Mary Paula Arends-Kuenning

• Ph.D. Economics University of Michigan
• Professor (Full) at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

This paper studies how the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) affected the wage gap between high and low-paid workers within Mexico, considering internal migration. In low-skilled, labor-abundant developing countries, trade liberalization should theoretically increase the wages of low-skilled workers, decreasing income inequality. However,...

The main objective of this paper is to understand the changes in the intrahousehold allocation of resources and the consequences for measuring poverty and inequality in Brazil between 2003 and 2018. We estimated a collective household model using the three most recent Brazilian Household Budget Surveys. Results showed a trend towards a more balance...

The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) has been applied widely in low-income settings, but rarely in middle-income settings such as Southern Brazil. This article explores the participation of women in agriculture in the western region of the state of Paraná, Brazil. We measured the empowerment of members of an agricultural cooperative...

Resumo: O objetivo deste trabalho foi mensurar e analisar o empoderamento das mulheres, em sua maioria agricultoras, associadas à Lar Cooperativa Agroindustrial ou participantes enquanto cônjuges dos cooperados. Para a obtenção dos resultados, foram coletados dados primários por meio de questionários aplicados a 150 casais de agricultores e agricul...

The United Nations included reducing harvest and postharvest losses as a Sustainable Millennium Development Goal in 2015, leading to increased research and policymaker interest in reducing losses to insure food security. This article analyzes the factors associated with self-reported harvest loss among soybean farmers in Paraná, Brazil, using a sur...

The growth of the elderly population and changes in household composition raise important questions regarding the level of well-being of the elderly in developing countries. Traditional analyses of poverty often ignore the question of intra-household distribution of resources. This paper is the first to apply a collective consumption model to analy...

This paper explores how the anticipated expenditure on children’s college education affects household asset allocation, applying a two-stage budgeting model of asset demand by using the 2016 China Family Panel Studies Data (CFPS). The empirical results show that if a household plans to send a child to college, the probability of holding risky asset...

As cooperativas são vistas como veículos de mobilização de recursos e desempenham um papel significativo na melhoria dos meios de subsistência e no desenvolvimento das comunidades rurais em grande parte do mundo. Na Europa, onde o modelo cooperativista surgiu no final do século XIX, de 40% a 60% do comércio agrícola corresponde às cooperativas (Aja...

We examine differences in transitions between stages of type 2 diabetes across racial, ethnic, and urban/rural statuses. The individual-level data from the 2006 to 2012 waves of the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) and county-level data from the 1990-2000 U.S. Censuses, the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, and the Inter-university Consortium for P...

Purpose Different forms of social learning have been explored to act as complements to conventional extension services. This paper examines the possibility of using vocational training to high school students who in turn transfer information to their parents. Design/Methodology/approach We conduct a randomized control trial in nine communities in...

We examine the differences in transitions between stages of type 2 diabetes across racial, ethnic, and urban/rural statuses. The individual-level data from the 2006 to 2012 waves of the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) and county-level data from the 1990-2000 US Censuses, the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, and the Inter-university Consortium for...

The United Nations included reducing harvest and postharvest losses as a Sustainable Millennium Development goal in 2015, leading to increased research and policymaker interest in reducing losses to insure food security. This paper analyzes the factors associated with self-reported harvest loss among soybean farmers in Paraná, Brazil using a survey...

Smallholder agriculture plays a key role to promote food security in Brazil. Population ageing together with fertility decline and expanded educational opportunities for youth present challenges for the continuation of family agriculture across generations, and those challenges are especially difficult for smallholder farmers. This paper examines f...

Purpose The main objective of this paper is to analyze patterns of consumption expenditure and the effects of income, prices and socioeconomic and demographic factors on demand among elderly- and young-adult-headed households in Brazil. Design/methodology/approach The authors estimated a Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System demand system using the...

Vide em: https://www.ipea.gov.br/portal/images/stories/PDFs/boletim_regional/210218_brua_23_artigo11.pdf Boletim Regional, Urbano e Ambiental nº 23, Edição Especial - Agricultura 2020

Can women's contraceptive method choice be better understood through risk compensation theory? This theory implies that people act with greater care when the perceived risk of an activity is higher and with less care when it is lower. We examine how increased over-the-counter access to emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs) accompanied by marketing c...

Resumo: Sabendo-se que a felicidade é sentida de forma subjetiva e a sua mensuração envolve a avaliação que cada pessoa faz de sua vida, este trabalho objetivou identificar e analisar quais são os determinantes socioeconômicos que influenciam na felicidade dos associados da Lar Cooperativa Agroindustrial. Para tanto, elaboraram-se questões que busc...

We examine whether there is any movement in the employment of native-educated nurses due to the influx of foreign-educated nurses. To avoid conflating the short- and long-term reactions to the entry of newly arrived foreign-educated nurses, we implement a multiple instrumentation procedure. We find that there is no significant effect of foreign-edu...

Resumo This paper presents a revision about the elderly population in Brazil, addressing aspects of the demographic transition as it relates to socio-economic conditions and some consequences and trends associated with policies affecting Brazil’s elderly. Since a demographic transition has been occurring as a result of the aging of the Brazilian po...

Farmers' adoption of new agricultural technologies is a risky endeavor that requires reliable and persuasive information, clarity about the technology's suitability to local conditions, and careful instruction to be successful. Often, these standards are not met in developing countries due to the scarcity of local research facilities; and the spars...

This paper explores how the anticipated expenditure on children's college educations affects household asset allocation by using the 2016 China Family Panel Studies Data (CFPS). We find that anticipated investment in children's college educations influences household asset allocation decisions in China. The empirical results show that if a househol...

We examine whether there is any movement in the employment of native-educated nurses due to the influx of foreign-educated nurses. To avoid conflating the short-and long-term reaction to the entry of newly arrived foreign-educated nurses, we implement a multiple instrumentation procedure. We find that there is no significant effect of foreign-educa...

Smallholder agriculture plays a key role to promote food security in Brazil. Population ageing together with fertility decline and expanded educational opportunities for youth present challenges for the continuation of smallholder agriculture across generations. This paper examines smallhold-ers' farm succession decisions in Western Paraná, Brazil...

Can women's contraceptive method choice be better understood by applying risk compensation theory? This theory implies that people act with greater care when the perceived risk of an activity is higher and with less care when it is lower. We examine how increased over-the-counter access to emergency contraceptives pills (ECPs) accompanied by market...

Na década de 2000, as universidades federais brasileiras passaram a adotar políticas de ação afirmativa nos processos seletivos de seus cursos de graduação. Nesse período, que compreende até a aprovação da Lei de Cotas em 2012, diversas instituições de educação superior definiram políticas de ação afirmativa com diferentes critérios e públicos-alvo...

This paper investigates how the adoption of affirmative action for college admission affected the enrollment of students from disadvantaged backgrounds in Brazil. We explore the time heterogeneity of policy adoption by universities to identify the policy impacts while accounting for contemporaneous confounding effects. Our study shows that the adop...

Esta pesquisa tem por objetivo investigar e analisar, sob a ótica do produtor rural, o volume e os fatores que afetam as perdas na colheita de grãos de soja na região Oeste do Paraná. Para a obtenção dos resultados foram coletados dados primários por meio de entrevistas com 243 produtores rurais em 8 municípios da região. Os resultados apontaram qu...

This study aims to analyze and decompose the gap between White and non-White students’ test scores observed in the Brazilian National Evaluation System of Basic Education (SAEB)—2015. To do so, proficiency equations were estimated for each student race group (White, Brown, Black, and Indigenous) using the recentered influence function method, which...

Agricultural productivity growth is vital for economic and food security outcomes which are threatened by climate change. In response, governments and development agencies are encouraging the adoption of ‘climate-smart’ agricultural technologies, such as conservation agriculture (CA). However, there is little rigorous evidence that demonstrates the...

This paper investigates how the adoption of affirmative action for college admission affected the enrollment of students from disadvantaged backgrounds in Brazil. We explore the time heterogeneity of policy adoption by universities to identify the policy impacts while accounting for contemporaneous confounding effects. Our study shows that the adop...

Trade facilitates growth in some regions of a country while shrinking others, and therefore to benefit from trade, labour may need to be able to migrate. This mobility is particularly crucial in a developing country with high income inequality like Mexico. We seek to answer the following questions: What characteristics facilitate or hinder that int...

Agricultural productivity growth is vital for economic and food security outcomes which are threatened by climate change. In response, governments and development agencies are encouraging the adoption of `climate-smart' agricultural technologies, such as conservation agriculture (CA). However, there is little rigorous evidence that demonstrates the...

We analyze trends in nursing education in the Philippines during a period of rising and falling demand for Philippine nurses in the developed countries. Based on focus group discussion data obtained in the Philippines, we examine students' motivations to become nurses and to what extent their choices were affected by the possibility of internationa...

This paper uses primary data from rural north India to show that participation in a community-level female empowerment program significantly increases access to employment, physical mobility, and political participation. The program provides support groups, literacy camps, adult education classes, and vocational training for rural women in several...

In Brazil, wives do most of the household work. About sixty percent of them also work outside the household, working a total of about 10 hours more per week than men. Because of this unequal distribution of household work, husbands and wives might have different priorities regarding the purchase of durable goods. Although both husbands and wives en...

This paper shows that participation in a community-level female empowerment program in India significantly increases participants' physical mobility, political participation, and access to employment. The program provides support groups, literacy camps, adult education classes, and vocational training. We use truncation-corrected matching and instr...

This paper studies the impact of the 1999 Colombian Earthquake on child nutrition and schooling. The identification strategy combines household survey data with event data on the timing and location of the earthquake, exploiting the exogenous exposure of children to the shock. The paper uniquely identifies both the short- and medium-term impacts of...

This paper employs the capability approach to explore how Latina/Latino migrants in Central Illinois—an area of the Midwest (or Heartland) that lies outside the traditional metropolitan destinations—were coping with the local effects of the global economic crisis of the late 2000s. The crisis affected the capabilities of Latina/Latino migrants to p...

This paper shows that participation in a community-level female empowerment program in India significantly increases access to employment, physical mobility, and political participation. The program provides support groups, literacy camps, adult education classes, and vocational training. We use truncation-corrected matching and instrumental variab...

This paper studies how internal migration responds to trade openness. We seek to answer the following questions: Has trade liberalization changed the pattern of internal-migration? What characteristics facilitate or hinder that internal migration? Using a gravity model of migration, We find that while economic growth from trade openness did draw wo...

This paper examines the impact of programs that provide incentives for school attendance in rural Bangladesh—a food-for-education program for poor primaryschool children and a secondary-school scholarship scheme for girls. Detailed timeuse data were available from a 1991–92 village study conducted prior to the programs’ implementation as well as fo...

When President Lula came into office in January 2003, he inherited a government that had made progress in confronting Brazil’s social inequalities. During the 1990s, the Cardoso administration together with state and local governments, focused on improving Brazil’s abysmal record in education. For example, in 1990, adults over age 15 had on average...

We analyze the impact of child labor on school achievement using Brazilian school achievement test data from the 2003 Sistema Nacional de Avaliação da Educação Básica (SAEB). We control for the endogeneity of child labor using instrumental variable techniques, where the instrumental variable is the average wage for unskilled male labor in the state...

This paper examines the recent decentralization of governance in Indonesia and its impact on local infrastructure provision. The decentralization of decisionmaking power to local jurisdictions in Indonesia may have improved the matching of public infrastructures provision with local preferences. However, decentralization has made local public infra...

The low contraceptive prevalence rate and the existence of unmet demand for family planning services present a challenge for parties involved in family planning research in Tanzania. The observed situation has been explained by the demand-side variables such as socioeconomic characteristics and cultural values that maintain the demand for large fam...

Recently, the transnational migration of nurses from developing countries to developed countries has received heightened attention from policymakers, health-care practitioners, and the media. In this article, the 1990 and 2000 Census Public Use Micro Survey (PUMS) data files are used to address the issue of nurse migration. I examine changes in the...

Bangladesh’s Food for Education Program (FFE), which provided free food to poor families if their children attended primary school, was successful in increasing children’s school enrollment, especially for girls. However, this success came at a price as class sizes increased. This paper uses a rich data set that includes school achievement test sco...

We investigate how the presence and education of parents affect adolescents’ school attendance, work participation, and school attainment in Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Panama. Across the four countries, approximately 20% of adolescents live in single-mother families and 4% in single-father families. Adolescents who live in single-mother familie...

Incl. bibl. Since the 1990s, governments of several developing countries have implemented conditional cash transfer programs to promote children's school attendance. The best known programs are Programa de Educacion, Salud y Alimentacion in Mexico, Bolsa Escola in Brazil, and Food-for-Education in Bangladesh. The goals of incentive programs are to...

In Bangladesh, pervasive poverty has kept generations of families from sending their children to school, and without education, their children's future will be a distressing echo of their own. Many children from poor families in Bangladesh do not attend school either because their families cannot afford books and other school materials, or because...

This paper estimates the risk preferences of cotton farmers in Southern Peru, using the results from a multiple-price-list lottery game. Assuming that preferences conform to two of the leading models of decision under risk--Expected Utility Theory (EUT) and Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT)--we find strong evidence of moderate risk aversion. Once we...

In Bangladesh, pervasive poverty has kept generations of families from sending their children to school, and without education, their childrens future will be a distressing echo of their own. Many children from poor families in Bangladesh do not attend school either because their families cannot afford books and other school materials, or because t...

The concern that learning performance may be adversely affected by increased class size appears to be unfounded. But unchecked, the negative peer effect could hinder student achievement.

The government of Bangladesh is currently testing and implementing strategies to change its family planning program from a reliance on field-workers who conduct home visits to a conventional fixed-site delivery system. Researchers have made two suggestions: First, the program should encourage women to switch from nonclinical methods delivered by fa...

In Bangladesh, family planning workers' visits reduce the costs of contraception and may increase the demand. If visits increase demand or if workers are targeting their visits, past visits by family planning workers should have a positive and significant effect on later probabilities of adopting contraceptive methods. Longitudinal data show that p...

The World Bank promotes women's education because it is an input into human capital. In the capabilities approach, education is a force that enables women to have expanded choices. Using data from in-depth interviews conducted in two villages in 1996 and 2000, we examine how rural Bangladeshis perceive women's education and to what extent those per...

Abstract While the income (poverty) effect on child labor is long established as a main determinant of child labor, there is a growing body of literature considering the pull of the labor market. This paper demonstrates that ceteris paribus, employment rates for 14- 16 year old boys and girls in urban Brazil increase as local labor market opportuni...

Will the biotechnology revolution improve the living standards of poor rural farmers in developing countries? The Green Revolution showed that the economic and social structures in a society play a larger role in determining how innovations affect people than the scientific content of the innovations. Social and economic structures within developin...

Should family planning programs put more effort into persuading couples to want smaller families or into helping women achieve their reproductive goals? Indeed, can family planning programs affect fertility preferences? Longitudinal data from Bangladesh collected from 1982 to 1993 show that women's desired family sizes have declined dramatically. T...

Using three data sets reflecting experi- ences in two regions of Peru—including a 1994 reinterview of women who partici- pated in the 1991-1992 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS)—this article exam- ines the reproductive goals of a sample of Peruvian women, the proportion who had an unintended pregnancy during a period of more than two years and th...

The international financial crisis manifests itself in Ireland not only as a crisis of the banking system, but also as a major fiscal crisis, aggravated by years of soft revenue policy and a housing bubble that has burst spectacularly. The severe drop in economic output results in a crisis of employment and a definitive end to the ‘Celtic Tiger’ er...

Experimental studies demonstrating the effectiveness of nonclinical distribution of contraceptives are typically conducted in settings where contraceptive use is low and unmet need is extensive. Determining the long-term role of active outreach programs after initial demand is met represents an increasingly important policy issue in Asia, where con...

Through linkage of a Demographic and Health Survey to a situation analysis, this article explores whether current contraceptive use in Peru is affected by the service environment in which a woman resides. The investigation focuses explicitly on the impact of the quality of family planning services and finds that, net of personal and household chara...

This report reviews the experience of the World Fertility Surveys and the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in collecting community-level data on family planning. It assesses the validity of the community data for Peru that were collected via a service availability module, much like that which is used for the DHS, through a comparison with data...

A list of the officers and trustees of the Illinois Economics Association.

While maid's services are considered luxury goods in developed countries, that is not always the case in developing countries. Economists believe that the reason for that is the availability of cheap unskilled labor supply in developing countries. However, few attention has been given to the scarcity of durable goods used in home-production in deve...