Claus C. Pörtner

Birth Order and the Intrahousehold Allocation of Time and Education

A potential determinant of intrahousehold distribution is the birth order of children. While a number of studies have analysed birth order effects in developed countries there are still only a few dealing with developing countries. This paper develops a model of intrahousehold allocation with endogenous fertility, which captures the relation between birth order and investment in children and shows that a birth order effect in intrahousehold allocation can arise even without assumptions about parental preferences for specific birth order children or genetic endowments varying by birth order. The important contribution is that fertility is treated as endogenous, something which other models of intrahousehold allocation have ignored despite the large literature on determinants of fertility. The implications of the model are that children with higher birth orders have an advantage over siblings with lower birth orders and that parents who are inequality averse will not have more than one child. The model furthermore shows that not taking account of the endogeneity of fertility when analysing intrahousehold allocation may seriously bias the results. The effects of a child’s birth order on its human capital accumulation are analysed using a longitudinal data set from the Philippines. Contrary to most longitudinal data sets this data set covers a very long period. We are, therefore, able to examine the effects of birth order on both number of hours in school during education and completed education. The results for both are consistent with the predictions of the model.

Sex-Selective Abortions, Fertility, and Birth Spacing

Previous research on sex-selective abortions has ignored the interactions between fertility, birth spacing, and sex selection, despite both fertility and birth spacing being important considerations for parents when deciding on the use of sex selection. This paper presents a novel approach that jointly estimates the determinants of sex-selective abortions, fertility, and birth spacing, using data on Hindu women from Indias National Family and Health Surveys. Women with eight or more years of education in urban and rural areas are the main users of sex-selective abortions and they also have the lowest fertility. Predicted lifetime fertility for these women declined 11 percent between the 1985-1994 and 1995-2006 periods, which correspond to the periods of time before and after sex selection became illegal. Fertility is now around replacement level. This decrease in fertility has been accompanied by a 6 percent increase in the predicted number of abortions during the childbearing years between the two periods, and sex selection is increasingly used for earlier parities. Hence, the legal steps taken to combat sex selection have been unable to reverse its use. Women with fewer than eight years of education have substantially higher fertility and do not appear to use sex selection.

Literacy, Skills, and Welfare: Effects of Participation in Adult Literacy Programs

This paper examines the effect of adult literacy program participation on household consumption in Ghana. The adult literacy programs in Ghana are of special interest because they are more comprehensive than standard literacy programs and incorporate many additional topics. We use community fixed effects combined with instrumental variables to account for possible endogenous program placement and self-selection into program participation. For households where none of the adults have completed any formal education we find a substantial, positive, and statistically significant effect on household consumption. Our preferred estimate of the effect of participation for households without education is equivalent to a 10% increase in consumption per adult equivalent. The effects of participation on welfare for other households are smaller, not statistically significant, and become smaller the more educated the household is. We find positive and statistically significant effects of participation on literacy and numeracy rates, although the increases are too small to be the only explanation for the welfare effects. There is also evidence that participants are more likely to engage in market activities and to sell a variety of agricultural goods. Taking account of both direct cost and opportunity cost, we argue that the social returns of adult literacy programs are substantial.

Natural Hazards and Child Health

This paper examines how the occurrence of natural disasters affect health status of children using data from Guatemala. Despite a large literature on child health there is relatively little work on how shocks from natural hazards affect the health of children. Using three rounds of DHS data combined with a long time series on the timing and location of weather shocks the paper estimates the impact of several types of natural disasters on child health, controlling for time and area fixed effects. Child health is proxied by height for age and weight for height and direct information on recent symptoms of illness. The effect of shocks from these hazards on the long-term health of children are negative and often very large; each shock reduces height for age by between 0.1 and 0.2 standard deviations. Indigenous children are affected more than non-indigenous children.

Family Planning and Fertility: Estimating Program Effects Using Cross-Sectional Data

Although reproductive health advocates consider family planning programs the intervention of choice to reduce fertility, there remains a great deal of skepticism among economists as to their effectiveness, despite little rigorous evidence to support either position. This study explores the effects of family planning in Ethiopia using a novel set of instruments to control for potential non-random program placement. The instruments are based on ordinal rankings of area characteristics, motivated by competition between areas for resources. Access to family planning is found to reduce completed fertility by more than one child among women without education. No effect is found among women with some formal schooling, suggesting that family planning and formal education act as substitutes, at least in this low-income, low-growth setting. This provides support to the notion that increasing access to family planning can provide an important, complementary entry point to kick-start the process of fertility reduction.

Children’s Time Allocation, Heterogeneity, and Simultaneous Decisions

This paper uses a longitudinal survey from the Philippines with detailed information on family time use to analyse the effects of economic factors on childrens time allocation. This is done while taking account of censoring, unobservable family heterogeneity and simultaneous decisions with respect to time spent in different activities. It is shown that there is a statistically significant correlation between unobservable individual and household characteristics when it comes to hours spent working and in school, but that this correlation is substantially smaller than one. Including household heterogeneity lead to substantial changes in the estimated effects of many of the important explanatory variables.

The Link between Parental and Offspring Longevity

Studies of adult mortality typically examine the impact of individual characteristics, but ignore the fact that the characteristics of people closely linked to those individuals also influence mortality risk. This paper examines the effect of parental longevity on survival outcomes of adult offspring using survey data from the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study (HRS) between 1992 and 2008. It employs a competing risk model that controls for correlation between individual death and survey non-response. There is strong evidence that individuals with longer-lived parents exhibit lower mortality risk. Even after controlling for health conditions and behavioral variables of the offspring, parental age at death has a substantial impact on the survival of the adult offspring, suggesting a strong genetic component that must be considered as important in determining longevity.

Only If You Pay Me More: Field Experiments Support Compensating Wage Differentials Theory

Compensating wage differentials is Adam Smith’s idea that wage differences equalize differences in job and worker characteristics. Other than risk of death, however, no job characteristics have consistently been found to affect wages, likely because of problems with self-selection and unobservable job characteristics. We run experiments in an online labor market, randomizing offered pay and job characteristics, thereby overcoming both problems. We find, as predicted by our model, that increasing job disamenities significantly reduces both likelihood of working and amount of work supplied. Correspondingly, the wage increases necessary to compensate workers for worse job disamenities are substantial, supporting the theory.