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on Demographic Economics |
| By: | Fredrick M. Wamalwa (School of Economics, University of Cape Town); Justine Burns (School of Economics, University of Cape Town) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we investigate the effect of two important family characteristics - gender and birth order- on intra-household investments in, and educational outcomes of, children in Kenya. We measure intra-household education investments in children by household's decision to enrol children in private schools and educational outcomes by two variables, completed years of education and relative grade attainment. We use a large household survey data that allows us to apply the family fixed effects models that address the potential endogeneity of children's gender and family size as well as factors that are unobservable at the household level. Although we do not find an intra-household gender preference in terms of investments in children's education, there is a female advantage in terms of the two measured education outcomes. Such female advantage is in contrast with literature generally reported from developing countries. It is, however, in line with global trends which show that more girls are getting educated and the gender gap in education has narrowed considerably. Regarding birth order effects, we find significant negative birth order effects on private enrolment, completed years of education and relative grade attainment. The negative birth order effects are not in line with the evidence from many other developing countries but are in line with results from developed countries. Our results are robust to different sample restrictions. We find that household wealth plays a significant role in propagating the birth order but not the gender effects we observe. |
| Keywords: | Birth order, gender, household fixed effects, fully interacted models, Kenya |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ldr:wpaper:203&r=dem |
| By: | Andrew Bibler (Institute of Social and Economic Reesarch, Department of Economics, University of Alaska Anchorage) |
| Abstract: | Recent research documents considerable gender gaps in non-cognitive skills among children and adolescents raised in single-parent households. However, determining the source of these gaps is complicated due to the presence of many interrelated and often unobservable inputs. One potential explanation for such gaps is that boys and girls receive different levels of parental time investments. If correlated with household structure differentially by gender, time investments could help explain gender differences in non-cognitive skills, as well as the sensitivity of outcomes and behavior of boys to household composition. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and accompanying Child Development Supplement (CDS), I estimate gender differences in parental time investments, defined as the amount of time parents spend participating in activities with the child, around changes in household composition. I find that, although both boys and girls experience reductions in parental time investments following a change from a two-parent to single-mother household, boys experience a larger reduction than girls. The largest difference is found in fathers’ time investments on weekdays, for which boys lose an additional 24 minutes per day (35% of average paternal weekday investments). Moreover, there is little to no evidence that single mothers compensate for the loss by increasing time investments to boys relative to girls. |
| Keywords: | education |
| JEL: | J12 J13 J16 J24 I20 |
| Date: | 2017–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ala:wpaper:2017-01&r=dem |
| By: | Nathan Fiala (University of Connecticut) |
| Abstract: | I present evidence that intra-household decision making affects business investment decisions and household welfare. I interact the results from a behavioral experiment that allows spouses to hide money from each other with an experiment that delivered capital to business owners in Uganda. Businesses were randomly selected to receive capital through a loan or grant, or capital paired with training. I find evidence that the grant with training treatment had medium-term economic impacts when given to men, but there are no effects from the other treatments for men or women. I also find that the loan with training treatment had impacts on the income of spouses of women, though women do not know about these effects. The results from the incentivized behavioral game correlate significantly with household economic outcomes: men who do not hide money from their wives show higher economic outcomes from the treatments, while those who hide money show a negative change relative to a control group. The opposite is the case for women: women who hide money from their husbands show increased economic outcomes, while those who do not hide money see a decrease in outcomes. The results are consistent with strong female household constraints where women have little control over resources in the family and so hiding money is the only way to keep control of it. Men have less fear of losing control of money in the household, and so those that hide money likely have serious household issues that lead to significant negative investment behavior. The results help to explain why women with existing enterprises have performed so poorly in previous capital experiments and why researchers have failed to find impacts from microfinance. |
| Keywords: | Economic development; microenterprises; microfinance; cash grants; entrepreneurship training; credit constraints |
| JEL: | O12 O16 C93 J16 L26 M53 |
| Date: | 2017–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uct:uconnp:2017-05&r=dem |
| By: | Mbratana, Taoufiki; Kenne Fotié, Andrée |
| Abstract: | Using the 2007 Cameroon Household Consumption Survey, we study gender wage disparity in pay-employment and self-employment. The main question considered in this paper is to know why women pay-employment and self-employment wages are relatively low. More generally, what is the underlying factors generating and explained wage gap between men and women householder in employment? To answer to our question, firstly, we use the Oaxaca-Blinder (OB) Decomposition to explain wage gap. Afterward, we perform Quantile Regression Decomposition using Machado and Mata (MM) method to see at different level of wage distribution the gap behaviour. Our main findings indicate that in the both methods, the wage gap is due to unexplained component in self-employment and to explained component in pay-employment with particularly strong effects at the extreme of wage distribution. In fine, governments should promote further development of work/life balance policies and other public employment supports to facilitate female labour force participation. Besides, future policy development should focus on remaining gender gaps in employment outcomes, including persistent occupational and sectorial concentration. |
| Keywords: | Gender; Pay-employment; Self-employment; Wage gap; Quantile regression; Cameroon. |
| JEL: | C31 J31 J71 |
| Date: | 2017–03–30 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:78092&r=dem |
| By: | Mbratana, Taoufiki; Kenne Fotié, Andrée |
| Abstract: | Using the 2007 Cameroon Household Consumption Survey, we study gender wage disparity in pay-employment and self-employment. The main question considered in this paper is to know why women pay-employment and self-employment wages are relatively low. More generally, what is the underlying factors generating and explained wage gap between men and women householder in employment? To answer to our question, firstly, we use the Oaxaca-Blinder (OB) Decomposition to explain wage gap. Afterward, we perform Quantile Regression Decomposition using Machado and Mata (MM) method to see at different level of wage distribution the gap behaviour. Our main findings indicate that in the both methods, the wage gap is due to unexplained component in self-employment and to explained component in pay-employment with particularly strong effects at the extreme of wage distribution. In fine, governments should promote further development of work/life balance policies and other public employment supports to facilitate female labour force participation. Besides, future policy development should focus on remaining gender gaps in employment outcomes, including persistent occupational and sectorial concentration. |
| Keywords: | Gender; Pay-employment; Self-employment; Wage gap; Quantile regression; Cameroon. |
| JEL: | C31 J31 J71 |
| Date: | 2017–03–30 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:78039&r=dem |
| By: | Gary, Kathryn (Department of Economic History, Lund University) |
| Abstract: | This paper combines new archival data on women’s wages from southern Sweden with published series from Stockholm in order to create a series of early modern female construction workers’ wages between the middle of the sixteenth and middle of the eighteenth centuries. This paper finds that women had relatively high relative wages in the later part of the sixteenth century, with an increasing wage gap into the eighteenth century, and that the changes in women’s relative remuneration are connected to changes in demand factors. This paper challenges assumptions about women’s participation in manual labor, in many cases finding a lack of differentiation between female and male unskilled workers as well as and unskilled labor force comprised of from forty to sixty percent women and high work intensity for female construction workers. |
| Keywords: | gender wage gap; wages; women; Scandinavia; Sweden; early modern period |
| JEL: | N33 N64 |
| Date: | 2017–04–13 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:luekhi:0158&r=dem |