Does Family Planning Help The Employment of Women? The Case of India

This paper gives some insight into the existence of a positive effect of family planning programmes on women’s employment in developing countries. We study married women aged 15 to 49 living throughout India using a sample drawn from the National Health Family Survey (NFHS-2) for 1998-1999. We focus on a programme of doorstep services delivered by health or family planning (FP) workers who are sent to visit women in their assigned areas. Results derived from the estimation of fixed effect linear probability and conditional logit models show a positive and significant correlation of the share of women living in a local area (village, town or city) that has been visited by FP workers with the probability of women’s employment. A multinomial analysis also shows that the largest positive effect of FP in rural India is to be found on paid work, as opposed to unpaid work, suggesting a potential empowering feedback of demographic measures through labour earnings.India, women’s employment, family planning, urban and rural development.

Have labour market reforms at the turn of the millennium changed job durations of the new entrants? A comparative study for Germany and Italy

According to the aims of the labour market reforms of the 90s implemented in many European countries, workers may stay at their first job for a shorter time, but should be able to switch jobs easily. This would generate a trade-off between job opportunities and job stability. This paper addresses this issue using administrative longitudinal data for Germany and Italy, two countries which have undergone changes in regulations that can be summarised under the header of “deregulation”.The estimated piecewise constant job and employment duration models show that changes in the durations of the first job and employment - measured as the sum of multiple consecutive jobs - are observed in periods of labour market reforms. However, the existence of a trade-off is not confirmed by the results. In Germany, men have experienced an increase in employment stability over time, mated with somewhat longer job durations, while women have not benefitted from an increase in employment durations as a compensation for the marked decrease in their first job durations. In Italy, employment stability of the new entrants of both sexes has not improved after the reforms. The reduction in the duration of the first job has not been counterbalanced by an increase in the opportunity to find rapidly another job. These results suggest that the objective of increasing job opportunities by means of labour market deregulation has not been fully achieved.employment duration, work career, tenure, precarious jobs, labour market reforms, mixed proportional hazard

Have labour market reforms at the turn of the millennium changed job durations of the new entrants? A comparative study for Germany and Italy

According to the aims of the labour market reforms of the 90s implemented in many European countries, workers may stay at their first job for a shorter time, but should be ble to switch jobs easily. This would generate a trade-off between job opportunities and job stability. This paper addresses this issue using administrative longitudinal data for Germany and Italy, taken as representative examples of continuous and isolated reforms, respectively. The estimated piecewise constant job and employment duration models show that changes in the durations of the first job and employment - measured as the sum of multiple consecutive jobs - are observed in periods of labour market reforms. However, the existence of a trade-off is not confirmed by the results. In Germany, men have experienced an increase in employment stability over time, mated with somewhat longer job durations, while women have not benefitted from an increase in employment durations as a compensation for the marked decrease in their first job durations. In Italy, employment stability of the new entrants of both sexes has not improved after the reforms. The reduction in the duration of the first job has not been counterbalanced by an increase in the opportunity to find rapidly another job. These results suggest that the objective of increasing job opportunities by means of labour market deregulation has not been fully achieved.employment duration, work career, tenure, precarious jobs, labour market reforms, mixed proportional hazard.

Mothers’ Employment and their Children’s Schooling: a Joint Multilevel Analysis for India

This paper studies the relation between mothers’ employment and their children’s schooling in India, where a high number of children are not attending school at compulsory school age. Using the second National Family Health Survey, the results of a joint multi-level random effects model show that, controlling for covariates, the correlation between mothers’ employment and children’s schooling is negative. A sensitivity analysis on wealth and education deciles shows that this relation disappears in urban areas and becomes weaker in rural areas only at the top wealth deciles, but persists for the more educated mothers. The last result may be driven by the low number of females with a high level of education in India, but it also seems to envisage that, for mothers with lower education, being literate does not increase pay conditions. These findings suggest that policies aiming at improving both women’s and children’s welfare should not only pursue higher levels of education, but also target improvements in women’s conditions in the labour market.women’s employment, children’s schooling, household allocation of time, random effects, India, NFHS-2

GDP and the Value of Family Caretaking: How Much Does Europe Care?

This study estimates the size and value of unpaid family caretaking activities at a European level. While at a country level several studies are available, a comprehensive evaluation for Europe as a whole was missing so far, mainly due to data limitations. This paper fills this gap using a method that merges the information of an EU household survey (EU-SILC) with a time use survey (HETUS). Monetary values of unpaid family domestic work and unpaid family childcare work are obtained applying both the opportunity cost and the market replacement approaches. For Europe as a whole, the total value of these activities ranges between 20.1 per cent and 36.8 per cent of the EU GDP, depending on the applied methodology. The national values of these activities are discussed and an interpretation of the country differentials in the family caretaking gender gaps is given in terms of differences in culture, economic development and welfare state.unpaid domestic work, family care work, gender inequality, opportunity cost, market replacement approach

Surviving the Genocide: The Impact of the Rwandan Genocide on Child Mortality

Between April and July 1994 Rwanda experienced a tremendous wave of inter-ethnic violence that caused at least 500,000 deaths. Combining birth history data drawn from the 2000 Rwanda Demographic and Health Survey with prefecture-level information on the intensity of the conflict, we examine the impact of the civil war on infant and child mortality. War exposure is measured exploiting the differential effects of timing of birth and genocide intensity at the household and geographic level. Considering both in utero and postnatal war exposure, we estimate discrete time proportional hazard models of child mortality for the exposed and the unexposed birth cohorts. We find large positive effects of exposure to the conflict on infant and child mortality. Moreover, restricting our sample to the survivors, we find that child mortality is significantly impacted by war exposure, increasing the hazard rate by nearly 6 percentage points on average. This result holds true also for children who were only exposed while in utero. This evidence points to the existence of long-term disruptive effects on the cohorts of children exposed to the violence

The Intergenerational Transmission of Math Culture

In this study, we provide evidence that parents' beliefs about the value of math, in terms of successful employment, have a positive impact on children's math scores. This result is robust to the reverse causality issue that characterizes the relationship between parental attitude and children's performance. We adopt an identification strategy that relies on two pillars. First, using PISA 2012, we estimate this relationship on a sample of immigrants that includes second-generation students and first-generation students who migrated before starting primary education. Second, we instrument the parental attitude with the country of origin math performance, under the assumption that country of origin math performance affects children's performance only through parents. We find that one additional score point in the origin country performance in math increases student performance by 21 percent of one standard deviation of the student math score. For an indirect transmission mechanism through parents math culture, this can be considered a quite substantial effect. Disentangling the effect of one of the factors that shape the family background, we contribute to the empirical literature on the explanations of individual educational achievements

Is the Allocation of Time Gender Sensitive to Food Price Changes? An Investigation of Hours of Work in Uganda

Dramatic spikes in food prices, like those observed over the last years, represent a real threat to food security in developing countries with severe consequences for many aspects of human life. Price instability can also affect the intra-household allocation of time, thus changing the labour supply of women, who traditionally play the role of 'shock absorbers'. This paper explores the nature of time poverty by examining how changes in the prices of the two major staples consumed, matooke and cassava, have affected the paid and unpaid labour time allocation in Ugandan households. We exploit the panel nature of the Uganda National Household Survey by adopting a Tobit-hybrid model. Our results show that gender differentials in the intra-household allocation of labour actually occur in correspondence with changes in food prices. We find that, overall, women work significantly more, since the additional hours women work in the labour market are not counterbalanced by a relevant reduction in their other labour activities. For men, we do not find any significant effect of price changes on hours of work

Do family planning programmes help women's employment? The case of Indian mothers

The paper deals with female employment in developing countries. We set out a model to test our argument that, at the first stage of development, demographic and health programmes have proven to be more effective for women's position in the society than specific labour and income support policies. Our household model in the collective framework predicts that an exogenous improvement in household production technology due to demographic and health policies gives the wife the opportunity to employ her time resources more efficiently, and, by consequence, the power to choose to participate or not to the labour market. A unique, rich and representative data survey for all Indian states and rural India (NFHS-2, 1998-1999) allows us to analyse the role of Family Planning (FP), reproductive and child care programmes, for the employment probability of married women aged 15 to 49. Our results for urban and rural India show that the FP effect is significant in rural India, that is, women that have been visited by an FP public worker have a higher probability of being employed. Moreover, for rural India, we compare this effect with that one of Governmental Policies (GP) supporting household income and promoting employment. Our results show that the effect of this particular FP intervention has been more effective for women's employment than GP. This result appears to be robust across different definitions of female employment and model specifications