Different Strategies For Estimation Research Articles

Impact of COVID-19 on agricultural markets: assessing the roles of commodity characteristics, disease caseload and market reforms.

This paper assesses the impact of the spread of COVID-19 and the lockdown on wholesale prices and quantities traded in agricultural markets. We compare whether these impacts differ across non-perishable (wheat) and perishable commodities (tomato and onion), and the extent to which any adverse impacts are mitigated by the adoption of a greater number of agricultural market reform measures. We use a granular data set comprising daily observations for 3 months from nearly 1000 markets across five states and use a double- and triple- difference estimation strategy. Expectedly, our results differ by type of commodity and period of analysis. While all prices spiked initially in April, they recovered relatively quickly, underscoring the importance of time duration for analysis. Wheat prices were anchored in large part by the minimum support price, while tomato prices were lower in some months. Supply constraints began easing in May with greater market arrivals perhaps reflecting distress sales. Market reform measures did help in insulating farmers from lower prices, but these effects are salient for the perishable goods, and not so much for wheat where the government remained the dominant market player. Taken together, these results point to considerable resilience in agricultural markets in dealing with the COVID-19 shock, buffered by adequate policy support.

Lighten the Burden: Assessing the Impact of the Indonesian For-Poor Students Cash Transfer on Spending Behaviors

The Indonesian Government launched a for-poor students cash transfer program (Bantuan Siswa Miskin or BSM) to aid poor students in attaining goods and services necessary to support schooling activities. Recipients are given a freedom on how to spend the BSM cash, and ideally they should spend the cash for the intended purpose. However, the government does not have any control on how households spend the cash transfer. We evaluate the effect of the BSM program on household education spending using the 4th and 5th wave of the Indonesian Family Life Survey. To deal with the issue of endogeneity and the unobserved heterogeneity, we use BSM eligibility criteria set by Ministry of Education and Culture as instrumental variables and first difference estimation strategy. We find that BSM has a significant effect on household spending pattern by increasing the share of education spending. This study provides evidence that poor households use cash transfers according to the intended purpose even though there is no formal incentive to do so.

From Mother to Daughter: Do Equal Inheritance Property Laws Reform Improves Female Labour Supply, Female and Their Daughter's Educational Attainments in India?

In 2005, India witnessed a constitutional amendment to the Hindu Succession Act of 1956, giving daughters the equal inheritance rights as sons. However, fives states in India had earlier amended the same Act in favour of daughters. Using this exogenous variation created by legislation on inheritance property rights, I exploit a difference-in- difference estimation strategy to estimate the impact of reform on female education, labour force participation and their daughter’s educational attainment. The study finds that women who were exposed to the reform experience increases in their average schooling years and average months of labour force participation. It is interesting to note that this positive effect is also observed for their daughter’s educational attainment. Results obtained from this study are consistent with the complementary and equalising effects hypothesis.

The Impact of Children's Public Health Insurance Expansions on Educational Outcomes

This paper examines the impact of public health insurance expansions through both Medicaid and SCHIP on children's educational outcomes, measured by 4th and 8th grade reading and math test scores, available from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). We use a triple difference estimation strategy, taking advantage of the cross-state variation over time and across ages in children's health insurance eligibility. Using this approach, we find that test scores in reading, but not math, increased for those children affected at birth by increased health insurance eligibility. A 50 percentage point increase in eligibility is found to increase reading test scores by 0.09 standard deviations. We also examine whether the improvements in educational outcomes can be at least partially attributed to improvements in health status itself. First, we provide further evidence that increases in eligibility are linked to improvements in health status at birth. Second, we show that better health status at birth (measured by rates of low birth-weight and infant mortality), is linked to improved educational outcomes. Although the methods used to support this last finding do not completely eliminate potentially confounding factors, we believe it is strongly suggestive that improving children's health will improve their classroom performance.

The Effect of Parents' Employment on Children's Educational Attainment

This paper presents the conditions under which a causal interpretation can be given to the association between childhood parental employment and subsequent education of children. In a model in which parental preferences are separable in own consumption and children’s well-being, estimation is complicated by endowment heterogeneity and by the fact that parents may compensate or reinforce children’s endowments relevant to educational attainment. A sibling difference estimation strategy is generally not sufficient to provide a consistent estimate of the parameter of interest. Identification rests on two stronger assumptions about the timing of parents’ knowledge of their children’s endowments and about the technology used to produce children’s human capital. We find a negative and significant effect on the child’s educational attainment of the extent of mother’s full-time employment when the child was aged 0-5. The effects of mother’s part-time employment and father’s employment are smaller and less well determined but again negative. In the context of our conditional demand function framework, these results suggest that a higher full family income increases the educational attainment of children, and given full family income, a higher mother’s or father’s wage reduces their children’s educational attainment.