This paper uses a stochastic dynamic programming model to characterize the optimal savings-consumption decisions and the role of livestock inventories as a buffer stock in rural Ethiopia. The results show that relatively land-rich households use accumulation and liquidation of cattle and other...

Households in rural Colombia are confronted with a variety of violent threats: attacks and displacement threats by guerrillas and paramilitaries, gang violence among drug traffickers, and high common delinquency. In this context, households have to adjust their day-to-day decisions, including...

The authors use the collective model of the household and show, theoretically, that as the woman's power rises, child labor will initially fall, but beyond a point it will tend to rise again. A household with a balanced power structure between the husband and the wife is least likely to send its...

The collective approach to household behavior relaxes the restrictive features of the unitary model by specifying household welfare as a weighted combination of the individuals' utilities. But the weights are assumed fixed or exogenous to the analysis. The authors extend the collective approach...

The aim of this paper is to explain why time use data are essential for analyzing issues of gender equity and the intra-household allocation of resources, comparing living standards, and estimating the behavioral effects of changes in policy variables. The first step in the exposition is to show...

This report considers how product market integration in a country's primary agricultural export alters the economic activities of men and women in a poor economy. Between 1993 and 1997, Vietnam relaxed its rice export quota and freed internal restrictions on the trade of rice across regions....

Market integration raises the relative price of a community's export product. The author examines how the response of child labor supply to an increase in the relative price of a primary export product varies with a child's household composition. The specific context for his study is the...

The authors compare three approaches to linking representative-household macro models with micro household income data in terms of their implications for measuring the poverty and distributional effects of policy shocks. These approaches are a simple micro-accounting method, an extension of that...

The author is concerned with the role of education as a determinant of health care choices. His central premise is that utilization of health services is determined not solely by an individual's own education, but rather by a notion of effective education, which incorporates the educational...

This paper examines the effects of expanding access to credit on the decisions and welfare of households. It focuses on the entry of Banco Azteca, the first bank in Mexico targeting households from the informal sector. Panel data suggest that informal households in municipalities with Banco...