Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Assessing Gender Parity In Intrahousehold Allocation Of Educational Resources: Evidence From Bangladesh, Sijia Xu, Abu S. Shonchoy, Tomoki Fujii
Assessing Gender Parity In Intrahousehold Allocation Of Educational Resources: Evidence From Bangladesh, Sijia Xu, Abu S. Shonchoy, Tomoki Fujii
Research Collection School Of Economics
Gender parity in education—an important global development goal—has been primarily measured through school enrollment, and the gender parity in education quality has received limited attention until recently. We address this issue by highlighting the intrahousehold allocation of education expenditure. We extend the hurdle model into a three-part model to enable decomposition of households’ education decisions into enrollment, total education expenditure, and share of the total education expenditure on the core component, or items relating to the quality of education such as private tutoring. We apply this model to four rounds of nationally representative household surveys from Bangladesh, a country that …
Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy
Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy
Research Collection School Of Economics
We use contemporaneous and retrospective panel datasets to examine the household-level relationship between fertility and access to electricity in Bangladesh. We find that access to electricity reduces fertility by about 0.2 children over a period of five years or total fertility rate by about 1.2 in most estimates. This finding is robust with respect to the choice of the estimation method, the choice of sample, and potential presence of endogeneity. The finding also corroborates the theoretical predictions on time use and consumption pattern derived from our model of electrification and fertility. The results also suggest that television is an important …
Illusion Of Gender Parity In Education: Intrahousehold Resource Allocation In Bangladesh, Sijia Xu, Abu S. Shonchoy, Tomoki Fujii
Illusion Of Gender Parity In Education: Intrahousehold Resource Allocation In Bangladesh, Sijia Xu, Abu S. Shonchoy, Tomoki Fujii
Research Collection School Of Economics
A target in the Millennium Development Goals—gender parity in all levels of education—is widely considered to have been attained. However, measuring gender parity only through school enrollment is misleading, as girls may lag behind boys in other educational measures. We investigate this with four rounds of surveys from Bangladesh by decomposing households’ education decisions into enrollment, education expenditure, and share of the education expenditure allocated for the quality of education like private tutoring. We find a strong profemale bias in school enrollment but promale bias in the other two decisions. This contradirectional gender bias is unique to Bangladesh and partly …
Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy
Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy
Research Collection School Of Economics
We use a household-level panel dataset from Bangladesh to examine the household-level relationship between fertility and the access to electricity. We find that the household's access to electricity reduces the change in the number of children by about 0.1 to 0.25 children in a period of five years in most estimates. This finding also applies to retrospective panel data and is robust to the choice of covariates and estimation methods. Our finding passes falsification test and corroborates with the predictions of our theoretical model on the households' time use and consumption pattern.
Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy
Fertility And Rural Electrification In Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Abu S. Shonchoy
Research Collection School Of Economics
We use a panel dataset from Bangladesh to examine the relationship between fertility and the adoption of electricity with the latter instrumented by infrastructure development and the quality of service delivery. We find that the adoption of electricity reduces fertility, and this impact is more pronounced when the household already has two or more children. This observation can be explained by a simple household model of time use, in which adoption of electricity affects only the optimal number of children but not necessarily current fertility behavior if the optimal number has not yet been reached.