Agricultural & Resource Economics Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2739
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Item The Relationship between Child Labor and Microfinance: Evidence from Rural Bangladesh(2009) Khadka, Manbar Singh; Leonard, Kenneth L; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This paper analyzes the relationship between availability of microfinance and child labor in rural Bangladesh. Using household-level fixed effect in panel data, this paper shows that the stock of women's recent loans negatively impacts child labor. A 10 percent increase in the stock of recent borrowing by women reduces child labor supply by 2.58 percent. By contrast, the paper does not find any significant effect of male credit on child labor.Item Environmental Risk Factors, Health and the Labor Market Response of Households in the United States(2008-08-04) Veronesi, Marcella; Alberini, Anna; Cropper, Maureen; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the first part of the dissertation, I estimate the effect of a married adult's specific health condition on his or her own labor market decisions (labor force participation, earnings, hourly wages, and hours of work) and his or her spouse's. I focus on cancer, stroke, ischemic heart disease, emphysema, chronic bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma. The effects differ by health condition and duration of the disease. Among married men who are working, having had emphysema for less than one year is enough to reduce the earnings of a man with college degree to those of a healthy man without high school diploma. My results also suggest that if a man has had cancer, his wife may have to compensate for the ensuing loss in household income by working more hours or entering the labor force. In the second part of the dissertation, I focus on the effect of children's asthma on mothers' labor force participation, on fathers' and mothers' labor supply, and on their hourly wages and weekly earnings. I compare these effects to those of a set of health conditions that includes deformities, congenital anomalies, heart problems, epilepsy and cancer. I find that single mothers with chronically ill children are the most affected group in terms of hours of work lost and reduction in earnings, and that fathers with an asthmatic child less than six years old work more hours per week. Then, I explore how mothers' labor force participation and hours of work affect days missed from school of a chronically ill child. I find that maternal employment is associated with a higher probability of a child missing school, and that this effect is the same for healthy children as for asthmatic children. In contrast, I find that if the mother works, then a child with deformities, congenital anomalies, heart problems, epilepsy or cancer is less likely to experience lost school days than if the mother does not work. I estimate the magnitude of these effects using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey for U.S. households from 1996 to 2002.Item THE ECONOMICS OF AGRICULTURAL LABOR EXCHANGE WITH EVIDENCE FROM INDONESIA(2004-03-02) Gilligan, Daniel Orth; Lopez, Ramon E; Agricultural and Resource EconomicsIn agricultural labor exchange, farmers temporarily pool their labor into teams and complete a task on each team member's plot in succession. Labor time is exchanged between team members under strict reciprocity and without pay. The use of agricultural labor exchange in developing countries is widespread, but has received little attention from economists. This dissertation investigates the motivation for the formation of labor exchange teams by considering the individual farmer's decision to participate. The analysis focuses on the two most prominent motivations for labor exchange: credit and labor market imperfections and the technological benefits of teamwork. A theoretical model of demand for labor exchange under factor market imperfections generalizes existing models of the organization of agricultural production by allowing for returns to teamwork and labor exchange. This generalization accounts for empirically relevant modes of production that were previously ruled out. The model establishes positive marginal returns to teamwork as a necessary condition for labor exchange when non-household labor exhibits moral hazard. The empirical analysis tests the implications of the model using primary data on agricultural households from Indonesia. Production function estimates demonstrate positive returns to teamwork for a sample of rice and corn farmers, establishing the necessary condition for labor exchange. Estimates of the farmer's decision to participate in labor exchange subject to unobserved working capital constraints are estimated for alternative constraint status assignment rules and via the EM algorithm. Results show that the effect of working capital holdings on the probability of participating in labor exchange has the inverted-U shape predicted by the model for working capital constrained households. Also, labor exchange use is responsive to wages in the paid labor market, and is constrained by the local distribution of land and crop choice. These findings imply that labor exchange operates in conjunction with paid labor markets; that labor exchange is a source of productivity growth for poor capital constrained farmers; and that the institution of labor exchange is likely to persist much later into the process of development than suggested by previous studies.