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Assistant Professor of
Economics
Weatherhead School of
Management
11119 Bellflower Road
Cleveland, Ohio 44106
Office Phone: 216-368-0208
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Trade
liberalization can generate substantial distributional conflicts. Despite
its importance, the effect on income from household production has received
little attention. This paper measures the impact of increasing trade
openness between Mexico and the U.S. resulting from NAFTA on the income of
small versus large farmers in Mexico. Relating NAFTA cuts in trade restrictions
to border prices of Mexican exports and imports, I find that NAFTA-induced
tariff reductions decreased the border price of corn, Mexico's main
agricultural import, and increased the border prices of tomatoes and
melons, Mexico's main agricultural exports. Then, I find that the rise in
fruit and vegetable prices benefited small farmers more than large farmers;
while the drop in corn prices hurt large farmers more than small. This
study accounts for benefits to Mexican farmers resulting from higher prices
of export goods as well as losses incurred from greater import competition.
Finally, the analysis at the regional level shows stronger results in the
central region where trade liberalization increased the level of earning of
poor farmers relative to those of large farmers. These results are
consistent with observed cropping patterns and regional characteristics.
This
paper introduces a model of endogenous fertility, where higher wages of
parents induces lower fertility, into a dynamic model of human capital
investment with credit constraints. It turns out that this has a dramatic
effect on the set of steady states: these shrink from a continuum to a
finite set, implying that the dynamics is subject to substantially less
history dependence. This happens essentially because skilled households
have fewer children than unskilled households, which induces a downward
demographic drift to the skill ratio in the economy, thus acting as a
selection mechanism across the set of steady states that is obtained with
fixed fertility. Moreover, steady states must be characterized by upward
mobility among the unskilled to counteract this demographic drift. Hence,
the paper generates a novel theory of long run mobility not driven by any
stochastic shocks or heterogeneity in abilities or tastes, but instead by
endogenous fertility, suggesting an empirically testable connection between
mobility and fertility patterns in the long run.
Work
in Progress
Self-Control and Nutritional Knowledge: What Influences
Children’s Food Consumption?, with Heather Royer
Childhood Obesity, Parents’ Knowledge, and Report Cards,
with Heather Royer
Networks and Savings Products in Nepal
Regional Differences in the Cropping Choices of Mexican
Farmers: the Importance of Transportation Costs, Land Size and Quality, and
Border Prices
Working Papers
Social Sectors and Poverty in Armenia: from Equity in Access
to Equity in Quality
Human
Development Working Paper, World Bank, March 2006
(with D. Angel-Urdinola and S. Jain)
Generational Accounting in the ECA Region
Human
Development Working Paper, World Bank, November 2005
(with M. Chawla, N. Krishnan, P. Rizza, R. Zakirova)
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