| This dissertation consists of three essays that study the intertemporal preferences of poor households in rural Mexico, boy-girl discrimination in India and the importance of characteristics determined in early childhood for the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status. The first essay, "Poverty and Time Preference", estimates the time preference of poor households in rural Mexico by combining experimental variation with simulation-based econometric methods. I use data from PROGRESA, a program that randomly assigned communities to treatment and control groups and paid cash transfers to poor households in treatment communities. The randomization implies that differences in the consumption profiles of control and treatment households are due to the program. A standard buffer stock model predicts how consumption will respond to cash transfers as a function of the discount factor. I use the method of simulated moments to estimate such a model by matching simulated treatment effects on consumption to sample treatment effects. My estimates indicate that, under a range of assumptions, households in the PROGRESA sample have very low discount factors. It is difficult to reconcile their behavior with the much higher discount factors that have been estimated for U.S. households. I conclude that either poor households are very impatient or a richer model is needed to describe the consumption behavior of poor households in developing countries.;The second essay, "Gender Discrimination: Evidence from a Time-Use Survey", co-authored with Silvia Helena Barcellos and Adriana Lleras-Muney, examines the gender allocation of one type of investment that---despite its importance---has been understudied in the boy-girl discrimination literature: time. Using data from a survey in India that collected information on how individuals allocate their time, we investigate whether families spend more time with childcare when the baby is a boy than when the baby is a girl. Our empirical strategy relies on the fact that---if the child's sex is random---then families that have recently had a boy are ex-ante identical to families that have recently had a girl. In this case, any differences in childcare time between them can be attributed to the sex of the newborn. We find evidence that boys and girls are treated differently: households with a boy under two spend roughly 20 minutes more per day with childcare than households with a girl under two. These differences are even larger for households with only one child: families with one boy under two spend roughly 50 minutes more per day with childcare than families with one girl under two.;In the third essay, "The Intergenerational Transmission of Poverty and its Mechanisms: Evidence from Philippine Children", I investigate how important are characteristics determined in early childhood for the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status (SES). Although a large literature documents that children born to high SES are more likely to achieve high socioeconomic status in adulthood, the mechanisms by which socioeconomic status transmits across generations are still little understood. Using data from the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey, I document how much childhood human capital accounts for the intergenerational SES correlation. My results imply that childhood health and nutrition, cognitive and non-cognitive abilities and early schooling account for between one-third and one-half of the relationship between parents' SES and their offspring's SES. |
