Mariapia Mendola

Farm Households Production Theories: A Review of 'Institutional' and 'Behavioural' Responses

This paper presents a synthesis of the main theoretical and empirical contributions that analyse production choices of farm households living and operating in developing countries. The review is particularly concerned with recent micro-economic contributions that highlight the trade-off farm households typically face, between full-income risk and expected return, while making production decisions in a context of weak financial institutions in low-income settings. The same literature point out how weak institutions and farm households behavioural responses to risk-return trade-off may lead to situations of poverty traps

What Drives Individual Attitudes Towards Immigration in South Africa

This paper empirically investigates the determinants of individual attitudes towards immigration in South Africa using the 1996, 2001 and 2007 rounds of the World Value Survey. The main question we want to answer is whether South African public opinion on migration is affected by the potential labor market competition of migrants towards natives. We investigate this issue by estimating the impact of survey respondents’ individual skill on their pro-migration attitudes. Our estimates show that the impact of individual skill – measured both with educational attainment and an occupation based measure – is positive and significant in both 1996 and 2001. Given that in both years immigrants to South Africa are on average more skilled than natives, we conclude that the labor-market channel does not play a role in preference formation over immigration. What might explain the positive impact of individual skill are non-economic determinants.

Parental health and child schooling

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the impact of parental health shocks on investments in childrens education using detailed longitudinal data from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Our study controls for individual unobserved heterogeneity by using child fixed effects, and it accounts for potential misreporting of self-reported health by employing several, more precise, health indicators. Results show that co-living children of ill mothers, but not of ill fathers, are significantly less likely to be enrolled in education at ages 15-24. Moreover, there is some evidence that mothers negative health shocks are likely to raise the employment probability of children due to the need to cover higher health expenditures.

International migration and gender differentials in the home labor market: evidence from Albania

This paper examines the role of male-dominated international migration in shaping labor market outcomes by gender in migrant-sending households in Albania. Using detailed information on family migration experience from the latest Living Standards Measurement Study survey, the authors find that male and female labor supplies respond differently to the current and past migration episodes of household members. Controlling for the potential endogeneity of migration and for the income (remittances) effect, the estimates show that having a migrant abroad decreases female paid labor supply and increases unpaid work. However, women with past family migration experience are significantly more likely to engage in self-employment and less likely to supply unpaid work. The same relationships do not hold for men. These findings suggest that over time male-dominated Albanian migration may lead to womens empowerment in access to income-earning opportunities at the origin.

Formation of Migrant Networks

In this paper, we provide the first direct evidence on the internal structure of the migrant social network. By using a purposely designed survey on Sri Lankan immigrants living in Milan, we show that the pattern of within-group link formation is heterogeneous across immigrants, and differentiated according to the network function (i.e., accommodation, credit, job-finding). We find that migrants tend to interact with co-nationals who come from nearby localities at origin, while the time of arrival has a U-shaped effect. Once the link is formed, material support is provided mainly to relatives, while early migrant fellows are helpful for job-finding.

The Impoverishing Effect of Adverse Health Events: Evidence from the Western Balkans

This paper investigates the extent to which the health systems of the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Kosovo) have succeeded in providing financial protection against adverse health events. The authors examine disparities in health status, healthcare utilization, and out-of-pocket payments for healthcare (including informal payments), and explore the impact of healthcare expenditures on household economic status and poverty. Methodologies include (i) generating a descriptive assessment of health and healthcare disparities across socioeconomic groups, (ii) measuring the incidence and intensity of catastrophic healthcare payments, (iii) examining the effect of out-of-pocket payments on poverty headcount and poverty gap measures, and (iv) running sets of country-specific probit regressions to model the relationship between health status, healthcare utilization, and poverty. On balance, the findings show that the impact of health expenditures on household economic wellbeing and poverty is most severe in Albania and Kosovo, while Montenegro is striking for the financial protection that the health system seems to provide. Data are drawn from Living Standards and Measurement Surveys.

Labour Migration and Social Networks Participation in Southern Mozambique

This paper investigates how social networks in poor developing settings are affected by migration. Using a unique household survey from southern Mozambique, we test the role of labour mobility in shaping participation in groups and interhousehold cooperation by migrant‐sending households in village economies at origin. We find that migration cum remittances boosts household engagement in community‐based social networks. Our findings are robust to alternative definitions of social interaction and to endogeneity concerns, suggesting that stable migration ties and higher income stability through remittances may decrease participation constraints and increase household commitment in cooperative arrangements in migrant‐sending communities.

Labor Migration and Social Networks Participation: Evidence from Southern Mozambique

There is a large literature pointing to community participation and social networks as salient components of household well-being in developing settings. Yet, there are few insights into whether people mobility affects incentive problems associated with social networks, or whether labor migration displaces social informal institutions in village economies at origin. This paper directly tests the role of international migration in shaping participation in groups and social networks by migrant sending households in village economies at origin. By using an original household survey from two southern regions in Mozambique, we find that households with successful migrants (i.e. those receiving either remittances or return migration) engage more in community based social networks. Our findings are robust to alternative definitions of social interaction and to endogeneity concerns suggesting that stable migration ties and higher income stability through remittances may decrease participation constraints and increase household commitment in cooperative arrangements in migrant-sending communities.

The Formation of Migrant Networks

This paper provides the first direct evidence on the determinants of link formation among immigrants in the host society. We use a purposely-designed survey on a representative sample of Sri Lankan immigrants living in Milan to study how migrants form social links among them and the extent to which this network provides them with material support along three different dimensions: accommodation, credit, job-finding. Our results show that both weak and strong ties are more likely to exist between immigrants who are born in close-by localities at origin. The time of arrival has a U-shaped effect: links are more frequent between immigrants arrived at the same time, and between long-established immigrants and newcomers. Once the link is formed, material support is provided mainly to relatives while early migrant fellows are helpful for job finding.

The Economic Effects of Land Redistribution: The Case of a Community-Based Rural Land Development Project in Malawi

Land reform in countries with high levels of land inequality is seen by most development experts as an effective means of reducing poverty, since land enriches the asset portfolio of poor households (HHs) and carries with it the potential for agricultural production and entrepreneurship. The objectives of land redistribution are largely classified into (i) social, (ii) economic (iii) political and (iv) environmental. As expressed by Binswanger et al. (2009), advocates of social land reform expect little overall economic gain from the reform, but see it as a way to provide some security and subsistence to a large unemployed rural labor force. To them, the main thrust of agricultural development is to come from large-scale farms and the supporting agro-industrial sectors. The advocates of economic land reform stress the productive superiority of family farms; and they expect the land reform to make a significant contribution not only to agricultural production, but also to rural employment, self-employment, and poverty reduction. The arguments in favor of economic land reform presented above are also consistent with the economic theory which states that a one-time egalitarian distribution of assets in an environment of imperfect markets is associated with permanent higher levels of growth (Deininger et al., 1999). Consistent with this notion, Aghion et al. (1999) express the fact that redistribution in an economy can be conducive to growth. Furthermore, cross-country regressions (Birdsall and Londono, 1998; World Bank, 2001) also provide evidence that greater inequality in the distribution of assets such as land is associated with lower subsequent growth.