Conference presentations

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During the last couple of weeks I have been to two conferences and given a talk. The first conference was the European Society for Population Economics' annual meeting in Paris. I presented my paper on sex selective abortion in India and received a lot of valuable comments. Just before that conference I went to Mannheim to present my work on risk and fertility in Guatemala at the Mannheim Research Institute for the Economics of Aging at the University of Mannheim. Currently I am in San Francisco for the Western Economic Association's annual conference, where I presented the sex selection work. After this the next conference is not until the end of September when I will be presenting at the NEUDC at Brown.

Economic Demography Workshop and PAA

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I presented my paper, "Risk and Household Structure: Another Look at the Determinants of Fertility", at the Economic Demography Workshop, held in connection with the Population Association of America's (PAA) annual meeting in Philadelphia, and at the session "Parents and Children" during the regular meeting. At the PAA meeting I was also the chair for the session "Assessing Public Health Interventions in Developing Countries", arranged by Anoshua Chaudhuri. I plan to have the paper on-line before too long.

Pacific Conference for Development Economics

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The first Pacific Conference for Development Economics was help at the University of San Francisco Saturday 5 March. It was a great success with lots of interesting papers and presentations. I presented my work on "Risk and Fertility: Another Look at the Determinants of Fertility". I hope to have a working paper version ready soon. However, the main advantage to going was meeting with the other people in the field. Next year's conference will be held 4 March 2006 at Santa Clara University. If you are a graduate student working on development you are encouraged to send it your paper. Part of the stated purpose of the conference is to allow graduate students to present and meet with faculty and other graduate students.

Changing Population Policies in China?

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This New York Times article, Fearing Future, China Starts to Give Girls Their Due, is worth reading (required registration). The basic idea is that China is beginning to realise that its sex ratio is unlikely to change by itself in the short run. Therefore, in some areas the local governments have decided in some cases to pay families that already have daughters. This should be in order to persuade more families to have girls. As far as I can tell at least one of the programs is essentially a pension program aimed at parents without children or with only daughters.

China's population passes 1.3bn

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According to BBC World China's population passed 1.3bn early Thursday with, very fittingly, the birth of a boy. The main interesting statistics in the article is that among registered births boys outnumer girls 120 to 100 (the expected numbers are 105 boys to every 100 girls). The numbers are obviously higher than in India, which is the topic of some of my current research (see this post), but given that India does not have a one-child policy the difference is not a large as one might expect.

Funding from UW Royalty Research Fund!

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Great news! I just received funding from the UW Royalty Research Fund to work on "Causes and Consequences of Sex Selective Abortion in India". The award will be used to cover costs of data, research assistance and travel. I have also been designated a Royalty Research Fund Scholar, which means that I get a quarter of release time from teaching to work on the project. As the work progresses, I will make sure to post more information about it here.

Labour/Development Brown Bag Today

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I am presenting at the Labour/Development Brown Bag today (14 October) at 12.30 in Savery Hall 302. The title of the paper is "Adult Literacy Programs In Ghana: An Evaluation" (joint with Niels-Hugo Blunch). This is very much work in progress and both the title and the content is likely to change, but that is after all what brown bags are for. I hope to have a working paper version of this paper ready by the end of the month. See below for the abstract.

This paper examines the effect of adult literacy program participation on household consumption in Ghana. We find that in most cases there is no significant effect on consumption from participation after allowing for self-selection into the program. For households where no adults have completed any formal education there is, however, a substantial positive and statistically significant effect on household consumption, pointing towards the potential importance of adult literacy programs for the parts of the population which have not participated in the formal education system. Possible explanations for why adult literacy program participation does not seem to significantly affect households where some formal education has been attained are explored, as well.

Graduate Research Assistant Needed

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I am looking for a graduate research assistant to help me on my projects. An interest in development economics and/or household economics would be an advantage and the same would a good working knowledge of Stata. The expected hours requirement will be between 10 and 20 hours a week, although this is flexible and depends on the RA's exam schedule, etc. I am currently working on the following projects:

  • "Risk and Household Structure: Another Look at the Determinants of Fertility." This paper examines whether parents choose higher fertility in areas where there is higher risks of natural diasters. The hypothesis is that children can serve as incomplete substitute of formal insurance mechanism. I am using data from Guatemala for this study.
  • "Inefficient Household Decisions? Evidence from Participation in Adult Literacy Programs." The aim of this project, which has not begun yet, is to examine why a large share of the participants in adult literacy programs in Ghana are from households where I found no significant positive effect of participation. The hypothesis is that participation is a way of improving one's standing within the household, even though there is no impact on the total consumption of the household.
  • "The Demand for Sex Selective Abortion." Since direct information on the use of sex selective abortion in not available in India, I am developing two methods for indirectly estimating what drives the demand for sex selective abortion. The data I am using are from the two rounds of the Indian National Family and Health Survey, which are large scale DHS type surveys.

If you are interested, you are more than welcome to send me an email or come by my office (Savery Hall M237).

NEUDC 2004 in Montreal

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The 2004 Northeast Universities Development Consortium Conference was held in Montreal 1-3 October. It has become the place to go for development economics research and provides a good overview of what is going on, especially among the junior researchers in the field. It is nice to see that micro-economics of development is still attracting a lot of attention and that interesting research is being done in the field. There is nothing like a conference like this to motivate me to go back and do research. I presented my paper, "Risk and Household Structure: Another Look at the Determinants of Fertility," in the session on Informal Social Protection. The paper's hypothesis is that children can act as imperfect substitutes for insurance and is based on the theory in my paper, "Children as Insurance," published in Journal of Population Economics, Vol. 14(1): 119-136, 2001. I use the ENCOVI 2000 survey from Guatemala combined with secondary data on the risk of hurricanes and earthquakes to estimate the effects of the risks natural disasters on fertility and education. The results show that increased risk of disasters that requires command of manpower to handle increase fertility and lower the education of children, while disasters where a larger family is of little use have a negative effect on fertility. Furthermore, actual shocks has a negative effect on both fertility and children's education, although there is some "catch-up" later. The paper still needs some work on the theoretical model, but the empirical part is converging (hopefully it is a stable path ;-) ) towards its final form. If you would like a copy of forthcoming versions please let me know or check this space.

I also discussed Sonia Laszlo's paper, "Education, Labour Supply and Market Development in Rural Peru," in the Economics of Schooling session. Its aim is very worthwhile: To estimate the return to education in a situation where most people either are self-employed or work on the family farm. Hence, contrary to standard returns to education papers it is not possible to use individual wages to access the return. Laszlo uses a combination of reduced form estimations combined with a structural model to back out the returns parameters. The main problem with the paper is that it is not clear that identification has been achieved, especially since the theoretical model, which is necessary for the structural parameters to be believable, is not convincing.

Birth Order and Intrahousehold Allocation

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My paper, "Birth Order and the Intrahousehold Allocation of Time and Education," (with Mette Ejrnæs) has been accepted for publication by the Review of Economics and Statistics. The latest version can be found under Papers. It is forthcoming in the November issue of this year. One shortcoming of the previous literature on intrahousehold allocation is that the decision on how to distribute resources between children (food, education, health etc.) was examined separately from the decision on how many children to have. Hence, the paper develops a model of intrahousehold allocation with endogenous fertility, which captures the relationship between birth order and investment in children. It shows that a birth order effect in intrahousehold allocation can arise even without assumptions about parental preferences for specific birth order children or genetic endowments varying by birth order. The important contribution is that fertility is treated as endogenous, something which other models of intrahousehold allocation have ignored. The implications of the model are that children with higher birth orders, i.e. are born later, have an advantage over siblings with lower birth orders, who are born earlier, and that parents who are inequality averse will not have more than one child. The model furthermore shows that not taking account of the endogeneity of fertility when analysing intrahousehold allocation may seriously bias the results. The effects of a child's birth order on its human capital accumulation are analysed using a longitudinal data set from the Philippines that covers a very long period. We examine the effects of birth order on both number of hours in school during education and completed education. The results for both are consistent with the predictions of the model.