Are Informal Workers Compensated for the Lack of Fringe Benefits? Free Health Care as an Instrument for Formality

This paper estimates the e¤ect of having a job covered by social security, on the wages of female salaried workers. I overcome the heterogeneity bias that typically contaminates estimates by using the exogenous availability of free health care and prescription drugs implemented in 2001 in the part of Mexico City that belongs to Distrito Federal (DF). This program provides valid instruments because health care is a substantial component of the bene?ts provided by social security, so the availability of alternative free health care should decrease the incentive to contribute to the system. In addition, eligibility for this program is not correlated with individual unobserved characteristics that a¤ect either wages or the choice of sector. My results show that being a DF resident after free health care was implemented has a negative an signi?cant e¤ect on the probability that a female salaried worker has social security in her current job. Regarding wages, not controlling for the endogeneity of formality on the wage regression gives rise to a positive formal premium as in previous studies for both developed and developing countries. In contrast, my instrumental variables results show that female salaried workers in the formal sector earn between 16 to 23 percent less than female workers in informal jobs. These results show that workers who receive higher fringe bene?ts are paid a lower wage, which supports the compensating di¤erential theory. In the Mexican context, it would also suggest that informal salaried workers are not necessarily worse o¤than their counterparts in the formal sector.

The Diffusion of Bt Cotton and the Economic Impact on Producers

The objective is to present the economic impact of producers adopting Bt cotton and the rapid diffusion on the main producing countries: USA, China and India. The existing literature about this type of transgenic crop has been revised and the results of different research are presented. Bt cotton varieties have been quickly adopted by the countries in this study. Data show that this technology helps reduce production losses and significantly decrease the use of pesticides, thus saving their cost and the associated labour cost. But the total cost reduction is weak due to the high prices of the seeds incorporating this technology.Innovation diffusion, Bt cotton, Crop Production/Industries,

The Private and Social Profitability of Mechanical Threshing

This article is part of the seminar-workshop on the “Consequences of Small Farm Mechanization on Production, Employment and Incomes in the Philippines” sponsored jointly by the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Economic and Development Authority, the Philippine Institute for Development Studies and the International Rice Research Institute held on December 1-2, 1983 at Tagaytay City. It presents both the private and social profitability of thresher adoption and utilization using different methods of appraisal. It also shows the effects of fuel and oil price and contract cost increases on utilization.agriculture sector, net present values, utilization, impact analysis, mechanization

The Private and Social Profitability of Mechanical Threshing

This article is part of the seminar-workshop on the “Consequences of Small Farm Mechanization on Production, Employment and Incomes in the Philippines” sponsored jointly by the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Economic and Development Authority, the Philippine Institute for Development Studies and the International Rice Research Institute held on December 1-2, 1983 at Tagaytay City. It presents both the private and social profitability of thresher adoption and utilization using different methods of appraisal. It also shows the effects of fuel and oil price and contract cost increases on utilization.agriculture sector, net present values, utilization, impact analysis, mechanization

Damping-Antidamping Effect on Comets Motion

We make an observation about Galilean transformation on a 1-D mass variable systems which leads us to the right way to deal with mass variable systems. Then using this observation, we study two-bodies gravitational problem where the mass of one of the bodies varies and suffers a damping-antidamping effect due to star wind during its motion. For this system, a constant of motion, a Lagrangian and a Hamiltonian are given for the radial motion, and the period of the body is studied using the constant of motion of the system. Our theoretical results are applied to Halley's comet.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:0910.468