Browsing by Author "Braunstein, Elissa, advisor"
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Item Open Access Does trade cause growth across trading blocs?(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2009) Marturana, Michael A., author; Braunstein, Elissa, advisor; Cutler, Harvey Stephen, committee member; Davies, Stephen (Stephen P.), committee memberDoes international trade influence the growth rate of income per capita across trading blocs? Many empirical studies have been conducted to analyze the effect of international trade on economic growth. This paper investigates the growth effects from trade, on income per capita, across the four trading blocs of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Southern Common Market from 1970 through 2004. Using an autoregressive process of one lag, the model yielded results consistent with economic theory—exports positively influence the growth rate of income per capita while imports reduce said rate. Furthermore, these variables are statistically significant at standard levels. The model also controls for membership in a particular trading bloc and finds intra-bloc economic growth rates to differ substantially. Other variable estimates from the model however, are not consistent with theory which implies some degree of model misspecification and suggests further research is needed.Item Open Access Essays in the economics of care(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Altringer, Levi A., author; Braunstein, Elissa, advisor; Zahran, Sammy, advisor; Mushinski, David, committee member; Hempel, Lynn, committee memberThe Build Back Better legislation (H.R. 5376) currently being debated in Congress represents the first major attempt to build a care infrastructure that heavily invests in children and families, recognizing the value of care and care workers. The legislation (1) promotes recruitment, education, training, retention, and career advancements of direct care workers by providing competitive wages, benefits, and other support services to the direct care workforce; (2) establishes an entitlement program to provide qualifying families the opportunity to obtain high-quality child care; (3) allows states, almost entirely federally funded for the first three years, to provide universal preschool to 3- and 4-year-olds; (4) establishes universal paid family leave; (5) provides infrastructure grants to improve child care safety; (6) supplies child care wage grants for small businesses; (7) provides child care allowances as part of trade adjustment programs for workers; (8) makes permanent the expansion of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit provided by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021; and (9) establishes payroll tax credit for child care workers and tax credits for caregiver expenses. In their own way, each chapter of this dissertation speaks to policies outlined in this legislation. In Chapter 1, titled The Role of Care Policy in Procyclical Child Mortality, I investigate the impact of the business cycle on child mortality. I conceptualize care as being supplied by three sectors---household, private, and public---and argue that public investment and provision insulates children from cyclical fluctuations in the quantity and quality of care provided. I then hypothesize that, in so far as the care mechanism mediates procyclical child mortality, children who are most likely to be the beneficiaries of generous care policy will be less exposed to the mortality risks of economic boom. Employing a sample of 21 OECD countries over the period 1960-2015, I show that procyclical mortality is null for children 5 to 9 years of age. This is the age group for which all OECD countries in my sample have universal, publicly provided care---i.e., primary education. Among children 0 to 4 years old, however, economic expansions are associated with increased risk of mortality. I then show that procyclical mortality among the 0- to 4-year-old age group is attenuated, and even disappears, in increasingly generous care policy environments. In Chapter 2, titled The Contemporaneous Mortality Benefits of the Head Start Program, I investigate the impact of Head Start on population-level child mortality. Though widely perceived as a schooling program focused on cognitive development, I argue that the "whole child" services provided by Head Start act as a de facto investment into the health and safety of poor children. The Head Start Expansion and Quality Improvement Act of 1990 led to considerable variation in program funding across localities. Further, program age requirements meant that increases in funding were largely directed toward the enrollment of 3- and 4-year-old children. Employing a sample of 50 large labor market areas over the period 1983 to 2007, I estimate log-log and log-linear fixed-effect mortality regressions and find that, relative to 1- to 2-year-olds, increases in Head Start funding are associated with reductions in 3- and 4-year-old mortality, all else equal. Then, utilizing that fact that children must also be poverty-eligible for Head Start, I show that the potential mortality benefits of Head Start are pronounced in relatively poor and disproportionately Black communities, as expected. In Chapter 3, titled Revisiting the Wages of Virtue and the Relative Pay of Care Work, I extend and update previous research by investigating the relative pay of care work in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. Research in feminist and labor economics provide several theoretical rationale as to why workers in care occupations might receive lower wages. I employ three separate measures of care work and show the continued existence of wage penalties among nurturant care occupations, while there appears to be no wage penalty for workers in reproductive care occupations, all else equal. Testing for heterogeneous care penalties across the occupational skill distribution, I find that the wage penalty for nurturant care work increases in relatively high-skill occupations among men. Alternatively, the wage penalty for nurturant care work is null, if not a slight wage premium, in relatively high-skill occupations among women. I explore potential explanations for the inconsistent behavior of these estimated care penalties across gender, such as occupational crowding and selection via occupational segregation, or sorting. The findings of this chapter have important implications for care penalty literature and motivate potential avenues of future research.Item Open Access Essays on the role of microfinance institutions in financial deepening, economic growth and development(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Ocasio, Vange Mariet, author; Braunstein, Elissa, advisor; Bernasek, Alexandra, committee member; Vasudevan, Ramaa, committee member; Schwebach, Robert G., committee member; Shaffer, Sherrill, committee memberTo view the abstract, please see the full text of the document.Item Open Access Foreign direct investment in developing countries: productivity growth, dual economies, and location determinants(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Ohakim, John, author; Braunstein, Elissa, advisor; Vasudevan, Ramaa, committee member; Weiler, Stephan, committee member; Koontz, Stephen, committee memberThis study revisits the role of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in developing countries along two dimensions. First, we empirically analyze the impact of FDI on productivity growth in 30 developing countries for the period 1970 to 2010. We, however, depart from previous studies on the FDI-growth nexus because our approach allows us to focus on the contribution of FDI to aggregate productivity in a developing economy, while considering the reallocation of labor characterized by sizable differentials in the productivity of labor between sectors. When structural change is accounted for, something that previous growth models fail to do, we find interesting results for both regimes of absorptive capacities. Second, this study empirically re-examines the location determinants of greenfield FDI in developing countries. The work done here incorporates South-South FDI exchanges and empirically examines if FDI inflows from the South differ from those that originate in the North. This is done by employing a novel dataset, which is analyzed using an extended gravity equation. We find that FDI flows from the global North differs from those from the global South. On average, investors from the North enter a developing country seeking to benefit from factors that make them more competitive internationally. On the other hand, FDI from the South, on average, is motivated primarily by interests in accessing and exploiting natural resources. That is, North-South FDI is efficiency-seeking while South-South FDI is resource-seeking. We also show that geographical agglomeration plays an important role in attracting FDI from other developing countries as well. We conclude this study by discussing policy implications for home, host and regional countries.Item Open Access Harnessing trade for structural transformation in sub-Saharan Africa: monitoring exports, South-South trade and commodity price volatility(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Hagan, Maame Ayegua, author; Braunstein, Elissa, advisor; Vasudevan, Ramaa, committee member; Numa, Guy, committee member; Costanigro, Marco, committee memberThis dissertation consists of three main empirical papers that lie at the intersection of international trade and (under) development. In particular, motivated by the proposition that structural change in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is needed for sustained growth, the papers build on each other to highlight different dimensions in SSA's quest for structural transformation within the context of global integration. Together, the papers explore the linkages between structural transformation and exports, South-South trade and commodity price volatility. Much of the literature on pathways for SSA to catch-up is centered on the success in East Asia's export-oriented industrialization and the replicability of this model. While there have been calls to apply the exact export-oriented industrialization recipe that transformed several economies in East Asia, evidence from SSA about the impact of this approach is not well-documented quantitatively. The first empirical paper (chapter 3) attempts to address this gap in the existing literature. Developing countries, especially those in SSA, have been involved in the production of primary commodities which were traded for imports of technologically-intensive manufacturing commodities, primarily from rich countries in the global North. However, the 2008 global economic crisis, which began in the global North but circulated to the South particularly through its impact on global trade, raised concerns about the desirability of export systems that depended on Northern demand. This experience encouraged developing countries to deepen their efforts to diversify their trade beyond North-South. Thus, South-South trade became one main alternative for accelerating structural transformation and achieving sustainable development. The second empirical paper (chapter 4) explores the prospects and implications of South-South trade as opposed to North-South trade as drivers of structural transformation in SSA. The relationship between terms of trade fluctuations and macroeconomic performance has been a deeply debated topic in the growth and development literature. The end of the recent "commodity super cycle" has renewed the discussion of the impact of large terms of trade shocks and the resulting ways of adjustment that follow. Many existing studies use the aggregate terms of trade as a proxy for commodity terms of trade while others have used different variations of the commodity terms of trade that rely on the price of only a few commodities. To address this, the final chapter (chapter 5) uses a newly developed, comprehensive, country-specific commodity terms of trade index and a broad sample of countries (with a special eye for SSA) to study the impact of persistent commodity price volatility on key variables that influence structural transformation in an economy. To put the results from the papers into perspective, where necessary, we compare the potential differences and similarities that exist with emerging and developing economies in America and Asia.Item Open Access The gender dynamics of public finance: a Chinese and cross-country analysis(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Knight, Tabitha, author; Braunstein, Elissa, advisor; Tavani, Daniele, committee member; Seguino, Stephanie, committee member; Charlton, Sue Ellen, committee memberThis dissertation consists of four chapters, integrated with the goal of increasing the knowledge of ways in which fiscal policies affect women's welfare worldwide. First, we provide an overview of the literature relating fiscal policies, gendered employment, and growth, contribute a conceptual model of employment based on these relationships, and propose areas for future work. While we consider the direct relationship between scal policy and gendered employment, we also consider two indirect relationships where scal policy in influences employment through its eect on growth and the unpaid labor burden. Next, we direct our focus towards the Chinese economy as we present a synopsis of women's position in the labor market and discuss the historical patterns of production and social norms, the evolving structure of the Chinese economy, and the ways in which these changes in influence women's relative wages, employment opportunities, and mobility; we also include an examination of possible future Chinese growth policies and their potential impacts on women's relative welfare. Using the knowledge obtained in the first two parts of this dissertation, we provide an empirical study of gendered employment in China with a focus on public spending on social infrastructure. We find that public spending on education is associated with increases in gender equality in employment as well short-run economic growth via upward harmonization. Finally, we further extend our work to a world-wide analysis of the same and find that public spending on healthcare and education are positively related to women's relative employment via upward harmonization. In this dissertation we aim to increase the understanding of the relationship between public sector spending, specifically on social infrastructure, and women's relative welfare, and encourage future work to evaluate other development policies through a gendered lens in order to provide policy options for those aiming to increase economic development in a gender-sensitive manner.Item Open Access Three essays in feminist economics: empirical & historical applications(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Small, Sarah F., author; Braunstein, Elissa, advisor; Alves Pena, Anita, committee member; Weiler, Stephan, committee member; Canetto, Silvia, committee memberThis dissertation includes three essays in feminist economics. The first two are quantitative empirical studies, which study the interactions between paid work, allocations of housework, and intrahousehold power dynamics. Chapter 1 examines the extent to which men extract unpaid household labor from women to support entrepreneurial ventures. Models using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data from 1985 to 2019 illustrate that, in married White couples, women's disproportionate share of housework increases when their husbands take on business ownership. However, there is no evidence that White husbands extend such support when their wives own businesses. In Black couples, wives take on even greater housework shares when they own a business. These dynamics suggest that the success of married White men's entrepreneurship may be built on extracting domestic labor from their wives: a notion consistent with patriarchal rent seeking theories. Chapter 2 offers a quantitative test of hegemonic masculinity theory and demonstrates how men of different race and income groups respond to their women partners out-earning them— an economic 'threat' to masculinity. Results indicate in upper-income White men have a strong aversion to the situation in which a woman out-earns her male partner. As hegemonic masculinity theory would suggest, middle-income White men follow suit, but lower income White men, and Black men in most income groups, do not. The third chapter is a qualitative history of Barbara Bergmann's occupational crowding hypothesis. The chapter situates the hypothesis among contemporary competing theories on the economics of discrimination and explains why the crowding hypothesis did not persist as a major explanation of wage differences in the mainstream of the economics profession. Each chapter contributes to the feminist economic mission to overcome androcentric bias in economic analysis, to speak to power, and to extinguish oppression.Item Open Access Three essays on gender inequality in Latin America: understanding labor market segregation, job quality, and environmental issues from a feminist perspective(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Machado Nunes, Débora, author; Braunstein, Elissa, advisor; Tavani, Daniele, advisor; Chatterjee, Sushmita, committee member; Barber, Edward B., committee memberFor the past three decades, Latin America experienced remarkable progress in educational attainment and health care access for women, combined with decreasing household income inequality and higher wages across the board since 2002, especially at the bottom of the wage distribution for most countries. Yet, gender job segregation in the labor market has increased since the early 1990s. Urban women persistently occupy jobs in the informal sector, where jobs are generally characterized by low wages, lack of benefits, poor working conditions, and no promotion possibilities. Concerning both urban and rural women is Latin America's unique vulnerability to the impacts of climate change and the lack of progress in preventing deforestation, which disproportionally impacts impoverished communities, especially women and children. Despite some progress on reproductive rights in several countries, persistent economic challenges and constraints present serious barriers to the advancement of gender equality and reproductive justice—understood as the right to prevent and terminate undesired pregnancies, carry desired pregnancies, and raise a healthy and happy child to the best of one's ability. Based on the premise that such a complex scenario can only be understood through feminist research methodologies, this dissertation proposes three independent yet connected essays. Each essay focuses on a different research question that helps us better understand the gendered impacts of economic policies in Latin America, how women with different intersectional identities are impacted by them, and how to build useful scholarship for policy makers and activists to advance gender equality and reproductive justice in the region. The first essay focuses on the connections between gender job segregation, income distribution, and real exchange rates in Latin America. For the second essay, we propose a theoretical discussion, focusing on building reproductive justice as a research program within economics. Finally, the third essay focuses on rural women, exploring the relationship between deforestation and hours unpaid care work in the Amazonia rainforest.Item Open Access Three essays on gender inequality, dynamic bargaining, and technology adoption in subsistence agriculture(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Slootmaker, Christopher, author; Braunstein, Elissa, advisor; Tavani, Daniele, committee member; Iverson, Terrence, committee member; Bond, Craig, committee memberTo view the abstract, please see the full text of the document.Item Open Access Three essays on globalization of trade and structures of economic growth and (under) development: comparative analysis of advanced and emerging nations(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Ganguly, Arpan, author; Braunstein, Elissa, advisor; Vasudevan, Ramaa, advisor; Tavani, Daniele, committee member; Zahran, Sammy, committee member; Stevis, Dimitris, committee memberWith the rise of neoliberal perspectives on economic policy and development in the 1980s came a new phase of globalization in the world economy. Quantitative increases in trade and financial flows, coupled with qualitative changes in corporate strategy and governance have been elemental to this process. Globalization of trade and production has integrated developed and underdeveloped regions of the world in a process of capitalist expansion and accumulation, one that has at times delivered bouts of growth in some countries, but little in terms of economic development or improvements in employment in others. This dissertation seeks to understand linkages between the globalization of trade and structures of development and under-development. Chapter 1 empirically evaluates the impact of trade and globalization on the quality of employment, particularly wage inequality by skill type and the functional distribution of income. This paper argues that rather than changes in relative prices, the link between trade and wage inequality is better explained by the mechanism of skill-intensity reversals. This is evident in trade's negative impact on less-skilled labor's skill intensity in production. Particularly for emerging nations, gains from external integration based on exploiting resource or skill-based differences in comparative advantage seems to have become transitory over time. Chapter 2 models the multifaceted impacts of trade and globalization on economic growth, using principal component analysis to differentiate among groups of countries based on how global capital interacts with domestic macroeconomic structures. This paper ties together a wide range of structuralist growth models to provide a unified narrative on regimes of globalization and growth. Chapter 3 evaluates the impact of trade globalization on economic development through its impact on structural change. This paper groups the analysis of regional differences in structural change in the development literature into three broad categories. Data on sectoral composition of value-added trade, output and employment is used to emphasize these regional dynamics, highlighting how internal and external constraints on the industrial sector lie at the heart of these challenges.Item Open Access Three essays on heterogeneous capabilities, poverty trap thresholds, and the persistence of inequality(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Anderson, Bret, author; Braunstein, Elissa, advisor; Bernasek, Alexandra, committee member; Vasudevan, Ramaa, committee member; Davies, Stephen, committee memberThe current trends in poverty measurement moving toward a focus on asset and wealth stocks, and hence away from traditional flow measures of consumption and income, warrant the scaling up of efforts to understand how individuals convert asset stocks into economic well-being. At the same time, modern advancements in computing power have led to an increase in the level of rigor associated with ex ante simulations of how macroeconomic changes potentially impact microeconomic well-being. In the presentation of three essays, this study investigates how individuals and households that are endowed with heterogeneous capabilities convert productive assets into economic well-being through the lenses of ex-post empirical analysis and an ex-ante macro-micro simulation. This analysis advances thinking on poverty an inequality by presenting a re-constructive critique of both the asset-based and human development/capabilities perspectives on poverty measurement, arguing that there are significant complementarities and reconcilable differences in which researchers can take significant advantage of. The theoretical and empirical insights regarding the role of capability disparities in conditioning household poverty trap thresholds are then applied in a preliminary fashion to a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model that is linked to a microsimulation model (MSM). The top-down behavioral CGE-MSM is capable of addressing the question of how macro changes impact poverty and income distribution when individuals are endowed with heterogeneous capabilities in an ex-ante fashion. In an attempt to isolate the impacts of macro changes on micro poverty and well-being, the questions of what poverty and well-being really are must be addressed first. The opening essay thus traces out the common origins, divergent evolution, and reconcilable differences across asset-based and Human Development/Capabilities perspectives of poverty. It is argued that asset-based studies have embedded in them a strong temptation to focus solely on asset accumulation policies without giving the conversion process of assets into livelihood its due study. Although the asset-based literature has made advances on the theoretical front in explaining how poverty trap thresholds are unique and dependent on intrinsic ability, the empirical analysis of what intrinsic ability may encompass remains understudied. The essay proposes that empirical asset-based studies of poverty trap thresholds stand to benefit from insights of the Human Development/Capabilities literature by viewing intrinsic ability as capability constraints which leads to differing opportunity costs. To illustrate the bridging role of opportunity costs, a simple, two-household model with heterogeneous opportunity costs is presented and applied to South Africa's most populated province. The results of the simple model underscore the need for a capabilities consistent asset-based framework. The second essay extends the first by asking how particular asset holdings are associated with capabilities to take on new economic opportunities. Knowledge of the patterns and linkages between capabilities and particular asset holdings has been relatively under- realized, particularly in the empirical poverty traps literature. Using the same household survey data of essay one, this essay seeks to empirically decompose how early period asset endowments impact future levels of well-being into direct and indirect mechanisms. A direct impact of asset endowments on future well-being would include consumption of the asset or the direct use of it to produce incomes (i.e. grain stock consumption or the sale of livestock offspring, respectively). The indirect impacts of endowments are of greater interest to this study and are of two forms: asset-to-asset complementarities and how household capabilities (or deprivations thereof) interact with particular asset holdings. To achieve this decomposition, this paper employs a method of path analysis akin to early heritability of traits studies which were aimed at distinguishing between the effects of nature versus nurture. This second essay contributes to the prior literature in three primary ways. First, it adds empirical robustness to prior theoretical work linking intrinsic ability with household-specific poverty trap thresholds. Second, it bridges the quantitative work on poverty traps with qualitative insights from the human development/capabilities literature by identifying which particular asset holdings are associated with different household capability constraints. Lastly, it serves as a reminder to policy that measuring poverty as asset stocks requires additional knowledge about the process of converting those assets into well-being. After the first two essays tackle the issue of poverty measurement and its conversion into economic well-being, the final essay reviews a host of macro, micro, and macro-micro modeling strategies in order to draw out central features of a framework that can address the micro impacts of macro changes in the presence of heterogeneous behavioral responses. Additionally, this essay presents a preliminary framework of that model and explores how capabilities, that heterogeneously impact the occupational choice of individuals, might be incorporated. When there are heterogeneous responses to changes in the macroeconomic employment situation, the identification of winners and losers of potential macro-policy changes in an ex-ante fashion is more complex. Standard computable general equilibrium (CGE) models are only able to identify between group changes in income distributions and not within group changes. Additionally, there is a lack of capacity to include unique behavioral responses. One alternative is to link a behavioral microsimulation model (MSM) to a CGE. The benefit of this approach is that the outcomes of behavior are aggregated rather than behavior itself being homogenized and aggregated as is implicitly done in models with representative agents or household groups. Though the original aim of the entire study - to put forth a macro-micro model flexible enough to incorporate heterogeneous behavior - was accomplished, the true benefits of the study come from considering the linkages between capabilities, poverty trap thresholds, and the distribution of well-being in greater detail.Item Open Access Three essays on informalization(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Gálvez García, Jose Rolando, author; Braunstein, Elissa, advisor; Tavani, Daniele, advisor; Vasudevan, Ramaa, committee member; Zaharan, Sammy, committee member; Velasco, Marcela, committee memberThis dissertation uses informalization as a way to identify workers and enterprises that engage in low-productivity, or contingent economic activities, and are systemically excluded from the costs and benefits of social welfare. Informalization represents a serious challenge for inclusive development in many economies around the world, particularly those in Latin America. The first chapter uses a political economy perspective to argue for adopting institutional approaches to conceptualize and understand informalization in order to account for the structural, exclusionary, and discriminatory dimensions of this development challenge. Adopting a macroeconomic perspective, chapter two analyzes the association between real exchange rates and the extent of urban informal employment in multiple Latin American economies in recent decades. Results indicate that real exchange rate competitiveness is associated with lower levels of urban informal employment in the region. The third chapter, taking a microeconomic approach, explores differences between formal and informal enterprises in Guatemala, and how these differences impact output and labor productivity.