments. Matlab, Bangladesh, extended a family planning and maternal and child health program to half the villages in its district in 1977, and recorded fertility in the program villages was 16 percent lower than in control villages for the following two decades until 1996. Households in program villages realized health and productivity gains that were concentrated among women, while child survival and schooling increased, and household physical assets were 25 percent greater per adult than in control villages.Fertility decline, demographic transition, intergenerational transfers, gender

    Education Investments and Returns in Economic Development

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    The returns to education: a review of the empirical macro-economic literature

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    The idea of positive educational externalities is that the benefits of individually acquired education may not be restricted to the individual but might spill over to others as well, accruing at higher aggregation levels, in particular at the macro-economic one. We offer an extensive summary and a critical discussion of the empirical literature on the impact of human capital on macro-economic performance, with a particular focus on UK policy. Key findings include: (1) Taking the studies as a whole, there is compelling evidence that human capital increases productivity. Although there is an important theoretical distinction between the augmented neo-classical approach and the new growth theories, the empirical literature is still largely divided on whether the stock of education affects the long-run level or growth rate of the economy. A one-year increase in average education is found to raise the level of output per capita by between 3 and 6 percent according to augmented neo-classical specifications, while it would lead to an over 1 percentage point faster growth according to estimates from the new-growth theories. (2) Over the short-run planning horizon (4 years) the empirical estimates of the change in GDP for a given increase in the human capital stock are of similar orders of magnitude in the two approaches. (3) The impact of increases at different levels of education appear to depend on the level of a country’s development, with tertiary/higher education being the most important for growth in OECD countries. (4) Education is found to yield additional indirect benefits to growth (in particular, by stimulating physical capital investments and technological development and adoption). More preliminary evidence seems to indicate that type, quality and efficiency of education all matter for growth. The most pressing methodological problems are the measurement of human capital; systematic differences in the coefficient of education across countries (in particular between developing and developed countries) and reverse causality. We also make recommendations for future research priorities

    No. 09: The State of Household Food Security in Nanjing, China

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    This report on the state of food security in Nanjing, China, is based on a 2015 city-wide survey conducted by Nanjing University and the Hungry Cities Partnership. The research found that most of the city’s residents are food secure, with access to desirable foods and high dietary diversity throughout the year. Nanjing has a high level of economic development, low unemployment, and spatially dense food supply networks. However, a high average level of food security obscures the finding that about one household in five is food insecure according to the Household Food Insecurity Access Prevalence indicator. Female-centred households, households that have no formal wage worker, and households with only one member tend to be the most food insecure. The proximity of wet markets and supermarkets to food retail and food procurement by households across Nanjing emerges clearly in this survey, and the relationship between wet markets and supermarkets appears to be more complementary than competitive. The survey found that three in four respondents feel exposed to threats of unsafe food from the production and processing stages of food supply chains, especially from the overuse of agrochemicals in the agriculture and livestock industry. There is a widespread perception that the ineffective enforcement of regulations by local governments is the major cause of food safety problems
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