Does household expenditure on education in India depend upon the returns to education?

This paper analyses whether the amount households spend on education depends upon the returns to education prevalent in the region in which they live. To this end, we estimated rates of return to education separately for boys and girls in 33 states and UTs in India. These rates of return were then included in our education expenditure model. Our results clearly indicated that the rate of return to education was highly significant in increasing the amount spent on education by the household both for boys and girls. However, we find that the impact of this variable is much larger at secondary level and for girls.Education, Returns to education, India, household expenditure.

Is Rural Child Labour Declining in India?

This paper will look at the patterns of child work, schooling and ‘idleness’ across the major states of India and over two years - 1993 and 2004. We analyse two rounds of the NSS dataset to see whether the patterns of schooling and child work have changed over this period or not. The analysis concentrates on the rural sector and finds that the proportion of children in work has increased between 1993 and 2004. While current attendance at school has increased, the proportion of children whose primary activity is schooling has decreased. We hypothesise that this may be because, in a growing economy, there are more opportunities for employment and therefore a larger number of children are likely to combine work and schooling.

Growth and Inverted U in Child Labour: A Dual Economy Approach

While it is commonly accepted that the main cause of child labour is poverty, empirical observations suggest that economic growth is not always associated with the reduction in child labour. We show, in a dual economy framework, that the e¤ect of productivity growth upon child labour may be positive or negative. In particular, changes in the productivity gap between the modern and the traditional sectors, due to the technological progress, can generate an increase in child labour. In a dynamic version of the model we also investigate how this e¤ect depends on the quality of schooling.

The 'Nowhere' Children: Patriarchy and the Role of Girls in India's Rural Economy

The paper is motivated by an apparent paradox – boys seem to participate more both in the labour market and in school than girls. This pattern breaks down once we take the household work done by girls into account. In this paper, we find that there is symmetry between the factors that make women’s contribution to the household economy less ‘visible’ than men’s and the factors that reduce girl’s involvement in outside work. Both are related to the kind of sociocultural environment in which households operate in India. Analysing the School, Work and household chores options for girls, we find that the kinship system prevalent in different regions as well as amongst different religions and castes is a significant determinant of these choices. In addition, we find that increases in household income do not decrease the probability of girls doing household chores, reinforcing our conclusion that non-economic factors are important. Our results confirm, once again, that while daughter’s labour complements mother’s work within family enterprises, it substitutes for mothers in household chores when the mother works outside the home.Child work, Girl child, kinship systems, patriarchy, household chores, India

Are We Getting It Right? Values and Life Satisfaction

The research agendas of psychologists and economists now have several overlaps, with behavioural economics providing theoretical and experimental study of the relationship between behaviour and choice, and hedonic psychology discussing appropriate measures of outcomes of choice in terms of overall utility or life satisfaction. Here we model the relationship between values (understood as principles guiding behaviour), choices and their final outcomes in terms of life satisfaction, and use data from the BHPS to assess whether our ideas on what is important in life (individual values) are broadly connected to what we experience as important in our lives (life satisfaction).life satisfaction, utility, values

His and Hers: Exploring Gender Puzzles and the Meaning of Life Satisfaction

Our paper contributes to current debates around work-life balance and the efficiency and wellbeing costs associated with different models of work and childcare (Gregory and Connolly, 2008). It also contributes from a gender perspective to the life satisfaction literature by providing a test for the hypothesis that women and men with children attribute different meanings to overall life satisfaction. We begin by presenting a conventional model of life satisfaction for British parents in wave 8 of the British Household Panel Survey which includes childcare arrangements; and move on to discuss the possibility that women and men have a different understanding of what matters in life and what constitutes life satisfaction, and accordingly we explore the role of dimensions of life satisfaction in overall life satisfaction. Finally, we try to account for observed differences between women and men and explain some of the paradoxes encountered in the literature on women and work-life balance, and on policy based on happiness scores.

Growth Response to Competitive Shocks: Market Structure Dynamics Under Liberalisation - the Case of India

Liberalisation transforms market structures through the behavioural responses of incumbent firms and entrants, large firms and small, to enhanced freedom of choice. Change in market share volatility, and change in the effective agility of small and large firms underpin changes in market structure. We analyse these processes for Indian manufacturing industries over the 18-year period from 1980, spanning the domestic liberalisation of 1985 and the more comprehensive reforms of 1991, using a data set of large and medium firms in 83 industries. We find that while market structures themselves appeared to change little, turbulence in market shares, as well as the way growth is related to size responded markedly, differing in direction and magnitude, depending on whether the liberalisation was partial and domestic, or comprehensive. We find that they tended to offset each other, leading to little visible change in market structure itself. We also find that while drivers of market structure traditionally recognised in industrial organisation studies had significant impacts on both components of concentration change, their dynamics are captured very well by a parsimonious model that has just the announcement effects - the reform dates.Liberalisation, Competitive Shocks, Firm growth, Turbulence, Market structure, India

Maternal Autonomy and the Education of the Subsequent Generation: Evidence from Three Contrasting States in India

This paper makes a significant contribution on both conceptual and methodological fronts, in the analysis of the effect of maternal autonomy on school enrolment age of children in India. The school entry age is modelled using a discrete time duration model where maternal autonomy is entered as a latent characteristic, and allowed to be associated with various parental and household characteristics which also conditionally affect school entry age. The model identification is achieved by using proxy measures collected in the third round of the National Family Health Survey of India, on information relating to the economic, decision-making, physical and emotional autonomy of a woman. We concentrate on three very different states in India – Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Uttar Pradesh. Our results indicate that female autonomy is not associated with socio-economic characteristics of the woman or her family in Kerala (except maternal education), while it is strongly correlated to these characteristics in both Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Secondly, while female autonomy is significant in influencing the school starting age in UP, it is less important in AP and not significant at all in Kerala.latent factor models, structural equation models, female autonomy, school enrolment decisions, India, National Family Health Survey

Maternal Autonomy and the Education of the Subsequent Generation : Evidence from three contrasting states in India

This paper makes a significant contribution on both conceptual and methodological fronts, in the analysis of the effect of maternal autonomy on school enrolment age of children in India. The school entry age is modelled using a discrete time duration model where maternal autonomy is entered as a latent characteristic, and allowed to be associated with various parental and household characteristics which also conditionally affect school entry age. The model identification is achieved by using proxy measures collected in the third round of the National Family Health Survey of India, on information relating to the economic, decision-making, physical and emotional autonomy of a woman. We concentrate on three very different states in India – Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Uttar Pradesh. Our results indicate that female autonomy is not associated with socio-economic characteristics of the woman or her family in Kerala (except maternal education), while it is strongly correlated to these characteristics in both Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Secondly, while female autonomy is significant in influencing the school starting age in UP, it is less important in AP and not significant at all in Kerala.