Panel evidence from rural Uganda on mobile money, risk sharing, and educational investment

We investigate the influence of the rapidly developing mobile banking service "mobile money" on rural households' capacity to smooth their investment in education following a negative shock. We find that a negative shock reduces per school-age kid educational spending by 9.3 percentage points in families that do not utilize mobile money but by 8.3 percentage points in homes that have used mobile money. The underlying process is a rise in remittance receipts and sender variety as a result of the lower transaction costs afforded by mobile money. We demonstrate that our findings are resistant to alternative processes. We utilize the extension of the mobile money agent network as an exogenous variable in mobile money access.

DETERMINANTS OF SCHOOL ENROLMENT IN INDONESIA: THE ROLE OF MINIMUM WAGE

This paper investigates the role of minimum wages in determining school enrolment (educational investment) in Indonesia using the National Socioeconomic Survey (Susenas). It finds that minimum wage legislation has a negative and significant substitution effect on educational investment. Individuals are more likely to drop out of senior secondary school as a result of a minimum wage legislation. Even though the response among low-income households is positive, this result may be generated by a fall in the probability of obtaining low-skilled employment, which offset the substitution effect.

Can Policy Change Culture? Government Pension Plans and Traditional Kinship Practices

Policies may change the incentives that allow cultural practices to persist. To test this, I study matrilocality and patrilocality, kinship traditions that determine daughters’ and sons’ post-marriage residences, and thus, which gender lives with and supports parents in their old age. Two separate policy experiments in Ghana and Indonesia show that pension policies reduce the practice of these traditions. I also show that these traditions incentivize parents to invest in the education of children who traditionally coreside with them. Consequently, when pension plans change cultural practices, they also reduce educational investment. This finding further demonstrates that policy can change culture. (JEL G51, I20, J15, J16, J32, Z13)

Family Resource Dilution in Expanded Families and the Empowerment of Married Only Daughters: Evidence From the Educational Investment in Children in Urban China

The One-Child Policy dramatically changed the Chinese family structure, and the literature indicates that only children may have an advantage in terms of family resource dilution. Moreover, as Chinese families traditionally prioritize investing in sons, only daughters are found to have been empowered by the policy because they did not need to compete with their brothers for parental investment. However, the literature is limited to only teenage children when they were still living in their parents' homes. It is unclear whether—when the generation of only children grew up and married—their family structure differed from that of children with siblings and whether married only daughters retained more family resources from their parents. Based on the data analysis of a 2016 survey, “Study of Youths in 12 Cities of Mainland China,” including a sample of 1,007 fathers and 2,168 mothers born between 1975 and 1985, this study explores the empowerment of married only daughters, employing the theory of family resource dilution in expanded Chinese families. Using educational investment in children as an example, and with random intercept models, this study presents empirical evidence that the dilution of family resources in Chinese expanded families still benefits males and patrilineal practices. Thus, this study demonstrates that Chinese families still tend to sacrifice the interests of married daughters to ensure support for their adult sons. However, it also illustrates that married only daughters could still connect to their parents' resources, giving them a relatively dominant position for decision-making regarding the family's educational expenditure on her own children. Thus, this study extends our understanding of the family resource dilution theory to Chinese expanded families, underscoring the need for further research on Chinese only children after they marry and form families of their own.