New perspectives on household decision making in developing countries: Conflict and the allocation of time.

摘要

Becker's theory of home production was the first to systematically incorporate time in economic models, and the theory generated much empirical research in a wide variety of areas. However, there are two problems in the existing literature. The theoretic problem is that the model's predictions---substitution from time-intensive towards goods-intensive commodities arising from compensated wage increases---are no longer clearly evident when more than two commodities exist. The empirical problem is that the direct applications of Becker's home production theory in empirical research are scarce because of the innate immeasurability of commodities. In Chapters 1 and 2 of this dissertation, I address these issues directly. First, I determine the conditions on the utility function under which the Becker's substitution effects for the classic two commodities case exist for the case of multiple commodities. Second, under certain assumptions about production technologies, I recover unobservable commodities from the cost functions. Then, using the Philippine Bukidnon panel study of rural households, I test for the negative substitution effects between a time-intensive and a goods-intensive commodity arising from wage increases in the multiple commodities setting. The estimates of the relative demand between childcare, which represents a time-intensive commodity, and meal consumption, which represents a goods-intensive commodity, support the major predictions of the model.;In Chapter 3, I address a seeming inconsistency between economic theory and empirical evidence on the relationship between women's financial independence and the incidence of physical spousal violence against them. Patterns of physical spousal violence in India seem to be inconsistent with the theory of marital bargaining, in that working women are subject to more physical spousal violence than non-working women. However, the interpretation of these results is made difficult by issues of endogeneity. I address this issue by exploiting changes in rural women's labor market outcomes exogenously driven by rainfall and crop area variations. The IV-probit estimation results indicate that women's labor force participation decreases the probability of physical spousal violence by 0.05. This suggests that the positive relationship between women's working status and physical spousal violence is likely to be driven by endogeneity.