Joost de Laat

Working Women, Men`s Home Time and Lowest Low Fertility

Contrary to the predictions of Economic Theory, Southern Europes rapid fertility decline has resulted in a positive cross-country correlation between female labor force participation and fertility. We develop a model with heterogeneity in attitudes towards womens home time and a social externality associated to mens home production to explain (1) this positive correlation and (2) its intertemporal reversal. Implications of the theory are tested using the multi-country ISSP94 household survey. We find that, within countries, less egalitarian attitudes increase fertility, but lower female labor force participation. However, consistent with our theory, countries with less egalitarian views have lower average fertility.

Household Allocations and Endogenous Information

This paper tests for the endogeneity of one of the main elements separating different models of intrahousehold allocations, namely the household information set. Based on unusually rich data, I find that split migrant couples in the Nairobi slums invest considerable resources into information acquisition through visits, sibling and child monitoring, budget submissions, and marital search. I also find potentially substantial welfare losses when information acquisition becomes costly, not only through reduced remittances but more importantly as families opt for family migration into the slums. That households invest in information when there are welfare gains complements a large and growing literature that seeks to explain intrahousehold allocations through more complex modes of decision-making.

Negative Rainfall Shocks Increase Levels of the Stress Hormone Cortisol Among Poor Farmers in Kenya

Does poverty lead to stress? Despite several studies showing correlations between socioeconomic status and levels of the stress hormone cortisol, it remains unknown whether this relationship is causal. We used random weather shocks in Kenya to address this question. Our identification strategy exploits the fact that rainfall is an important input for farmers, but not for non-farmers such as urban artisans. We obtained salivary cortisol samples from poor rural farmers in Kianyaga district, Kenya, and informal metal workers in Nairobi, Kenya, together with GPS coordinates for household location and high-resolution infrared satellite imagery measuring rainfall. We show that the absence of rain constitutes a random negative income shock for farmers, but not for non-farmers. We find that low levels of rain in the preceding year increase cortisol levels among farmers, but not non-farmers. Similarly, farmers but not non-farmers exhibit higher levels of self-reported stress when the preceding year had high compared to low levels of rain. In addition, the effect of rain on cortisol is larger in farmers who depend solely on agriculture for their income than among those who also have other sources of income. Together, these findings suggest a causal effect of negative shocks on stress levels.

Reciprocity in Labor Relations: Evidence from a Field Experiment with Long-Term Relationships

We followed field workers administering a household survey over a 12-week period and examined how their reciprocal behavior towards the employer responded to a sequence of exogenous wage increases and wage cuts. To disentangle the effects of reciprocal behavior from other explicit incentives that occur naturally in long-term employment relationships, we devised a novel measure of effort that not only captures the notion of work morale but that field workers perceived as unmonitored. While wage increases had no significant effect, wage cuts led to a strong and significant decline in unmonitored effort. This finding provides clear evidence of a highly asymmetric reciprocity response to wage changes. Our estimates further imply that field workers quickly adapted to higher wages and revised their reference point accordingly when deciding on reciprocity. Finally, we consider a second measure of effort that was explicitly monitored and found no significant effect to any of the wage changes. This lack of impact illustrates that explicit incentives can easily outweigh the effects of reciprocity and highlights the importance of having a measure of effort that workers perceive as unmonitored when testing for reciprocity in long-term relationships.

Social Mobility in Children’s Mobility? An Investigation into Child Circulation among the Maasai of Kenya

There is an old Maasai children’s story about a young brother and sister who, following the death of their mother, are sent to live with an evil, abusive stepmother. The siblings eventually run away and after several misadventures with the Devil, they secure the Devil’s livestock, kill their stepmother and father, and live happily ever after. This Maasai story, retold by Hollis (1905), recalls the tales of the Grimm brothers, whose protagonists—Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, and Cinderella—were also abused at the hands of evil stepmothers. This suggests that the fear that fostered or adopted children might be vulnerable to the “wicked whims” of nonnatal caretakers is not only a Western preoccupation.