Elaina Rose

Ex ante and ex post labor supply response to risk in a low-income area

This paper tests for ex ante and ex post labor supply responses to weather risk for rural Indian farm households. The analysis uses panel data on 2115 households spanning 13 states in rural India, merged with a 22-year series of district-level rainfall data. Ex ante, households facing riskier distributions of rainfall are more likely to participate in the labor labor market Ex post, unexpectedly bad weather and low rainfall increase labor force participation.

Child gender and the transition to marriage.

We estimate the effect of a child’s gender on the mother’s probability of marriage or remarriage using data from the PSID Marital History and Childbirth and Adoption History Files. We find that the birth of a son speeds the transition into marriage when the child is born before the mother’s first marriage. A competing-risks analysis shows that the positive effect of a son is stronger for marriages to the child’s biological father than for other marriages. We find no significant effect of child gender on the mother’s remarriage probabilities when the children are born within a previous marriage. These results are consistent with a marital-search model in which sons, more than daughters, increase the value of marriage relative to single parenthood.

Child gender and father involvement in fragile families

In this article, we use data from the first two waves of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the effects of child gender on father involvement and to determine if gender effects differ by parents’ marital status. We examine several indicators of father involvement, including whether the father acknowledges “ownership” of the child, whether the parents live together when the child is one year old, and whether the father provides financial support when the child is one year old. We find some evidence that child gender is associated with unmarried father involvement around the time of the child’s birth: sons born to unmarried parents are more likely than daughters to receive the father’s surname, especially if the mother has no other children. However, one year after birth, we find very little evidence that child gender is related to parents’ living arrangements or the amount of time or money fathers invest in their children. In contrast, and consistent with previous research, fathers who are married when their child is born are more likely to live with a son than with a daughter one year after birth. This pattern supports an interpretation of child gender effects based on parental beliefs about the importance of fathers for the long-term development of sons.

Gender Bias, Credit Constraints and Time Allocation in Rural India

This paper examines the impact of a childs gender on the time allocation of rural Indian households for the five-year period subsequent to its birth. A theoretical model generates predictions for the effect of the birth of a boy relative to a girl (i.e., the gender shock) on household behaviour when the household is liquidity constrained and when it is not. The results from the empirical analysis are consistent with the case in which poorer households are liquidity constrained and less poor households are not. The interpretation of the finding that women in both groups of households work less subsequent to the birth of a boy relative to a girl differs in these two cases.

Estimating the Veteran Effect with Endogenous Schooling When Instruments are Potentially Weak

Instrumental variables estimates of the effect of military service on subsequent civilian earnings either omit schooling or treat it as exogenous. In a more general setting that also allows for the treatment of schooling as endogenous, we estimate the veteran effect for men who were born between 1944 and 1952 and thus reached draft age during the Vietnam era. We apply a variety of state-of-the-art econometric techniques to gauge the sensitivity of the estimates to the treatment of schooling. We find a significant veteran penalty.