Andrew Foster es Profesor en Brown University y Director del Social Science Research Institute de la misma universidad. Es también Editor Jefe del Journal of Development Economics y anteriormente fue Director del Population Studies and Training Center de Brown University. Tiene un PhD en Economía por University of California at Berkeley y realizó sus estudios de grado en Princeton University. Sus investigaciones se centran en temas de microeconomía empírica, en particular relacionados con desarrollo económico, población y medio ambiente. Sus proyectos más recientes se enfocan en el papel de las economías de escala en la agricultura, el impacto del riesgo ex ante en la elección de la escolarización y cuestiones relacionadas con la movilidad educativa. Sus trabajos han sido publicados en revistas académicas como American Economic Review, European Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Demography, European Economic Review, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Economic Letters, Review of Economics and Statistics, Review of Economic Studies y Journal of Econometrics, entre otras.

Abstract: We study the relationship between risk and schooling investment in a low-income setting. Our theoretical model reveals that parents respond to variance in future child schooling by reducing investments ex ante if the human capital production function exhibits dynamic complementarity and parental preferences for human capital are not too concave. We further explore the implications of the theory using multiple rounds of panel data from rural India that contain, in each round, three seasons of time allocation for each sampled child. In particular, we first use seasonally-measured study times to estimate the key parameters of the structural model. These estimates suggest that elimination of variance would result in a 15 percent increase in acquired human capital, 50% of which is attributable to an ex ante response. We then use cross-village variation in risk over time to estimate these effects, using the idea that the consequences of rainfall variation for income in a rural economy are importantly affected by the presence of irrigation. Using this variation, we estimate an ex ante elasticity of study time with respect to variance that is somewhat smaller, but of the same order of magnitude as those predicted by the structural model. Finally, we simulate the effects of an implicit social insurance program, modeled after the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). Our results suggest that the risk-reducing effect of the NREGS may offset adverse effects on child education that were evident during the NREGS phase-in due to rising wages.

Autores: Andrew Foster (Brown University) & Esther Gehrke (Wageningen University)

Organizan: Departamento de Economía, Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Revista Económica

Contacto: iie@econo.unlp.edu.ar