Homeownership is both an individual and society objective, because of the positive neighborhood effects associated with areas of higher homeownership. To help realize these positive effects, the Mexican government has several programs directed to increasing homeownership. Many factors, however, may influence homeownership including shocks experienced by households. Shocks such as death in family, illness or accidents, unemployment, and business, crop, or livestock loss affect homeownership if households are unable to cushion the impact of the shock. Government income support programs, however, may help cushion the effect of a shock. The main objective is to determine how shocks that households’ experience and government income support programs influence homeownership in Mexico. A secondary objective is to determine how socio-demographic variables influence homeownership in Mexico. Based on the Random Utility Model, logit models of homeownership are estimated using data are from the 2002 Mexican National Survey on Living Levels of Households. Two models are estimated; with and without income. Income is excluded because of a large number of households that did not report income. Generally, inferences from the two models are similar. Homeownership appears to not be affected by shocks experienced by households. It appears households are able to cushion the impact of shocks. The two income support programs, the Program of Direct Rural Support of Mexico (PROGRESA) and the Program of Direct Rural Support of Mexico (PROCAMPO), appear to be increasing homeownership. These social welfare programs provide cash transfers to households. For whatever reason, PROGRESA has a larger effect on homeownership than PROCAMPO. Households with older heads have a larger probability of being a homeowner than households with younger heads. No statistically significance relationship exists between education and homeownership. Regional differences are seen in homeownership, with households located in the northwest region having a higher probability of homeownership than other regions. Differences in the significance of variable representing the household head’s gender, marital status, and occupation on homeownership exist between logit models that include and do not include current income. The most likely reason for these differences is interactions between the variables and a wealth effect.

This thesis seeks to contribute to two areas of historical enquiry: the history of women and the history of poverty, by investigating the strategies used by women to cope with poverty. It attempts this in a systematic way by applying a taxonomy of strategies to the case study area of West Oxfordshire from the mid-to-late nineteenth century. As such, it broadens our understanding of the lives of women living in a rural area as well as examining poverty from the perspective of the responses to it. Three main strategies were considered; employment, household management and community strategies. General results of the analysis suggest that the strategic approach is a valuable method of examining the way poor rural women coped with poverty, highlighting the interconnections between their roles of reproduction, production and consumption. Specific results suggest that first, a radical rethink of the role and importance of the home as a female power base is required. Second, although strategies are difficult to quantify, certain strategies appear to have been more popular than others; household management emerged as the pivotal strategy to make ends meet. Careful spending and saving and the ability to utilise a variety of resouces such as animal husbandry and gardens and allotments was necessary in the fight against poverty. Employment, although of value, could not always be relied upon to provide a steady, regular income. Community strategies were of some value. They were provided informally by kin and the neighbourhood and formally by charities and poor relief. Third, certain factors were influential concerning the nature of strategies; namely duration of need, age and marital status, geographical location, seasonality and conditions for eligibility. The organic nature of the taxonomy means that it can be expanded to include additional strategies and used to study other groups of women such as the middle-class, different historical periods and geographical locations.

Doctor of Philosophy / School of Family Studies and Human Services / Maurice M. MacDonald / Since 2008, the effects of the Great Recession have lingered in memory and in public discourse, and have underscored the need to better understand the determinants of financial resilience. Financial resilience refers to the household’s ability to absorb and respond to financial shocks (MacKinnon & Derickson, 2013). A financial shock may be induced by a rapid decline in income or asset values, an increase in expenses, or some combination thereof. Solvency -- the relationship between a household’s assets and liabilities -- is one aspect of financial resilience: maintaining a healthy debt ratio affords a household the opportunity to liquidate assets to meet debt obligations in response to a financial shock. Thus, the practical question which inspired this dissertation was "what is the right amount of debt for the household?" Within the personal finance and consumer economics literature, borrowing and saving -- behaviors which influence household solvency -- are conceptualized in part as functions of individual future orientation. The premise that resources are fungible, however, has led to the characterization of concurrent borrowing and saving as a behavioral anomaly. Corporate finance, by contrast, does not characterize this common practice as an anomaly, but suggests that concurrent borrowing and saving is, in part, a matter of balancing the costs and benefits of debt. However, theories of corporate finance cannot predict or explain how individual future orientation might influence a household’s capital structure. Thus, this dissertation adds to the literature by exploring precisely this question: how does individual future orientation influence household capital structure? The present results suggest, in contrast to the existing body of research, that future orientation is positively associated with an individual’s propensity to use leverage to finance investments; but that within a complex family resource management system, this individual propensity is moderated by the relative bargaining power of the other members of the household.

Bamboo growing is strongly associated with farm size (landholding), wealth, household size, food sufficiency, irrigation facility, livestock owned, land tenure, household off-farm and on-farm incomes, physiography of the land, and access to forests. The landholding is the most important socioeconomic factor that influences households decision to grow bamboos. Bamboo growing also varies with ethnicity as socially and economically disadvantaged ethnic groups are less likely to grow bamboos on farmland than other ethnic groups. The literacy and age of the household heads are not strongly associated with bamboo growing on the farmland. Bamboo is the most commonly planted species in villages in the Midhills. They are the preferred species for planting, both on private land and in community forests. As timber is getting scarce, bamboo is increasingly used as a replacement for timber. They are also the best fodder species (particularly Bambusa nutans) in the Terai and the fifth best in the Midhills. The interest in bamboo planting is particularly high where there is better access to the markets and bamboos have already been identified as one of the important species for use in income generation programmes. There are many taboos, superstitions and beliefs, particularly in eastern Terai, against bamboo planting which prohibit households from further bamboo planting. Had there not been such beliefs, there could have been more bamboos on the farmlands of eastern Terai and Midhills than at present. Bamboo is also one of the most remarkable woody perennials in eastern Nepal. There are many households, both in the Terai and the Midhills, who are dependent on the income from bamboo craftmaking. Most of the traders are newcomers with lack of resources to expand the trade. Many bamboo growers who sold bamboos, craft makers and traders were not happy with their income and suggested various steps for improvement. There is also a need to review many of the HMGN policies as many of them contradict each other and are therefore unfavourable towards stimulating the growing of bamboos in Nepal. It is clear that a detailed development plan to improve the use of bamboo resources is needed. Socioeconomic research on bamboos should be extended to other regions of Nepal in order to inform the new development plan.

No description available.

When only whole years of age are recorded in survey data, children who experienced a birthday since the beginning of the school year may appear to be of school-age when they are not, or vice-versa. This creates an error in estimates of school participation indicators based on such data. This issue is well-known in education statistics, and several procedures attempting to correct for this error have been proposed. The present study critiques current practice and demonstrates that its limitations continue to confound educational research and high-stakes policy conclusions: speculative explanations have been proposed for what is actually a measurement artefact. An alternative adjustment strategy is proposed that coherently exploits all available information and explicitly indicates the remaining uncertainty. The application of the method is illustrated by a number of empirical case studies using recent household survey data. These examples demonstrate that the method is feasible, accurate, and that taking survey timing into account can significantly alter how these data are interpreted.

This study investigates the nature of social reproduction in single-black-womanheaded families in post-apartheid South Africa, through an ethnographic case study in Bophelong Township in Gauteng. The study focuses on the two coterminous aspects of social reproduction: the physical reproduction of labour power and the reproduction of social relations of the mode of production as such, in this case capitalism. The study included a socio-economic survey, participatory observation and in-depth interviews with woman-heads over a period of four years. After a preliminary analysis, the data concerning the woman-headed family form was organised into three generations, the Grandmothers, the Mothers and the Daughters. The conclusions are however tentative given that this was a qualitative study based on a particular type of woman-headed family, one sample in one township in South Africa. The internal variations within this family form expressed the woman-heads’ concrete lived experience, biography and social agency; and are moments of a single totality. While black women’s location is informed by many social determinations that intersect and deepen their oppression as woman-heads, they are cast into leadership roles and directly mediate relations within their families, with males, with family kin, with communities and society. The woman-heads find themselves in contradictory positions within patriarchal society, given their own socialization, the daily struggle to reproduce children physically and the need to transcend traditional patriarchal social relations, including the challenge to appropriate egalitarian forms of leadership and avoid becoming proxies for patriarchy. Despite daily struggles for survival, woman-headed families are important social spaces for struggles for egalitarian family arrangements, including those concerning sons and traditional culture, historically the domain of men. However, it is necessary that the struggles within the family are anchored and supported by the struggles for egalitarianism within society as a whole. In particular this means struggles anchored and supported by a radical, grassroots and dynamic women’s movement.

This study investigates Life Cycle Hypothesis savings behaviour among South African households. The mobility matrix methodology as well as a multivariate regression analysis was employed to assess the implications of a permanent increase and a temporary decrease in household incomes based on the impacts of the global financial crisis. Using the General Household Survey data from 2002 - 2010, the study concludes that life cycle savings were greater during the period of 2002 - 2004 (,pre-financial crisis') compared with the period of 2008 - 2010 (,post-financial crisis'). Overall, the global financial crisis significantly negatively impacted household retirement savings.

Debt and credit markets played a crucial role in recent economic history. This thesis is composed of three chapters, each of which explores some drivers of private and public debt accumulation throughout the past decade. The first two chapters are directly linked, and study some behavioural determinants of household debt accumulation in the United States in the run-up to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The third chapter takes a different perspective, and focuses on the political economy of fiscal reforms. In the first chapter, I study whether the growth in US household debt ahead of the 2007-2008 financial crisis can be attributed to shifts in the distribution of personal income across the US population. The underlying theoretical mechanism is based on the idea that if individuals are concerned with status, rising income inequality within a given social group might lead its relatively poorer members to consume a larger proportion of their resources, due to a desire to emulate the consumption levels of richer individuals (Duesenberry [1949]; Frank, Levine and Dijk [2014]; Bertrand and Morse [2016]). I test this hypothesis by exploiting state-level variation in top incomes over time, following the methodology proposed by Bertrand and Morse [2016]. The results I present in this chapter challenge the status-emulation theory of consumer behaviour during the 2000s credit boom. I show that, between 1996 and 2007, only low and-middle-income home-owners increased their expenditure and debt-to-income ratios as a response to an increase in income inequality in their state of residence. I also show that the growth in income inequality was strongly correlated with house prices growth, across US states and metropolitan areas. The positive correlation between inequality and household debt in the pre-crisis US might therefore be simply explained by the wealth and collateral effects experienced by low and middle-income home-owners living in areas where inequality was growing at the fastest rates. The lifting of credit constraints due to rising house prices have been a major driver of household debt accumulation ahead of the 2007-2008 financial crisis (Mian and Sufi [2011]). However, this effect might have been coupled with a generalized optimistic belief that the growth in house prices was likely to continue in the future (Case, Shiller and Thompson [2012]). The second chapter therefore tests whether consumers hold realistic expectations about the housing market, and whether this is a driver of their consumption and saving decisions. Using the Michigan Survey of Consumers, I show that American households have heterogeneous expectations about the future of house prices, which systematically depend upon household characteristics, as well as upon the history of past house price realizations in the local area of residence. I also analyze individual-level forecast errors to show that house price expectations are biased and inefficient. Changes in individual forecast errors are predictable from past house price realizations in the local area of residence: in particular, forecast errors are positively correlated with recent price trends, and tend to become overoptimistic in good times, and over-pessimistic in bad ones. The predictability of forecast errors from public information available at the time the forecast was made suggests a violation of full-information rational expectations theory. This systematic bias in house price expectations matters because consumers make financial decisions on the basis of their house price beliefs. By exploiting an exogenous shift in housing sentiment, I show that when individuals expect the value of their properties to rise, they borrow against the anticipated increase in home equity. The third and final chapter shifts the focus to the political drivers of public debt and deficits. Public debt crises often call for the intervention of international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In this chapter, I introduce a new panel dataset on planned fiscal policy prescriptions included in all IMF loans between 2002 and 2012, and use it to study how domestic politics of recipient countries influence the content of IMF lending agreements. I show that IMF policy prescriptions depend strongly on domestic politics and that fiscal conditions are shaped by a political force often neglected in public choice literature: the threat of extra-parliamentary opposition, or civil unrest. Extra-parliamentary opposition (measured as a populations’ propensity to riot and demonstrate) significantly reduces the stringency of fiscal policy conditions attached to IMF loans. It also reduces the number of reforms in the realms of public employment and labor markets. These results suggest that fiscal policy has a strong political component even during circumstances when domestic politics are commonly assumed to cease to matter, as they do in IMF agreements. Also, they suggest that voting is not the only mechanism through which politics enters the technical realm of economic policy.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries / Department: Family Economics.