Browsing by Author "Barry Goodwin, Committee Member"

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    Elderly Labor Supply in a Rural, Less Developed Economy: An Empirical Study
    (2009-04-23) Sawant, Kshama; Robert Clark, Committee Member; Ann McDermed, Committee Member; Barry Goodwin, Committee Member; Charles Knoeber, Committee Member
    The important factors that determine the living standards of adults are labor force participation, living arrangements, and health status. For the elderly, lifetime asset accumulation is another key determinant of living standards in old age. In a majority of less developed countries (LDCs), especially in the rural areas, asset accumulation levels of the elderly are very low. Employer-based or public pension income is accessible to only a tiny percentage of the elderly. A crucial aspect of empirical and policy interest is how do rural LDC elderly obtain economic welfare in the absence of private asset accumulation or formal public programs. A majority of the elderly continue to work in very old age, supplying labor in the market, working in family-owned enterprises, or participating in domestic duties. A majority of the rural LDC elderly, especially in South Asia, also live in extended households, which typically include their children, and the children’s families. How this living arrangement impacts the elderly has been examined only sparingly. Indeed, national policy on older persons in India, for instance, has implicitly assumed that the extended household works well in delivering old age support. In light of these facts, the current study presents an empirical economic profile of rural elderly in Northern India by examining their labor supply in detail. The empirical study carries out three tasks. Elderly labor supply is estimated via a structural framework that is robust to the endogeneity of marginal productivity, and includes a wide range of demographic, household-level, and infrastructure covariates. The framework is used to examine the extended household as an old age support mechanism. A key contribution of this study is that rural work behavior is observed separately for wage-based labor, production on household farms, and household-owned business enterprises. Secondly, the study attempts to situate the labor supply analysis in the larger context of intrahousehold economics. A specific question asked is, do rural elderly work out of preference? Or do they engage in labor activities primarily compelled by poverty? This question is interpreted as a ``poverty hypothesis’’ for elderly labor supply. The hypothesis was originally developed in the economics literature on LDC child labor. Congruent with child labor, a general form of the hypothesis states that the household’s poverty compels the elderly to work. The corresponding empirical implication is that the own-wage elasticity of the elderly will be negative. Finally, labor supply in domestic work, and other non-market work activities, is included in the analysis. Reduced-form estimates are derived for the labor participation decision in any type of work. The empirical findings suggest that living with adult children does not have statistically significant influences on the hours supplied by the elderly in wage-based labor. The non-elderly working coresiding members are, on the other hand, predicted to work more wage hours if elderly are present in the household. The own-wage elasticity of annual hours of elderly labor supply is estimated to be negative for wage work. Since the estimates are structurally robust, this can be suggestive of a poverty hypothesis for elderly in rural North India. The reduced-form model for labor participation predicts that elderly men coresiding with at least one adult son and daughter-in-law are less likely to choose to work. Elderly women coresiding with adult daughters are less likely to be working. The elderly not coresiding with adult children are less likely to be working when small children and young teenagers are present in the household. The empirical results provide strong support for formal social security programs, and for elderly-targeted policies to be combined with rural poverty alleviation and employment generation.
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    A Hedonic, Hedonic Metric and Logistic Approach to Estimating Demand for Fluid Milk Products Using Micro Level Data
    (2008-11-10) Gulseven, Osman; John Monahan, Committee Member; Michael Wohlgenant, Committee Chair; Nick Piggott, Committee Member; Barry Goodwin, Committee Member; Raymond Palmquist, Committee Member
    This study analyzes the market for functionally enhanced milk products. The first paper investigates the factors that derive the demand for soymilk products based on a two-stage hedonic model. In the first stage, the relationship between the prices of dairy products and the attributes of these products are exploited to derive the marginal implicit attribute prices. In the second stage, we used these prices along with the information on households’ demographic background to explain the demand for product attributes. Our results indicate that although the soymilk taste is undesirable, since soymilk is lactose/cholesterol free (LFCF) and mostly organic, it has a higher price premium than other milk types. In the second paper, we introduced the concept of Hedonic Metric (HM) approach as an approximation method to estimate the price elasticities in classical traditional models. In these models, the number of estimated parameters increases exponentially with the number of variables included in the model. HM method applied in this paper is practical and significantly reduces the number of parameters. The HM approach is compared with the Distance Metric (DM) approach of Rojas and Peterson (2008) to see which method gives better approximations to original LA/AIDS and RM models. In the last paper, we applied a two-stage logistic estimation to analyze consumer attitudes towards specialty milk types. In the first stage of our estimation we estimated the hedonic attribute prices. In the second stage we used these implicit prices along with the demographic information on households to estimate the factors that affect households’ decision to purchase specialty milk types. Our results indicate that while CFLF attribute and soy attribute are complementary with each other, whereas the organic attribute is a substitute to them. Minority households have a much higher probability of purchasing specialty milk types than white households.
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    Stature, Nutrition, Health, and Economic Growth
    (2006-12-11) Treme, Julianne; Lee Craig, Committee Chair; Thomas Grennes, Committee Member; Mitch Renkow, Committee Member; Barry Goodwin, Committee Member
    Historically, scholars of economic growth have focused almost exclusively on aggregate output or income as a way to assess the standard of living in a society. The purpose of this dissertation is to supplement and challenge this methodology by using evidence of the biological standard of living to measure the physiological adjustments of human populations to changes in the economic climate. Human stature captures the biological costs and benefits of economic activity, and as such, it serves as a primary indicator of the biological standard of living. When approximated by output and income alone, the standard of living in society appears to steadily improve over time. Human stature offers a different picture though, fluctuating through time even as incomes rise, implying that the general increase of incomes came at the expense of both health and nutrition and ultimately height. The divergence between economic and biological indicators reveals the importance of representing economies both by material and physical measures: a reflection of both purchasing power and health. This dissertation uses stature to approximate income and estimate the health effects of economic fluctuations. It begins by using an innovative estimation technique to generate per capita GDP growth rates and identifies several undocumented growth episodes in Colonial America. The results of this chapter suggest that early growth rates were higher than previous estimates indicate. It then shifts focus to the regional growth pattern of stature over the nineteenth-century United States, exploring changes in human welfare associated with the convergence of stature as reflected by the gap between short and tall populations. The results imply that human welfare did not improve for large segments of the population until the last two decades of the century and in fact, the physical costs associated with economic activity overwhelmed the physical benefits for much of the century. The United States experienced a period of divergence in heights across regions, before they began to converge at the end of the century. It ends with the global exploration of the impact of economic and health variables on stature in the nineteenth century, finding that Gross Domestic Product and urbanization effects varied across countries. GDP and height were actually negatively correlated in several countries, implying that GDP increases were spent in large part on unhealthy purchases, or that the negative externalities of growth overwhelmed the positive ones.