Essays on Household Decision Making in Developing Countries

Essays on Household Decision Making in Developing Countries
Author: James Wesley Berry
Publisher:
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2009
Genre:
ISBN:

(cont.) The effect of treated friends comes primarily from bilateral ties, where both the child and his friend indicate that they spend time with each other. The third chapter, written jointly with Nava Ashraf and Jesse Shapiro, explores how households make decisions to purchase and use health products in developing countries. This study tests whether higher prices can increase use, either by targeting distribution to high-use households (a screening effect), or by stimulating use psychologically through a sunk-cost effect. We develop a methodology for separating these two effects. We implement the methodology in a field experiment in Zambia using door-to-door marketing of a home water purification solution. We find that higher prices screen out those who use the product less. By contrast, we find no consistent evidence of sunk-cost effects.

Three Essays on the Economics of Household Decision Making

Three Essays on the Economics of Household Decision Making
Author: Vipul Bhatt
Publisher:
Total Pages: 95
Release: 2010
Genre:
ISBN:

Abstract: My research emphasizes the role of interrelated preferences in determining economic choices within a household. In this regard, I study both intergenerational interactions (between parents and children) and intragenerational interactions (between spouses). These linkages have important implications on individual economic behavior such as savings, labor supply, investment in human capital, and bequests which in turn affects aggregate savings and growth.

Essays on Household Decision

Essays on Household Decision
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 104
Release: 2014
Genre: Families
ISBN:

This thesis considers the fact that the majority of households consists of two adults whose characteristics and preferences matter for the households' decisions. The rst chapter studies how an increase in the generosity of maternity leave payments a ects parental labor supply, early child development, and the relative well-being of the parents considering that parents may have di erent preferences over outcomes and that the policy change may a ect the parental bargaining positions. I develop and estimate a static cooperative Nash bargaining model of parental decision-making in the rst period of the child's life and use the model to investigate how the decision-making changes with an increase in the leave payments. The results indicate that mothers will spend more time at home rather than in the labor market when the leave payments increase, but that the average early child development is not much a ected. Furthermore, the policy shifts the bargaining positions within the household in favor of the father and, although both parents are better o from the policy change, the mother would be better o relative to the father without the increase in maternity leave payments. In the second chapter we look closer at how the insurance value of marriage, represented by the correlation of shocks to individual incomes, varies over di erent groups in the popu- lation. We nd that this value may be lower for more recent cohorts, and decrease with age and with higher education. The third chapter builds on the second. We investigate the importance of intra-household risk-sharing through labor supply by testing the following prediction: A higher correlation of income shocks within the household implies a lower ability to insure income through spousal labor supply and should, all else equal, lead to higher asset accumulation of the house- hold. Our results indicate that this prediction holds empirically, suggesting that households perceive spousal labor supply as an important income insurance.

Essays on Household Economics

Essays on Household Economics
Author: Abdelrahmen El Lahga
Publisher:
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2008
Genre:
ISBN:

This thesis presents four self-contained essays on household economics. The first essay tests whether children of certain age groups should be treated as decision makers within the household, applying an existing testing methodology developed for determining the number of adult decision makers in the context of a collective household model. The second essay compares two types of matrix rank based tests for the number of household decision makers - using conditional and using unconditional demand functions. The analysis shows robust evidence in favour of two decision makers, with the interpretation that husband and wife are separate decision makers.The third essay uses the very general technique of indirect inference to estimate a collective household labour supply model in a new and attractive way, and shows that this technique can be applied very fruitfully here. The last essay analyzes reduced form models of time allocation using panel data models applied to the German Socio-Economic Panel. It exploits variation in marital status of couples over time. Controlling for fixed effects, it finds evidence that marriage increases women specialization in domestic work.

Essays in Household Economics

Essays in Household Economics
Author: Alexandre Fon
Publisher:
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2021
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation contains three essays in applied microeconomics, with a focus on household decision-making.In the first chapter, I study the effect of asymmetric information about income on household decisions, resource sharing, and welfare. I proceed in four steps. In the first step, I develop a theoretical model that accounts for the possible existence of asymmetric information. The model predicts that households will partly mitigate the welfare cost of asymmetric information by incentivizing the wage earner to provide information about his or her true income. These incentives are provided by making the consumption share increase with reported income: the wage earner's consumption share is high when reporting a high income and low when reporting a low income. Second, I derive a new non-parametric identification result for this model. Third, I estimate the model using a survey of Bangladeshi day laborers. The estimation confirms the predictions of the model, providing evidence that the households in the data are affected by asymmetric information. Finally, I conduct three counterfactual analyses to document how asymmetric information interacts with policies and compute the willingness to pay in each case. In the second chapter, which is co-authored with Maria Casanova and Maurizio Mazzocco, we show that the intratemporal and intertemporal preferences of each decision-maker in the household can be identified even if individual consumption is not observed. This identification result is used jointly with the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) to estimate the intratemporal and intertemporal features of individual preferences. The empirical findings indicate that there is heterogeneity in intertemporal preferences between wife and husband. In the third chapter, I use a major reform of the parental leave system in Quebec in 2006 to analyze how households make decisions related to parental leave. I show that the introduction of a father's quota - a policy designed to incentivize fathers to take parental leave - was successful in more than doubling the proportion of fathers taking some parental leave. However, the impact on the intensive margin was limited: in 80% of households, mothers take all the leave that is available to both parents. I also use an administrative dataset to analyze the relationship between parental leave decisions and income. In general, households with higher labor income take more parental leave overall (summing the mother's and the father's weeks). However, fathers with higher labor income take less parental leave.