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on Demographic Economics |
| By: | Mehmet Uğur (Cukurova University, Department of Economics); Tuğçe Uğur (Cukurova University, Department of Agricultural Economics) |
| Abstract: | Poverty is a complex concept in its nature. Thus, it does not cover any universal description. In the most basic recognition of poverty, it is usually accepted as an absolute term which is measured with a specific poverty line and identifies the poor which are below this threshold level. One another approach which identifies poverty as a relative term suggests that there is relativity at some forms on describing poverty. Influential Indian economist Amartya Sen suggests that the conflict between the absolute and relative approach could be overcome with a capability approach which considers the functioning of persons and the capabilities of a person reflects the various combinations of functionings he can achieve. With this approach, we are now more able to understand the real freedoms that people enjoy and more aware in evaluating human well-being. This study mostly involves with the poverty status of the rural households and it will aim to show the real deprivations of poor. Initial results suggest that the poverty in rural areas is far more challenging, especially in multidimensional term. Thus, the study will aim to present the actual conditions of the poor and to suggest main ways to alleviate poverty. Secondly, the study will examine whether capability sets of male and female populations are equal in selected rural areas of Turkey and if there's distinct differences, then, the study will try to understand the main reasons of these differences. Globally, it is accepted that women tend to be poorer than men; and they are more deprived in health and education and in freedoms in all its forms. As women make up a substantial majority of the world's poor, women's unequal failure of capability needs to be seen as a problem of justice. In principle, it should be understood that nobody should be disadvantaged because of their gender. A basic foundation for a theory of gender justice emerged in the form of the capabilities approach. In his influential work, Development as Freedom, Sen (1999) argues that the goal of governments should be expanding the real freedom to choose the kind of life one has reason to value. Here, the main quality of Sen's capability approach is to focus what individuals are able to do or to be. It proposes that 'social arrangements should be primarily evaluated according to the extent of freedom people have to promote or achieve functionings they value'. This view makes a substantial difference in our understanding that what we need now is an approach of equality of opportunity. Because, gender justice requires that adequate economic resources flow to both genders in such measure as to ensure that each has the means to acquire the necessary capabilities. Although Sen has offered some basic capabilities, we couldn't find any gendered list of capabilities in his works. But Robeyns (2003) has offered some guidance on a specific set of capabilities. The list includes crucial capabilities such as education, bodily integration, political empowerment, mobility and respect. Also, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has published, a new index called Gender Inequality Index (GII) for measuring gender inequality in its Human Development Report (HDR) 2010. It measures three dimensions of gender inequality in a society which includes maternal mortality rate, adolescent fertility rate, seats in parliament, education, labor force participation and seemed a combination of previous gender indices. In HDR 2011, the index shows poor results for Turkey where the results have ranked Turkey 77th out of 145 countries. The study covers both UNDP and TurkStat data, in principle. In initial analyses, the study finds distinct differences in capability sets of genders and in general, underscores the low levels of education in rural areas of Turkey. Because, despite education is compulsory in all level, in education practice, families tend to favour boys at all stages of education. Traditional reluctance to school the girls still persists in the lower income groups and rural areas. As analyses illustrated, government implement some aid policies for those families to school their girls, but the general trend still depicts poor scenery |
| Keywords: | : Capability, Gender, Poverty, Education, Rural Poverty |
| JEL: | J16 I30 O15 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eyd:cp2015:288&r=dem |
| By: | Andrew E. Clark; Warn N. Lekfuangfu; Nattavudh Powdthavee; George Ward |
| Abstract: | We analyse the relationship between early maternal employment and child emotional and behavioural outcomes in early childhood and adolescence. Using rich data from a cohort of children born in the UK in the early 1990s, we find little evidence of a strong statistical relationship between early maternal employment and any of the emotional outcomes. However, there is some evidence that children whose mother is in full-time employment at the 18th month have worse behavioural outcomes at ages 4, 7, and 12. We suggest that these largely insignificant results may in part be explained by mothers who return to full-time work earlier being able to compensate their children: we highlight the role of fathers' time investment and alternative childcare arrangements in this respect. |
| Keywords: | Child outcomes, maternal employment, well-being, conduct, ALSPAC |
| JEL: | D1 I3 J6 |
| Date: | 2015–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1380&r=dem |
| By: | David Neumark; Ian Burn; Patrick Button |
| Abstract: | We design and implement a large-scale field experiment – a resume correspondence study – to address a number of potential limitations of existing field experiments testing for age discrimination, which may bias their results. One limitation that may bias these studies towards finding discrimination is the practice of giving older and younger applicants similar experience in the job to which they are applying, to make them “otherwise comparable.” The second limitation arises because greater unobserved differences in human capital investment of older applicants may bias existing field experiments against finding age discrimination. We also study ages closer to retirement than in past studies, and use a richer set of job profiles for older workers to test for differences associated with transitions to less demanding jobs (“bridge jobs”) at older ages. Based on evidence from over 40,000 job applications, we find robust evidence of age discrimination in hiring against older women. But we find that there is considerably less evidence of age discrimination against men after correcting for the potential biases this study addresses. |
| JEL: | J14 J26 J7 K31 |
| Date: | 2015–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:21669&r=dem |
| By: | Herbst, Mikołaj; Strawiński, Paweł |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates some early outcomes of the reform to lower the school starting age in Poland. It explores data on the school performance of 6- and 7-year-old pupils, collected in the transitory period of the reform, when parents were welcomed to enroll their 6-year-old children in the first grade on a voluntary basis. It was found that the parental decision is largely based on a rational assessment of the child’s readiness for school. There is strong evidence of positive selection for early enrollment in the 1st grade. At the beginning of the school year early entrants perform worse than 7-year-old children, but after one year the gap between the two age cohorts becomes substantially reduced in all subjects tested. Older students do perform better, but the separately measured effect of an early school start also seems to be beneficial. We point out a selection of unobservables as a possible explanation of the results obtained. |
| Keywords: | school starting age, educational achievement, Poland |
| JEL: | H4 I21 I28 |
| Date: | 2015–10–19 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:67585&r=dem |
| By: | Chinhui Juhn; Kristin McCue |
| Abstract: | We examine changes in marriage and earnings patterns across four cohorts born between 1936 and 1975, using data from a series of Survey of Income and Program Participation panels linked to administrative data on earnings. We find that for both men and women, marriage has become increasingly positively associated with education and earnings potential. We compare ordinary least squares (OLS) and fixed effect (FE) estimates of the earnings differential associated with marriage. We find that the marriage earnings gap fell for women in fixed-effect estimates implying that the impact of specialization has diminished over time. We also find that increasingly positive selection into marriage means that OLS estimates overstate the reduction in the marriage earnings gap. While our findings imply that marriage is no longer associated with lower earnings among women without minor children in our most recent cohort, the motherhood gap remains large. Among men, we find that the marriage premium actually increases for more recent birth cohorts in fixed-effects regressions. |
| JEL: | J12 J16 J22 J31 |
| Date: | 2015–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cen:wpaper:15-36&r=dem |
| By: | James Bisbee; Rajeev Dehejia; Cristian Pop-Eleches; Cyrus Samii |
| Abstract: | We investigate whether local average treatment effects (LATE’s) can be extrapolated to new settings. We extend the analysis and framework of Dehejia, Pop-Eleches, and Samii (2015), which examines the external validity of the Angrist-Evans (1998) reduced-form natural experiment of having two first children of the same sex on the probability of an incremental child and on mother’s labor supply. We estimate Angrist and Evans's (1998) same-sex instrumental variable strategy in 139 country-year censuses using data from the Integrated Public Use Micro Sample International. We compare each country-year's LATE, as a hypothetical target, to the LATE extrapolated from other country-years (using the approach suggested by Angrist and Fernandez-Val 2010). Paralleling our findings in Dehejia, Pop-Eleches, and Samii (2015), we find that with a sufficiently large reference sample, we extrapolate the treatment effect reasonably well, but the degree of accuracy depends on the extent of covariate similarity between the target and reference settings. Our results suggest that – at least for our application – there is hope for external validity. |
| JEL: | C26 J01 J1 J13 J22 |
| Date: | 2015–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:21663&r=dem |
| By: | Jayati Sarkar (Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research); Ekta Selarka (Madras School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | This paper provides evidence on the effect of women directors on the performance of family firms with a case study of India. Existing literature on the subject has primarily focused on widely held firms, notably in the US. Given that ownership structure and governance environment of family firms are distinctly different from those of non-family firms, the evidence on the relationship between women on board and firm performance in the context of widely held firms may not apply in the context of family firms. India provides an ideal setting for analyzing this question as the presence of family firms is pervasive and since 2013 India has instituted gender quotas on corporate boards. Using a data-set of 10218 firm year observations over a ten year period from 2005 to 2014 which spans the pre-quota and post-quota years, we find robust evidence that women directors on corporate boards positively impact firm value and that this effect increases with the number of women directors on board. However, we find that the positive effect of gender diversity on firm performance weakens with the extent to which the family exerts control through occupying key management positions on the board. In addition, women directors affiliated to the family have no significant effect on firm value, whereas independent women directors do. Our results with respect to profitability are somewhat different; while as in the case of market value, women directors positively impact profitability with the positive effect driven by independent women directors, the effect does not vary with the extent of family control. Taken together, our results suggest that though gender diversity on corporate boards may positively impact firm performance in family firms in general, the extent of family control can have a significant bearing on this relationship. The findings from this study could be instructive for emerging economies like India in promoting gender-based quotas on corporate boards. |
| Keywords: | board of directors, gender diversity, family ownership and control, gender-quota |
| JEL: | G32 G34 G38 |
| Date: | 2015–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ind:igiwpp:2015-026&r=dem |