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The contribution of own food production to the nutrition of households in two neighbouring, rural, semi-arid settlements was investigated. A survey of a 10% probability sample (n=131) of households in Sekuruwe and Ga-Molekane in the Mokgalakwena Local Municipality, Waterberg District Municipality, Limpopo Province, South Africa, conducted in 2001, provided data on household composition, income (cash and kind), poverty status, expenditure and agriculture, including a detailed account of the types and quantities of food that were purchased during the month preceding the date of the interview. For each household the food obtained from the different types of agriculture they practised was quantified. Protein, iron and Vitamins A and C were selected as indicators to assess the contribution of purchased and own produced food to the food intake of households. Food composition tables were used to estimate the nutrient content of the different foods. To assess the contribution of irrigated home gardening to food intake of households, Drum & Drip micro-irrigation systems which enabled irrigated vegetable production on an area of 36 m2 were installed on the residential sites of 10 volunteer households in the study area. The results confirmed that income is the most important determinant of household food security in rural South Africa. However, food obtained from various types of dry-land agriculture contributed significantly to household nutrition and without farming the food security of households would be reduced, especially among the ultra-poor. Small-scale irrigated vegetable production was shown to have the potential to substantially raise the amount of the Vitamins A and C available to households but did not address the lack of protein in the diet of ultra-poor households and the lack of iron in the diet of all households.

M.Comm. / In September 2002 South Africa saw the implementation of labour market regulation policy in the market for domestic workers, known as Sectoral Determination 7: domestic worker sector. This policy has been promulgated through the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, No 75 of 1997. The primary rationale behind the introduction of Sectoral Determination 7 was to protect the most vulnerable labour market sectors in South Africa such as domestic services workers and farm workers. This mini dissertation thus investigates the impact of the policy of minimum wages on the market for domestic workers in the South African context, and examines whether minimum wages in South Africa contribute to higher employment levels and better conditions of employment in the market for domestic workers. This is achieved through a comprehensive comparative analysis of a survey undertaken in the City of Pretoria at Orchards and Soshanguve against two similar surveys conducted in Bloemfontein in 2006 and 2001, respectively.

M.Comm. / Household savings is an important instrument for any economy and is also a crucial determinant of welfare in developing countries. This study investigates the determinants of household savings in South Africa and the factors that influences the current declines experienced in household savings. Household variables such as household income, expenditure, debt, as well as interest rates were analysed using trends to reveal their specific effect to the overall household savings. The Permanent Income Hypothesis emphasises the notion that people save because they expect a decline in their future income, meaning that savings should be a good predictor of a decline in income. Cointegration analysis on South African Reserve Bank data from 1990Q1 to 2009Q3 was conducted and results revealed that with all variables included, household income is the main determinant of household savings in South Africa. Impulse response functions, variance decomposition functions, as well as the granger-causality test were performed and results showed that household income remains the main determinant of household savings.

Early exposure of adolescents to sexual intercourse has given rise to an increase in adolescent pregnancy and childbearing, a situation that has proved to have both economic, social and health implications not only for the adolescent mother but also for her child. Using data from the 2004, Lesotho Demographic and Health Survey (LDHS, 2004), this study examines the effect of household characteristics on adolescent childbearing in Lesotho. The analyses done at three levels were based on a sample of 1,230, never married adolescents aged 15 to 19 years who had either always lived in the present residence or moved to the residence before age thirteen. The sample was a sub-sample from the dataset of all women of reproductive age interviewed during the survey. Logistic regression models were used to check for the odds of adolescent premarital births. The results show that only about seven percent of adolescents in the sample had premarital births. The older adolescents (18 and 19 years old) had the highest rates of premarital births, 14 and 19 percent respectively, indicating that the risk of premarital birth increases with age. The odds of premarital births was higher among adolescents that had first sexual intercourse at age 15 years or younger, and had achieved primary education or less. The results also showed the strong influence characteristics of co-resident women have on the behavior of adolescents. For instance, adolescents co-residing with an older woman that had had a premarital birth or first birth as a teenager, or who were separated or divorced, had higher odds of premarital births. The likelihood of adolescent premarital birth was found to be higher in households that were headed by females as well as in large households. The findings of this study have implications for programs designed to reduce adolescent pregnancy and childbearing. Most interventions to date, to reduce adolescent premarital pregnancy and childbearing, have focused primarily on adolescents themselves. The findings of this study shows that certain household characteristics influence adolescent premarital births and should therefore be taken into account in designing interventions to reduce adolescent premarital childbearing.

Thesis advisor: Philip Strahan / In the first two essays of this dissertation, I examine the role of third-party debt collectors in consumer credit markets. First, using law enforcement as an instrument, I find that higher density of debt collectors increases the supply of unsecured credit. The estimated elasticity of the average credit card balance with respect to the number of debt collectors per capita is 0.49, the elasticity of the average balance on non-credit card unsecured loans with respect to the number of debt collectors per capita is 1.32. There is also some evidence that creditors substitute unsecured credit for secured credit when the number of debt collectors increases. Higher density of debt collectors improves recoveries, which enables lenders to extend more credit. Finally, creditors charge higher interest rates and lend to a larger pool of borrowers when the density of debt collectors increases, presumably because better collections enable them to extend credit to riskier applicants. In the second essay I investigate the economics of the debt collection industry. The existence of third-party debt collection agencies cannot be explained by the benefits of specialization and economies of scale alone. Rather, the debt collection industry can serve as a coordination mechanism between creditors. If a debt collection agency collects on behalf of several creditors, the practices it uses will be associated will all creditors that hired it. Hence, consumers will be unable to punish individual creditors for using harsh practices. As a result, the third-party agency may use harsher debt collection practices than individual creditors collecting on their own. As long as the costs of hiring third-party debt collectors are below the benefits from using harsh debt collection practices, the debt collection industry will create economic value for creditors. The last essay, written jointly with Thomas Chemmanur, develops a theory of corporate boards and their role in forcing CEO turnover. We show that in general the board faces a coordination problem, leading it to retain an incompetent CEO even when a majority of board members receive private signals indicating that she is of poor quality. We solve for the optimal board size, and show that it depends on various board and firm characteristics: one size does not fit all firms. We develop extensions to our basic model to analyze the optimal composition of the board between firm insiders and outsiders and the effect of board members observing imprecise public signals in addition to their private signals on board decision-making. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Finance.

Thesis advisor: Arthur Lewbel / A person's health not only influences her chance of surviving to adulthood and her life expectancy, but also her economic decisions, her productivity, and her well-being. Since a healthy population is a major factor in economic development, it is important to understand the determinants of individuals' health-related decisions and outcomes. The three essays that comprise this dissertation make advancements in this direction and focus on the Indian subcontinent. The first and second essays analyze how intra-household decision making affects individuals' health outcomes and welfare, with a special attention towards within family gender inequality. The third essay studies how exposure to historical medical facilities affects individual health outcomes across generations. From a methodological point of view, this dissertation highlights the advantages of combining economic models with data from a wide range of sources, theory with empirics. I employ both quasi-experimental and structural estimation methods, using the former to uncover relevant causal links and policy levers, and the latter to estimate deep parameters, overcome data limitations and perform counterfactual policy analysis. More broadly, with this work I stress the importance of research in development economics being open to a variety of methodologies and empirical approaches. The ratio of women to men is particularly low in India relative to developed countries. It has recently been argued that close to half of these missing women are of post-reproductive ages (45 and above), but what drives this phenomenon remains unclear. In the first essay, titled “Why Are Older Women Missing in India? The Age Profile of Bargaining Power and Poverty”, I provide an explanation for this puzzle that is based on intra-household bargaining and resource allocation. I use both reduced-form and structural modeling to establish the critical connections between women's bargaining position within the household, their health, and their age. First, using amendments to the Indian inheritance law as a natural experiment, I demonstrate that improvements in women's bargaining position within the household lead to better health outcomes. Next, with a structural model of Indian households, I show that women's bargaining power and their ability to access household resources deteriorate at post-reproductive ages. Thus, at older ages poverty rates are significantly higher among women than men. The analysis indicates that gender inequality within the household and the consequent gender asymmetry in poverty can account for a substantial fraction of missing women of post-reproductive ages. Finally, I demonstrate that policies aimed at promoting intra-household equality, such as improving women's rights to inherit property, can have a large impact on female poverty and mortality. The first essay contributes to a wide literature showing that a relevant determinant of the household decisions and outcomes is the relative bargaining position of the decision makers. Although this link is well-accepted in this literature, intra-household bargaining power is de facto an unobserved variable. In the second essay, joint with Arthur Lewbel and Denni Tommasi and titled “Women's Empowerment and Family Health: A Two-Step Approach”, we propose a novel two-step approach to overcome this data limitation and to directly assess the causal link between women's empowerment and family health. In the first stage, we structurally recover a dollar-based measure of women's intra-household empowerment, with a clear interpretation provided by economic theory; in the second stage, we identify the causal effect of women's decision power relative to men's on household members' health. We demonstrate that women's bargaining power improves their own health outcomes, while not affecting their spouses'. When we turn to children, we find that improvements in women's position within the family does not affect their weight or height, but it increases their likelihood to receive vaccinations. The determinants of individuals' health, however, go beyond the family, and trace back to historical developments. In the third essay, joint with Federico Mantovanelli and titled “Long-Term Effects of Access to Health Care: Medical Missions in Colonial India”, we examine the long-term effect of access to historical health facilities on current individual health outcomes. To this aim, we construct a novel and fully geocoded dataset that combines contemporary individual-level data with historical information on Protestant medical missions. We exploit variation in the activities of missionary societies and use an instrumental variable approach to show that proximity to a Protestant medical mission has a causal effect on individuals' health status. The investigation of potential transmission channels indicates that the long-run effect of access to health care is not driven by persistence of infrastructure, but by changes in individual habits regarding hygiene, preventive care and health awareness, which have been bequeathed over time. Important policy implications can be drawn. First, policies aimed at promoting gender equality within families, such as improving women's property and inheritance rights, can have positive spillovers on women's health, poverty and mortality, and can boost health investments in children. Second, as the population in India and in other developing countries ages, gender asymmetries among the elderly need to be further investigated and promptly addressed by the development practitioners. Third, intra-household inequalities, between genders and across ages, should be taken into account when measuring poverty and evaluating the effect of policies to alleviate it. Finally, in light of the existence of long-run effects, the expansion of health care access in India should become an even more prominent goal for policy makers, as it can beneficially affect both current and future generations. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

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Promoting household food security and reducing malnutrition rates of a growing population with the same amount of water is a challenge facing South African nutritionists and agriculturalists alike. Apart from non-food related effects of agriculture in general, the crop and livestock production practices of the South African smallholder farmer may have nutritional implications, primarily when practised on residential land and resulting in home consumption. Yet, few studies have systematically investigated the impact thereof. It appears that crop diversification, gender issues and nutrition education are among the important factors that strengthen the link between agriculture and nutrition. Since food production is the most water-intensive activity in society, nutritional water productivity (i.e. nutrition per volume water) of foods and the nutritional water footprint of diets should be investigated in order to achieve a sustainable solution. This implies that both the demand for a diet consisting predominantly of water-productive plant products, as well as the supply thereof, be addressed.

Although HIV/AIDS and water-borne infections, exemplified by diarrhoea, are leading causes of morbidity and mortality in developing countries, their association has received only cursory attention. This study was therefore conducted to ascertain the scope and frequency of potential enteric bacterial pathogens isolated from stool samples of HIV-positive and -negative individuals with and without diarrhoea as well as household drinking water of the study groups in rural communities in Limpopo Province. A prospective study involving 330 HIV-positive individuals (200 with diarrhoea and 130 without diarrhoea) and 160 HIV-negative patients, (80 with diarrhoea and 80 without) was undertaken from August 2005 to January 2006. Stool and drinking water samples were analyzed for the presence of enteric bacterial pathogens using standard microbiological methods. Of the 330 HIV-positive individuals, 126 (38%) and 206 (62%) were males and females respectively. HIV prevalence was mostly common in the age group 21to 30 years. A potential enteric pathogen was isolated from all (100%) of the HIV-positive individuals with diarrhoea and 68 (52.3%) without diarrhoea (P = 0.0001). Bacteria that were significantly associated with diarrhoea among HIV-positive patients and their household drinking water were Escherichia coli, Salmonella spp., Campylobacter spp., Shigella spp. and Aeromonas spp. whereas Plesiomonas shigelloides was not. The same profiles of enteric bacterial pathogens were isolated from HIV-negative individuals but at lower frequencies (P = 0.0001). Enteric pathogens were distributed across gender and different age strata. A notable finding was the emergence of Aeromonas spp. and Plesiomonas shigelloides in HIV infected individuals with diarrhoea. This study provides the foremost baseline reference compendium on the scope and frequencies of enteric bacterial pathogens isolated from stool and household drinking water samples of HIV-positive and -negative individuals with and without diarrhoea in rural communities in the Limpopo Province.