Elderly Health and Salaries in the Mexican Labor Market

Little work exists on elderly health, work and salaries in developing countries. This paper aims to contribute to this literature in the areas of health and income of the elderly. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of elderly health in the context of a developing country, Mexico,and the relationship between these health indicators and earnings in the labor market. We analyze the determinants of elderly health in Mexico, considering a number of different measures of health status, and we use these indicators to evaluate the impact of health on the income of working elderly individuals. We use the National Mexican Aging Survey of 1994, which contains detailed self-reported indicators of health as well as labor market information, to tease out these potential relationships. The results find that health measures have a strong negative effect on wages for male elderly workers. Our lowest point estimations demonstrate that poor health lowers hourly earnings by 58 percent. These are sizable effects, particularly within the context of a developing country, which does not have a universal social security system and may therefore imply that many elderly individuals work, whether or not their health level permits it. Poor health may also prevent others from working, and thereby contribute to high poverty rates among the elderly.

Conditional cash transfers and their impact on child work and schooling

In this paper we investigate whether a conditional cash transfer program such as the Programa Nacional de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA) can simultaneously combat the problems of low school attendance and child work. PROGRESA is a new program of the Mexican government aimed at alleviating extreme poverty in rural areas. It combats the different causes of poverty by providing cash benefits that are targeted directly to households on the condition of children attending school and visiting health clinics on a regular basis. Some of the questions addressed are as follows: Does the program reduce child labor? Does it increase participation in school activities? Does the latter occur at the expense of children's leisure time? And how do the effects of the program vary by age group and gender? Our empirical analysis relies on data from a quasi-experimental design used to evaluate the impact of the program involving a sample of communities that receive PROGRESA benefits (treatment) and comparable communities that receive benefits at a later time (control). We estimate the effect of “treatment on the treated” using both double-difference and cross sectional difference estimators. Our estimates show significant increases in the school attendance of boys and girls that are accompanied by significant reductions in the participation of boys and girls in work activities. We also find that the program has a lower impact on the incidence of work for girls relative to boys.FCND ,Transfer payments. ,Income Mexico. ,Public health. ,Children Mexico. ,Poverty. ,

Labor market shocks and their impacts on work and schooling

The authors use individual observations from a panel of families during the period of the peso crisis in Mexico to investigate whether and how labor market shocks, as proxied by changes in the gender- and age-specific unemployment rates in the metropolitan area of the household, affect the intertemporal time allocation of adult members and children. Their findings suggest that significant added-worker effects are in operation, especially for adult females of poorer households and in some cases children. The same shocks also increase significantly the probability that children do not continue school in the next year. The paper also presents evidence suggesting differential treatment based on the sex of children within families.FCND ,Unemployment Mexico. ,Labor market Mexico. ,Urban economics. ,Economic situation. ,Insurance. ,Gender issues. ,

Do School Subsidies Promote Human Capital Accumulation among the Poor?

We investigate the hypothesis that conditioning transfers to poor families on school attendance leads to a reallocation of household resources enhancing the human capital of the next generation, via the effect of the conditionality on the shadow price of human capital. We estimate the price effect of conditional transfers to mothers on intrahousehold allocations using data from a social program in Mexico, and show that price effects are large and statistically significant. The estimates suggest that household resources beyond those directly subject to conditionality have been reallocated favorably to children's human capital.

Labor market shocks and their impacts on work and schooling

The authors use individual observations from a panel of families during the period of the peso crisis in Mexico to investigate whether and how labor market shocks, as proxied by changes in the gender- and age-specific unemployment rates in the metropolitan area of the household, affect the intertemporal time allocation of adult members and children. Their findings suggest that significant added-worker effects are in operation, especially for adult females of poorer households and in some cases children. The same shocks also increase significantly the probability that children do not continue school in the next year. The paper also presents evidence suggesting differential treatment based on the sex of children within families.FCND ,Unemployment Mexico. ,Labor market Mexico. ,Urban economics. ,Economic situation. ,Insurance. ,Gender issues. ,

Deception and Misreporting in a Social Program

We investigate empirically the extent of misreporting in a poverty-alleviation program in which self-reported information, followed by a household visit, is used to determine eligibility. Underreporting may be due to a deception motive, and overreporting to an embarrassment motive. We find that underreporting of goods and desirable home characteristics is widespread, and that overreporting is common with respect to goods linked to social status. Larger program benefits encourage underreporting and discourage overreporting. The effect of benefits on underreporting is significant under a variety of specifications. We also investigate the effects of education and gender on misreporting.

Conditional cash transfers and their impact on child work and schooling

In this paper we investigate whether a conditional cash transfer program such as the Programa Nacional de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA) can simultaneously combat the problems of low school attendance and child work. PROGRESA is a new program of the Mexican government aimed at alleviating extreme poverty in rural areas. It combats the different causes of poverty by providing cash benefits that are targeted directly to households on the condition of children attending school and visiting health clinics on a regular basis. Some of the questions addressed are as follows: Does the program reduce child labor? Does it increase participation in school activities? Does the latter occur at the expense of children's leisure time? And how do the effects of the program vary by age group and gender? Our empirical analysis relies on data from a quasi-experimental design used to evaluate the impact of the program involving a sample of communities that receive PROGRESA benefits (treatment) and comparable communities that receive benefits at a later time (control). We estimate the effect of “treatment on the treated” using both double-difference and cross sectional difference estimators. Our estimates show significant increases in the school attendance of boys and girls that are accompanied by significant reductions in the participation of boys and girls in work activities. We also find that the program has a lower impact on the incidence of work for girls relative to boys.FCND ,Transfer payments. ,Income Mexico. ,Public health. ,Children Mexico. ,Poverty. ,

Program participation under means-testing and self-selection targeting methods

"The use of means testing for determining eligibility has become increasingly popular in developing countries wishing to improve the targeting performance of their social safety net programs. However, past experience shows that means testing often reduces program participation of eligible households—this is true even for universally available programs in developed countries. High non-take-up rates reflect the important role that self-selection patterns can play in program participation levels by different socioeconomic groups. Yet there is still very little empirical evidence on the nature and magnitude of the trade-offs between program coverage of the eligible population and targeting performance, especially for developing countries. This paper contributes to filling this gap by evaluating the targeting." From TextMeans testing ,Targeting performance ,Social safety nets ,Progress ,households ,Oportunidades ,