PARENTS AS PUBLIC GOODS: THEORY AND EVIDENCE FROM RURAL CHINA

This paper attempts to explain why some elderly in rural China live alone in relative poverty while others live with their children and are relatively well-off. It develops a theoretical model of intergenerational transfers specific to rural China and tests among competing hypotheses using cross-sectional data collected in 2000.Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

International migration: Can it improve living standards among poor and vulnerable populations?

Hunger, Migration, Poverty, Poverty reduction, Remittances,

Are Women Taking over the Farm in China?

Development practitioners in the West have proclaimed that a ``feminization of agriculture'' is occurring in the developing world. In this paper, I use household survey data collected in rural China to empirically test whether or not women have been doing an increasing amount of farmwork. I find exactly the opposite-- if anything, the proportion of farmwork being done by women is declining over the late 1990s. Furthermore, I analyze the demographic composition of the farm labor force and find that the future feminization of agriculture is unlikely.Women, agriculture, China, farm labor

Are Women Taking over the Farm in China?

Development practitioners in the West have proclaimed that a "feminization of agriculture" is occurring in the developing world. In this paper, I use household survey data collected in rural China to empirically test whether or not women have been doing an increasing amount of farmwork. I find exactly the opposite-- if anything, the proportion of farmwork being done by women is declining over the late 1990s. Furthermore, I analyze the demographic composition of the farm labor force and find that the future feminization of agriculture is unlikely.Women, agriculture, China, farm labor

Household Investment through migration in Rural China

In this paper, we strive to better understand how household investment is affected by participation in migration in rural China. After we describe investment patterns across different regions of rural China, we use a theoretical model to describe a relationship between migration and investment and to generate hypotheses about the relationship consistent with our descriptive findings. We test the hypotheses using household data collected in rural China in 2000 and find that in poorer areas migration increases consumptive investment by nearly 20 percent. We find no evidence of a link between migration and productive investment.China, migration, development, household investment, dynamic panel data

Must conditional cash transfer programs be conditioned to be effective?: The impact of conditioning transfers on school enrollment in Mexico

"A growing body of evidence suggests that conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs can have strong, positive effects on a range of welfare indicators for poor households in developing countries. However, the contribution of individual program components toward achieving these outcomes is not well understood. This paper contributes to filling this gap by explicitly testing the importance of conditionality on one specific outcome related to human capital formation (namely school enrollment), using data collected during the evaluation of Mexico's Programa de Educación, Salud, y Alimentación (PROGRESA) CCT program. We exploit the fact that some PROGRESA beneficiaries who received transfers did not receive the forms needed to monitor their children's attendance at school. We use a variety of techniques, including nearest neighbor matching and household fixed effects regressions, to show that the lack of these forms reduced the likelihood of children attending school, with this effect being most pronounced among children who were transitioning to lower secondary school. We provide substantial evidence that these findings are not driven by unobservable characteristics related to households or localities." from Author's AbstractConditionality, Cash transfers, School enrollment, School attendance, Progresa, Social protection, Education,

Migrant labor markets and the welfare of rural households in the developing world : evidence from China

In this paper, the authors examine the impact of reductions in barriers to migration on the consumption of rural households in China. The authors find that increased migration from rural villages leads to significant increases in consumption per capita, and that this effect is stronger for poorer households within villages. Household income per capita and non-durable consumption per capita both increase with out-migration, and increase more for poorer households. The authors also establish a causal relationship between increased out-migration and investment in housing and durable goods assets, and these effects are also stronger for poorer households. The authors do not find robust evidence, however, to support a connection between increased migration and investment in productive activity. Instead, increased migration is associated with two significant changes for poorer households: increases both in the total labor supplied to productive activities and in the land per capita managed by the household. In examining the effect of migration, we pay considerable attention to developing and examining our identification strategy.Access to Finance,Population Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Labor Policies,Debt Markets

Migrant Opportunity and the Educational Attainment of Youth in Rural China

In this paper, we investigate how reductions of barriers to migration affect the decision of middle school graduates to attend high school in rural China. Change in the cost of migration is identified using exogenous variation across counties in the timing of national identity card distribution, which make it easier for rural migrants to register as temporary residents in urban destinations. We make use of a large panel household and village data set supplemented by an original follow-up survey, and find a robust negative relationship between migrant opportunity and high school enrollment. This effect is consistent with our finding of low returns to high school education among migrants from surveyed villages.Migration, Educational Attainment, Rural China

Measuring risk attitudes among Mozambican farmers:

Although farmers in developing countries are generally thought to be risk averse, little is known about the actual form of their risk preferences. In this paper, we use a relatively large field experiment to explore risk preferences related to sweet potato production among a sample of farmers in northern Mozambique. We explicitly test whether preferences follow the constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) utility function and whether farmers follow expected utility theory or rank dependent utility theory in generating their preferences. We find that we can reject the null that farmers'preferences follow the CRRA utility function in favor of the more flexible power risk aversion preferences. In a mixture model, we find that about three-fourths of farmers in our sample develop risk preferences by rank dependent utility. We also find that by making the common CRRA assumption in our sample, we poorly predict risk preferences among those who are less risk averse.Sweet potato, Risk preferences, constant relative risk aversion (CRRA), farmers preferences,