Incumbent Behavior: Vote Seeking, Tax Setting and Yardstick Competition

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical investigation of tax competition when voters use the tax policy of neighboring jurisdictions as information to evaluate the performance of their incumbent politicians. We show that this has implications both for voter tolerance of high taxes and for the process of tax setting itself, Our empirical results, which use two different tax data sets, confirm the importance of neighbors' taxes both on the probability of incumbent reelection and on tax setting behavior.

The impact of parental death on school enrollment and achievement: Longitudinal evidence from South Africa

We analyse longitudinal data from a demographic surveillance area (DSA) in KwaZulu-Natal, to examine the impact of parental death on children's outcomes. We find significant differences in the impact of mothers' and fathers' deaths. The loss of a child's mother is a strong predictor of poor schooling outcomes. Maternal orphans are significantly less likely to be enrolled in school, and have completed significantly fewer years of schooling, conditional on age, than children whose mothers are alive. Less money is spent on their educations on average, conditional on enrolment. Moreover, children whose mothers have died appear to be at an educational disadvantage when compared to non-orphaned children with whom they live. We use the timing of mothers' deaths relative to children's educational shortfalls to argue that mothers' deaths have a causal effect on children's educations. The loss of a child's father is a significant predictor of household socioeconomic status. Children whose fathers have died live in significantly poorer households, measured on a number of dimensions. However, households in which fathers died were poor prior to fathers' deaths. The death of a father between waves of the survey has no significant effect on subsequent household economic status. While the loss of a father is correlated with poorer educational outcomes, this correlation arises because a father's death is a marker that the household is poor. Evidence from the South African 2001 Census suggests that the estimated effects of maternal deaths on children's school attendance and attainment in the Africa Centre DSA reflect the reality for orphans throughout South Africa.

Mothers and Others: Who Invests in Children's Health?

We estimate the impact of family structure on investments made in children's health, using data from the 1988 National Health Interview Survey Child Health Supplement. Controlling for household size, income and characteristics, we find that children living with step mothers are significantly less likely to have routine doctor and dentist visits, or to have a place for usual medical care, or for sick care. If children living with step mothers have regular contact with their birth mothers, however, their health care does not suffer relative to that reported for children who reside with their birth mothers. In addition to health investments, we find a significant effect of step mothers on health-related behaviors: children living with step mothers are significantly less likely to wear seatbelts, and are significantly more likely to be living with a cigarette smoker. We cannot reject that investments for children living with birth fathers and step mothers are the same as those made by birth fathers living alone with their children. Who invests in children's health? It appears these investments are made, largely, by a child's mother, and that step mothers are not substitutes for birth mothers in this domain.

Does School Quality Matter? Returns to Education and the Characteristics of Schools in South Africa

This paper contributes to what is known about the impact of school quality, by documenting its effect on the incomes of Black South Africans, using data from the 1996 South African census and two national surveys of school quality. South Africa provides an interesting laboratory for studying the impact of school quality on labor market outcomes. Under the Apartheid system, Blacks faced extremely limited residential and school choices, which limits the extent to which results are attributable to the endogeneity of school and residential choice. In addition, Black schools' funding and staffing decisions were made rather arbitrarily by a White government that was at best indifferent to the needs of Black schools. Large differences in pupil/teacher ratios developed between Black schools, differences much larger than those observed in the United States. Using a two-state estimation procedure similar to that employed by Card and Krueger (1992) and by Heckman et al. (1996), we find that the quality of schools in a respondent's magisterial district of origin has a large and significant effect on the rate of return to schooling for Black men. The South African results are notable, moreover, because they are so similar to those estimated by Card and Krueger (1992) for the United States.

Consumption, health, gender, and poverty

Standard methods of measuring poverty assume that an individual is poor if he or she lives in a family whose income or consumption lies below an appropriate poverty line. Such methods provide only limited insight into male and female poverty separately. Nevertheless, there are reasons why household resources are linked to the gender composition of the household: women's earnings are often lower than men's; families in some countries control their fertility through differential stopping rules; and women live longer than men. It is also possible to link family expenditure patterns to the gender composition of the household, something the authors illustrate using data from India and South Africa. Such a procedure provides useful information on who gets what, but cannot tell us how total resources are allocated between males and females. More can be gleaned from data on consumption by individual household members,and for many goods, collecting such information is good survey practice in any case. Even so, it will be some time before such information can be used routinely to produce estimates of poverty by gender. A more promising approach is likely to come within a broader definition of poverty that includes health (and possibly education) as well as income. The authors discuss recent work on collecting self-reported measures of nonfatal health and argue that such measures are already useful for assessing the relative health status of males and females. The evidence is consistent with non-elderly women generally having poorer health than non-elderly men. The authors emphasize the importance of simultaneously measuring poverty in multiple dimensions. The different components of well-being are correlated, and it is misleading to look at any one in isolation from the others.Housing&Human Habitats,Public Health Promotion,Population&Development,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Population&Development,Housing&Human Habitats,Poverty Lines

Sex Differences in Obesity Rates in Poor Countries: Evidence from South Africa

Globally, men and women face markedly different risks of obesity. In all but of handful of (primarily Western European) countries, obesity is more prevalent among women than men. In this paper, we examine several potential explanations for this phenomenon. We analyze differences between men and women in reports and effects of the proximate causes of obesity -- physical exertion and food intake -- and the underlying causes of obesity -- childhood and adult poverty, depression, and attitudes about obesity. We evaluate the evidence for each explanation using data collected in an African township outside of Cape Town. Three factors explain the greater obesity rates we find among women. Women who were nutritionally deprived as children are significantly more likely to be obese as adults, while men who were deprived as children face no greater risk. In addition, women of higher adult socioeconomic status are significantly more likely to be obese, which is not true for men. These two factors can fully explain the difference in obesity rates we find in our sample. Finally (and more speculatively), women's perceptions of an 'ideal' female body are larger than men's perceptions of the 'ideal' male body, and individuals with larger 'ideal' body images are significantly more likely to be obese.

Stature and Status: Height, Ability, and Labor Market Outcomes

It has long been recognized that taller adults hold jobs of higher status and, on average, earn more than other workers. A large number of hypotheses have been put forward to explain the association between height and earnings. In developed countries, researchers have emphasized factors such as self esteem, social dominance, and discrimination. In this paper, we offer a simpler explanation: On average, taller people earn more because they are smarter. As early as age 3 %u2014 before schooling has had a chance to play a role %u2014 and throughout childhood, taller children perform significantly better on cognitive tests. The correlation between height in childhood and adulthood is approximately 0.7 for both men and women, so that tall children are much more likely to become tall adults. As adults, taller individuals are more likely to select into higher paying occupations that require more advanced verbal and numerical skills and greater intelligence, for which they earn handsome returns. Using four data sets from the US and the UK, we find that the height premium in adult earnings can be explained by childhood scores on cognitive tests. Furthermore, we show that taller adults select into occupations that have higher cognitive skill requirements and lower physical skill demands.