Celine Ferre

Age at first child : does education delay fertility timing ? the case of Kenya

Completing additional years of education necessarily entails spending more time in school. There is naturally a rather mechanical effect of schooling on fertility if women tend not to have children while continuing to attend high school or college, thus delaying the beginning of and shortening their reproductive life. This paper uses data from the Kenyan Demographic and Health Surveys of 1989, 1993, 1998, and 2003 to uncover the impact of staying one more year in school on teenage fertility. To get around the endogeneity issue between schooling and fertility preferences, the analysis uses the 1985 Kenyan education reform as an instrument for years of education. The authors find that adding one more year of education decreases by at least 10 percentage points the probability of giving birth when still a teenager. The probability of having ones first child before age 20, when having at least completed primary education, is about 65 percent; therefore, for this means a reduction of about 15 percent in teenage fertility rates for this group. One additional year of school curbs the probability of becoming a mother each year by 7.3 percent for women who have completed at least primary education, and 5.6 percent for women with at least a secondary degree. These results (robust to a wide array of specifications) are of crucial interest to policy and decision makers who set up health and educational policies. This paper shows that investing in education can have positive spillovers on health.

Is There a Metropolitan Bias? The Inverse Relationship Between Poverty and City Size in Selected Developing Countries

This paper provides evidence from eight developing countries of an inverse relationship between poverty and city size. Poverty is both more widespread and deeper in very small and small towns than in large or very large cities. This basic pattern is generally robust to choice of poverty line. The paper shows, further, that for all eight countries, a majority of the urban poor live in medium, small, or very small towns. Moreover, it is shown that the greater incidence and severity of consumption poverty in smaller towns is generally compounded by similarly greater deprivation in terms of access to basic infrastructure services, such as electricity, heating gas, sewerage, and solid waste disposal. The authors illustrate for one country -- Morocco -- that inequality within large cities is not driven by a severe dichotomy between slum dwellers and others. The notion of a single cleavage between slum residents and well-to-do burghers as the driver of urban inequality in the developing world thus appears to be unsubstantiated -- at least in this case. Robustness checks are performed to assess whether the findings in the paper are driven by price variation across city-size categories, by the reliance on an income-based concept of well-being, and by the application of small-area estimation techniques for estimating poverty rates at the town and city level.

Updating Poverty Maps Between Censuses: A Case Study of Albania

The geography of poverty dynamics is of core interest to both researchers and policy makers. Yet, due to lack of panel data, the measurement of such movements has been very limited. In this chapter, the authors consider a method to construct updated poverty maps between censuses. They build on the methodology used to construct counterfactual distribution of welfare measures. Unlike methods that rely on panel data or availability of time-invariant household characteristics, both of which are difficult to obtain, the authors propose a method that can be applied to most datasets. They use the example of Albania where census data were available in 2001 and household-level data were available for 2002, 2005, and 2008 to illustrate the updating of poverty maps. The results are quite encouraging to look at poverty mobility as they predict intercensal poverty estimates quite well.

Can public works programs mitigate the impact of crises in Europe? The case of Latvia

To mitigate the impact of the 2008–2010 global financial crisis on vulnerable households, the Government of Latvia established Workplaces with Stipends, an emergency public works program that targeted registered unemployed people who were not receiving unemployment benefits. This paper evaluates the targeting performance and welfare impacts of the program. The paper employs a quasi-experimental estimation strategy and analyzes a unique household survey. The authors find that the Latvian public works program was successful at targeting poor people, and leakage of benefits to non-poor households was small. Using propensity score matching, the authors find that the program’s stipend mitigated the impact of job loss and raised participating household incomes by 37 percent relative to similar households not benefiting from the program. The paper also finds that the forgone income for this program was less than forgone incomes estimated in other countries.JEL codesI38, J64, J68

Can Conditional Cash Transfers Improve Education and Nutrition Outcomes for Poor Children in Bangladesh? Evidence from a Pilot Project

There is an increasing recognition that investment in human development at an earlier age can have a significant impact on the lifetime earnings capacity of an individual. This notion is the basis for the popularity of conditional cash transfer programs to help boost child health and education outcomes. The evidence on the impact of conditional cash transfers on health and education outcomes, however, is mixed. This paper uses panel data from a pilot project and evaluates the impact of conditional cash transfers on consumption, education, and nutrition outcomes among poor rural families in Bangladesh. Given implementation challenges the intervention was not able to improve school attendance. However the analysis shows that the pilot had a significant impact on the incidence of wasting among children who were 10-22 months old when the program started, reducing the share of children with weight-for-height below two standard deviations from the World Health Organization benchmark by 40 percent. The pilot was also able to improve nutrition knowledge: there was a significant increase in the proportion of beneficiary mothers who knew about the importance of exclusively breastfeeding infants until the age of six months. The results also suggest a significant positive impact on food consumption, especially consumption of food with high protein content.

Did Latvia's Public Works Program Mitigate the Impact of the 2008-2010 Crisis?

To mitigate the impact of the 2008-2010 global financial crisis on vulnerable households, the Government of Latvia established Workplaces with Stipends, an emergency public works program that targeted registered unemployed people who were not receiving unemployment benefits. This paper evaluates the targeting performance and welfare impacts of the program. It exploits the over-subscription of Workplaces with Stipends to define a control group. The paper finds that the program was successful at targeting poor and vulnerable people, and that leakage to non-poor households was small. Using propensity score matching, the paper finds that the programs stipend mitigated the impact of job loss and, in the short term, raised participating household incomes by 37 percent relative to similar households not benefiting from the program. The paper also finds that the foregone income for this program was less than foregone incomes estimated in other countries. This suggests a dearth of income-generating opportunities in Latvia; thus the program provided temporary employment opportunities and helped the unemployed mitigate the impact of the crisis. However, relative to the depth of the crisis in Latvia, the Workplaces with Stipends program scale was small, which meant long waiting periods for program applicants.