ABSTRACTS
WORKS IN PROGRESS:
Evaluation of the Impact of PROGRESA on Nutrition: Theory, Econometric Methods and an Approach to deriving Individual Welfare Findings from Household Data (submitted as dissertation for the MSc in Economics at UCL)
This dissertation deals with the evaluation of policy interventions aiming to improve welfare. In particular, the importance of childhood nutrition in breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty and the reasons calling for a rigorous evaluation of the interventions are analysed. The impact of an anti-poverty program in rural Mexico, PROGRESA, on the nutrition-based indicators of health is estimated with different econometric techniques.
The average PROGRESA effect on the value of food consumption and on the caloric availability is estimated exploiting the randomization as identification condition and taking into account the issue of densificaciòn. Our preferred estimates show an average increase, in the value of the food consumed weekly by the household of 23,53 pesos (13,9%) as well as an increase in the daily per capita calories consumed of about 198 kilocalories (9%).
The PROGRESA impact on the calorie consumption is further analysed with non parametric techniques. PROGRESA has a positive impact across the entire distribution of the caloric consumption, that is the non parametrically estimated distribution shifts to the right due to the PROGRESA. In addition, a non parametric regression approach is implemented to analyze the relationship between caloric availability and food expenditure. Our result shows the calorie intake-food expenditure elasticity being on average 0.326 below the median of the x variable (log per capita food expenditure) and 0.063 above the median.
Furthermore, this dissertation deals with the issues of obtaining individual findings from household data. Our estimated (implementing a GMM approach) equivalence scale between children and adult shows a child being only 73% of an adult as far as the consumption of food is concerned. The general result is that the individual welfare measures and PROGRESA impacts are substantially positively affected by the use of our estimated equivalence scale in place of the standard un-weighted household size. Hence, our evidence supports the view that household data may be somewhat misleading for estimating individual welfare measures.
Finally, a state-of-the-art method is implemented for deriving a relationship between calorie intake and age. Our estimates show some evidence of a more marked PROGRESA impact at younger ages.
PUBLISHED PAPERS:
The NAIRU: Estimation and the Effect of Permanent Sectoral Employment Reallocation, Rivista di Politica Economica, Nov-Dec 2002
This paper analyses the NAIRU making use of a cointegrated VAR and of Italian labour market data. It is shown in the paper
that a cointegrated VAR represents a statistically adequate approach to the estimation of the NAIRU, that is an effective way to overcome
several problems affecting standard structural approach. In particular the paper investigates whether permanent employment
shift across italian industrial sector (in order to measure sectoral shifts in labour demand it is used Neumann and Topel [34]'s employment-
based dispersion index) has on effect on unemployment. Findings of this paper indicate that permanent sectoral employment
shifts affect unemployment both in long- and in shortterm Another interesting result is that the effect of sectoral reallocation
on unemployment rate occurs only after somedelay.
[JEL Code: C32; C51; E24]
Paper