I gave a seminar at UBC 17 March on my paper "Gone with the Wind? Hurricane Risk, Fertility and Education". I am in the process of revising the paper based on comments from seminar participants and referee reports I have gotten. An revised version should be ready in the not too distant future.
I gave a seminar at the Population Studies Center at University of Michigan Monday 9 March 2009. The paper, "The Demand for Sex Selective Abortions," is still work in progress, but the presentation is here. Note that since this is work in progress methods and results might/will change, especially in light of the very useful comments I got during my visit. The abstract is:
One of the major changes that have taken place in India over the last two decades is a significant shift in the sex ratio at birth, as techniques for prenatal sex determination have become more widely available. There has, however, been little analysis of which factors influence the decision to abort female fetuses at the individual level. Furthermore, the sparse literature does not address the relationship between fertility, spacing and the demand for sex selective abortions, which may lead to biased estimates of the determinants of sex selective abortions. Using data from the three rounds of the National Family and Health Survey this paper relies on the observed spacing between births to examine the determinants of the demand for sex selective abortions. By employing a discrete hazard model it is possible to simultaneously control for the fertility and abortion decisions, while taking account of censoring and unobservable characteristics that might affect either.
This is a highly recommended conference. More information on the conference below or you can get in touch with me. Pacific Conference for Development Economics Saturday, March 14, 2009 http://bss.sfsu.edu/economics/newsevents/pacdev.htm San Francisco State University
Please note that the conference submission deadline is fast approaching. If you have not already sent in your paper, please submit your paper (or extended abstract) by February 1st. Submission and registration information is available on the conference website.
I went to Boston for the annual NEUDC conference last weekend. It is always interesting to see what people are working on ... and catching up with old friends. My paper on adult literacy in Ghana (which is joint work with Niels-Hugo Blunch) was part of the poster session and we got some good comments (plus it gave me a chance to figure out how to make posters in LaTeX!). The final result is here.
This is not quite new (January 2008), but it is a very interesting look at whether Hepatitis B can really explain a substantial part of the sex ratio in China as claimed by Oster 2005. The paper is by Monica Das Gupta of the World Bank and you can find the paper here. The abstract nicely sums up the main problem with the Oster argument:
China has a large deficit of females, and public policies have sought to reduce the son preference that is widely believed to cause this. Recently a study has suggested that up to 75 percent of this deficit is attributable to hepatitis B infection, indicating that immunization programs should form the first plank of policy interventions. However, a large medical dataset from Taiwan (China) shows that hepatitis B infection raises women's probability of having a son by only 0.25 percent. And demographic data from China show that the only group of women who have elevated probabilities of bearing a son are those who have already borne daughters. This pattern makes it difficult to see how any biological factor can explain a large part of the imbalance in China's sex ratios at birth -- unless it can be shown that it somehow selectively affects those who have borne girls, or causes them to first bear girls and then boys. The Taiwanese data suggest that this is not the case with hepatitis B, since its impact is unaffected by the sex composition of previous births. The data support the cultural, rather than the biological, explanation for the "missing women."
Niels-Hugo Blunch and I have revised our paper "Literacy, Skills and Welfare: Effects of Participation in Adult Literacy Programs" for resubmission to Economic Development and Cultural Change. The abstract is below.
This paper examines the effects of adult literacy program participation on household consumption in Ghana. We use community fixed effects combined with instrumental variables to account for possible endogenous program placement and self-selection into program participation. For households where none of the adults have completed any formal education we find a substantial, positive and statistically significant effect on household consumption. Our preferred estimate of the effect of participation for households without education is equivalent to a ten percent increase in consumption per adult equivalent. There is, however, little evidence that other households benefit from participation in terms of welfare. The improvements in literacy and numeracy rates are also mainly concentrated among participants with little or no formal schooling, although most participants appear to gain in skills to some extent. Taking account of both direct cost and opportunity cost we argue that the social returns to adult literacy programs are substantial.
At the Population Association of America's Annual Meeting in New Orleans I presented a preliminary version of my paper, "Hurricanes, Hoarding and Replacement: Estimating the Causal Effect of Mortality on Fertility," on the effect of mortality on fertility using exposure to hurricanes to identify exogenous changes in mortality. The presentation can be found here. I also discussed four papers in the session on "Infant and Child Mortality".
I recently presented a revised version of Niels-Hugo Blunch and my paper, "Literacy, Skills and Welfare: Effects of Participation in Adult Literacy Programs," on the effects of participating in adult literacy programs in Ghana for the department and at the 2008 Pacific Development Conference held at UCSD. If you are interested in the preliminary results, please see the presentation. The PacDev is a great opportunity to present work and see what else is going on in the development field on the West Coast. This year, Mark Anderson, who is a 2nd year student at the department, presented his paper on crime in South Africa and received a lot of praise and good comments. The paper was originally written for my Econ 591 and Econ 543 classes. I will try to link to his paper when the next version is ready.
Craig McIntosh did a great job at putting together a very interesting conference with lots of good papers. Next year the conference will be in the San Francisco, arranged by Anoshua Chaudhuri (SFSU), who is a former graduate student at UW Economics. Since we will be going back to San Francisco there were discussions about whether the name should be changed back to the original name: the Bay Area Development Association (you figure out what the "appropriate" acronym would be ;-) ).
I presented my paper "Gone with the Wind? Hurricane Risk, Fertility and Education" at the AEA annual meeting in New Orleans and discussed a paper (Siwan Anderson and Mukesh Eswaran, "What Determines Female Autonomy? Evidence from Bangladesh"). My presentation is here if you are interested.
I presented at the Labour and Development brown bag today. The topic was a grant proposal that I am trying to put together in cooperation with University of Witwatersrand and people here at UW. You can find the slides for the presentation here
I have just finished a paper on the relation between risk, fertility and education that uses data on hurricanes in Guatemala. The abstract is below. You can download the paper here.
This paper uses data on hurricanes in Guatemala over the last 120 years combined with a recent household survey to analyse how decisions on education and fertility respond to hurricane risk and shocks. For households with land an increase in the risk of hurricanes lead to both higher fertility and higher education, while households without land have fewer children but also higher education. Hurricane shocks lead to decreases in both fertility and education, and although there is a substantial compensatory effect on fertility later in life, that is not the case for education. The paper examines a number of possible explanations for these patterns and finds that the most likely explanation is insurance considerations through increased available labour and migration.
I never got around to writing the things up as they happend, so instead here is what went on in March of various research related activities: I presented my paper, "Gone with the Wind? Hurricane Risk, Fertility and Education", at the Pacific Conference for Development Economics held at Santa Clara University, at the Center for Sudies in Demography and Ecology seminar series and at the Population Association of America's (PAA) annual conference in Los Angeles in the session "Demography of Poverty". At the Population Association of America conference I also discussed two papers in the session "Causal Effects of Schooling on Demographic and Health Outcomes".
I also travelled to Delhi in connection with my project on the use of sex selective abortion in India. The project is partly financed by the University of Washington's Royalty Research Fund. Finally, I participated in a one day workshop on population issues in Ethiopia organised by the World Bank in Addis Ababa, where I presented preliminary results from a project analysing the effectiveness of family planning programs in Ethiopia.
I just wanted to make sure that everybody interested have heard about the 2006 Pacific Conference for Development Economics. It is a relatively new initiative (first conference was last year) and it is great venue for especially PhD students to present their work. The poster for the conference can be found here. Please contact either me or Michael Kevane (mkevane at scu.edu) for more information.
New paper! Niels-Hugo Blunch and I just finished a paper that examines the effectiveness of participation in adult literacy programs in Ghana. The abstract is below. You can download the paper here.
This paper examines the effects of adult literacy program participation on household consumption in Ghana. For households where none of the adults have completed any formal education we find a substantial, positive and statistically significant effect on household consumption. There is, however, little evidence that other households benefit from participation. Furthermore, there appears to be relatively little effect of participation on individual literacy and numeracy skills for all types of households. Hence, the positive effects of participation seem to arise not from literacy skills taught in the programs, but rather from another major component, which focuses on income generating activities, and/or from other factors such as improvements as a result of an expanded network.
I participated in the NEUDC 2005, which, very conveniently for me, was held at Brown. I presented my work on the relation between risk and fertility in Guatemala and discussed Shareen Joshi and T. Paul Schultz's paper on the long-term impact of family planning programs in Matlab.