Dowry and Intrahousehold Bargaining: Evidence from China

This paper analyzes the relationship between a woman’s intrahousehold bargaining position and her welfare within marriage. Simultaneity problems common to the literature are overcome by using dowry to proxy for bargaining position. Omitted variable bias is addressed by using grain shocks in the year preceding marriage and sibling sex composition as instruments for dowry. Instrumented dowry positively impacts several measures of a wife’s welfare, including time allocation, household purchases, and the wife’s decision-making authority, thereby offering strong evidence to support collective models of the household.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39994/3/wp608.pd

Media Coverage & Charitable Giving After the 2004 Tsunami

Media coverage of humanitarian crises is widely believed to influence charitable giving, yet this assertion has received little empirical scrutiny. Using Internet donations after the 2004 tsunami as a case study, we show that media coverage of disasters has a dramatic impact on donations to relief agencies, with an additional minute of nightly news coverage increasing donations by 0.036 standard deviations from the mean, or 13.2% of the average daily donation for the typical relief agency. Similarly, an additional 700-word story in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal raises donations by 18.2% of the daily average. These results are robust to controls for the timing of news coverage and tax considerations. We repeat the analysis using instrumental variables to account for endogeneity bias, and the estimates are unchanged. However, we also find that the effect of news coverage varies considerably by relief agency.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57235/1/wp855 .pd

Dowry and Intrahousehold Bargaining: Evidence from China

This paper analyzes the relationship between a woman’s intrahousehold bargaining position and her welfare within marriage. Simultaneity problems common to the literature are overcome by using dowry to proxy for bargaining position. Omitted variable bias is addressed by using grain shocks in the year preceding marriage and sibling sex composition as instruments for dowry. Instrumented dowry positively impacts several measures of a wife’s welfare, including time allocation, household purchases, and the wife’s decision-making authority, thereby offering strong evidence to support collective models of the household.Intrahousehold Allocation, Dowry and Brideprice, Marriage, China

Fluid inclusions in Martian samples: Clues to early crustal development and the hydrosphere

Major questions about Mars that could be illuminated by examining fluid inclusions in Martian samples include: (1) the nature, extent and timing of development (and decline) of the hydrosphere that existed on the planet; and (2) the evolution of the crust. Fluid inclusion analyses of appropriate samples could provide critical data to use in comparison with data derived from analogous terrestrial studies. For this study, sample handling and return restrictions are unlikely to be as restrictive as the needs of other investigators. The main constraint is that the samples not be subjected to excessively high temperatures. An aqueous fluid inclusion trapped at elevated pressure and temperature will commonly consist of liquid water and water vapor at room temperature. Heating (such as is done in the laboratory to fix P-V-T data for the inclusion) results in moderate pressure increases up to the liquid-vapor homogenization temperature followed by a sharp increase in pressure with continued heating because the inclusion is effectively a fixed volume system. This increased pressure can rupture the inclusion; precise limits are dependent on size, shape, and composition as well as the host material

Media Coverage & Charitable Giving After the 2004 Tsunami

Media coverage of humanitarian crises is widely believed to influence charitable giving, yet this assertion has received little empirical scrutiny. Using Internet donations after the 2004 tsunami as a case study, we show that media coverage of disasters has a dramatic impact on donations to relief agencies, with an additional minute of nightly news coverage increasing donations by 0.036 standard deviations from the mean, or 13.2% of the average daily donation for the typical relief agency. Similarly, an additional 700-word story in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal raises donations by 18.2% of the daily average. These results are robust to controls for the timing of news coverage and tax considerations. We repeat the analysis using instrumental variables to account for endogeneity bias, and the estimates are unchanged. However, we also find that the effect of news coverage varies considerably by relief agency.Charitable giving; Media; Disasters; Tsunami; Southeast Asia

Local Distributional Effects of Government Cash Transfers in Chile

Despite rapid economic growth and poverty reduction, inequality in Chile has remained high and remarkably constant over the last 20 years, prompting academic and public interest in the subject. Due to data limitations, however, research on inequality in Chile has concentrated on the national and regional levels. The impact of cash subsidies to poor households on local inequality is thus not well understood. Using poverty mapping methods to asses this impact, we find heterogeneity in the effectiveness of regional and municipal governments in reducing inequality via poverty-reduction transfers, suggesting that alternative targeting regimes may complement current practice in aiding the poor.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57252/1/wp872 .pd

Reviews

A. Barker and F. Manji, Writing for Change ‐ An Interactive Guide to Effective Writing, Writing for Science, Writing for Advocacy, CD‐ROM and Users Guide, Fahama/International Development Research Centre, Oxford, 2000. ISBN: 0–9536–9021–0, no price given. Softback (28 pages) and CD‐ROM