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

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

Shared agency: the dominant spouse’s impact on education expenditure

In this paper, we consider whether it is the gender of the decision maker or the extent of agency that they wield that is crucial to increasing household welfare. This is an important question as development policy is often formed on the basis that placing resources in the hands of women results in greater household welfare. Indonesia provides the ideal opportunity to study this issue because it is home to ethnic groups with very different gender norms from male dominance (the patrilineal Batak) to female dominance (the matrilineal Minangkabau). Using IFLS data for three rounds, we consider the impact of decision-making by the dominant spouse on household expenditure on education. We find that, in Indonesia, when the dominant spouse (male or female) has sole control of decision-making, there is an overall negative impact on education expenditure. This leads us to argue that it is more important to consider the issue of spousal dominance, than wholly to focus on gender

Are happy youth also satisfied adults? An analysis of the impact of childhood factors on adult life satisfaction

This paper aims to consider whether there is a link between youth happiness levels and adult life satisfaction. Our results are unequivocal that such a link exists both because demographic and socio-economic conditions are persistent over a lifetime and also because there is a persistence in personality effects. To test this link, we estimate a model of happiness for a sample of young people. This model provides us with a range of variables measuring socio-economic effects and personality effects amongst young people. These variables are then included in the adult life satisfaction model. The model is estimated using data from the British Household Panel Survey for 1994–2008. In addition to childhood happiness levels influencing adult life satisfaction significantly, we also find that the youthful personality trait for happiness has a larger effect on adult life satisfaction than demographic and socio-economic conditions

Lifestyle and life satisfaction: the role of delayed gratification

This paper considers the impact of two measures of lifestyle - the consumption of fruit and vegetables and doing exercise - on individual well-being. Since lifestyle is likely to be endogenous, we correct for this by using two dimensions of delayed gratification as instruments. The ability to delay gratification enables individuals to give greater weight to the investment component of lifestyle decisions rather than merely the affective component. Our analysis is based on the UK Understanding Society Data, which covers 40,000 UK households over time. We find that the two delayed gratification instruments are positive and significant in influencing lifestyle. In Stage 2, we find that fruit and vegetable consumption and sports activity increase life satisfaction, though the impacts vary for men and women. These results are robust across income quartiles, region, gender, education and age groups

Stigma and labour market outcomes: sex work and domestic work in India

In this paper, we examine whether the earnings of sex workers in India are significantly different from those in domestic work, a trade that is also gendered in nature and can be done with similarly low levels of training and education. We analyse this using data collected during fieldwork in the cities of Kolkata and Delhi in India. Our results confirm that there is a significant difference in wages between the two groups of workers. We consider the extent to which the stigma attached to sexwork contributes to the higher wages in this occupation relative to domestic work. To do this, we control for endogeneity caused by selection on unobservables. We find that stigma is a significant contributory factor to the wage differential. We also preliminarily consider an alternate explanation – that of violence in the trade. We find that the experience of violence in the trade does not affect the take home earnings of the individuals

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