Cristobal Ridao-Cano

Skill, Trade and International Inequality

Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory suggests that greater openness tends to enlarge intercountry differences in stocks of skill (or human capital), which new growth theory suggests would cause intercountry divergence of per capita incomes. Econometric analysis of data on about ninety countries during 1960-90 confirms that greater openness tends to cause divergence of secondary and tertiary enrollment rates between more-educated and less-educated countries and also between land-scarce and land-abundant countries. These findings may have implications for the optimal choice of trade policies by poor countries. Copyright 1999 by Royal Economic Society.

The Impact of Vocational Training for the Unemployed : Experimental Evidence from Turkey

A randomized experiment is used to evaluate a large-scale, active labor market policy: Turkeys vocational training programs for the unemployed. A detailed follow-up survey of a large sample with low attrition enables precise estimation of treatment impacts and their heterogeneity. The average impact of training on employment is positive, but close to zero and statistically insignificant, which is much lower than either program officials or applicants expected. Over the first year after training, the paper finds that training had statistically significant effects on the quality of employment and that the positive impacts are stronger when training is offered by private providers. However, longer-term administrative data show that after three years these effects have also dissipated.

The dynamics of school and work in rural Bangladesh

Canals-Cerd? and Ridao-Cano investigate the effect of work on the school progress of rural Bangladeshi children. They specify a dynamic switching model for the sequence of school and work outcomes up to the end of secondary school, where the switching in each school level is determined by the endogenous work history of the child up to that level. This approach allows the authors to evaluate the dynamic effects of work on school progress. They find that work has a negative and sizable effect on school progress and are able to measure this effect for different groups of children. Their results highlight the relevance of policies aimed at increasing school progress through reductions in child work and the importance of accompanying these policies by efforts to improve the adverse environment that working children face. The authors evaluate the dynamic effects of three policies: compulsory primary schooling, compulsory school entry at age six, and universal access to secondary school. They find that these policies have a sizable effect on school progress and child labor.

A time series model of fertility and female labour supply in the UK

Multiple time series procedures suitable for estimation and testing with nonstationary data are applied to UK data on age-specific fertility rates, age-specific female labour force participation rates, and womens and mens wages. Cointegration tests establish the existence of two long-run equilibrium relations, identified as a fertility relation and a labour supply equation, for each age group. Maximum likelihood estimates of these equations are consistent with the new home economics model of fertility, and tests of Granger-causality show evidence of extensive feedback among the variables.

To Help or To Harm? Food Stamp Receipt and Mortality Risk Prior to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act

We use data from the National Health Interview Survey-Family Resources Supplement to examine the relationship between Food Stamp receipt and prospective adult mortality, among eligible households. We specify a switching probit model to adjust for observed and unobserved factors that correlate with selection into the Food Stamp Program and mortality, and to estimate mortality under counterfactual conditions that we do not observe. The average individual, based on observed characteristics, has higher mortality when participating than when not participating. But due to unobserved differences between participants and nonparticipants, those who self-select into participation experience lower mortality than if they did not participate. Our findings suggest that Food Stamps provide an important safety net that protects the health of those who are most likely to participate.

Can Child Care Vouchers Get Turkish Mothers Back to Work? Estimating the Employment and Redistributionary Impact of a Demand Side Child Care Subsidy in Turkey

Lack of access to affordable and quality child care is one of the impediments to increasing female labor force participation rates in Turkey. With less than one third of working age women active in the labor market, the Turkish government has been considering options for expanding female labor force participation by providing a demand side subsidy conditional on employment (or activation). To achieve this, utilization of child care is being considered as a policy option. This paper considers the labor supply impact and cost effectiveness of such a demand side subsidy by evaluating the labor supply model of women in Turkey under the current conditions and simulates -- under various targeting scenarios and for different benefit levels of the subsidy -- (i) the number of women that would join the labor force or become formally employed; (ii) the budgetary implications and cost effectiveness of the subsidy; and (iii) the potential benefits accrued by the bottom quintiles of society. Given the constrained supply of existing services, the paper finds that the immediate employment impact of such a demand side intervention is likely to be low, and the distribution regressive in the short term. A targeted subsidy based on welfare level and employability of the woman is likely to be most cost effective in the medium term when supply side constraints on child care are addressed and concurrent policies to expand the supply of child care have been implemented. In the short term, when the subsidy is provided conditional on child care utilization (and there is no targeting of the poor) the benefits are likely to be highly regressive, with only 3 percent of benefits accruing to the bottom quintile of the population. The formal employment impact of the program is also estimated to be low: we find that in the short term the number of women activated through the program would range from 2,800 to 43,000 women (entering formal employment) at a cost varying from 1.4 million TL to 37 million TL per month (not including administrative costs of running the program) if the benefits are fixed at 50 % of the net minimum wage. In the medium term, when the supply of ECEC is assumed to be more flexible and supply of services is not a constraint, the demand side transfer is expected to activate into the formal sector an upper bound estimate of 187,600 women, constituting a less than 1 percentage point change in female labor force participation -- at a cost of about 138 million TL per month.

Early Childhood Health and Education Outcomes and Children's Exposure to Multiple Risks in Turkey

This paper considers changes in childrens early health and education opportunities and outcomes in Turkey. The study aims to look at changes in health utilization, nutrition, access to early childhood education and school enrollment rates for children between 2003 and 2008. The findings suggest that health utilization has improved over time in these years and access to health care has increasingly become delinked from initial circumstances of children in the household, in parallel to Turkeys expansion of the Health Transformation Program. On the other hand, nutrition outcomes remained correlated with maternal education and household wealth status. Access to early childhood education and care programs also came out to be highly regressive, with only households and children in the top quintile having access to child care programs outside the home. The paper also considers later educational attainment outcomes for older children, by circumstance groups and finds that while some progress has been made in enrollment in basic education in these years, variables that define gender, mother tongue spoken at home and parental education remain significant determinants of early drop-outs as of 2008. In the final section, the paper investigates exposure of a certain small group of children in Turkey to multiple risk factors at the same time, and evaluates the incidence by circumstance group the probability of facing overlapping risks in early childhood. the paper argues that children in these circumstance groups, and that have exposure to multiple risk factors, should be the primary target of social protection and early childhood intervention programs.