Introducing Foster Care: Challenges and Opportunities to Reducing Health Disparities

Guest editor Dr. Anu Partap introduces Volume 9, Issue 1 of the Journal of Applied Research on Children

Child care and female employment decisions: A theoretical note

The empirical literature is divided over the issue of whether child care costs are a significant barrier to female employment. In this paper we develop a theoretical model that contributes to the literature (1) by allocating mother's time between work, leisure and child care and (2) by introducing the possibility of uncertainty in second period income because of a greater probability of divorce. We examine how these changes affect decisions on labour supply and purchase of child care. We show that although an increase in the price of child care reduces the demand for child care, it has an ambiguous impact on female employment decisions. From a policy point of view, this implies that government subsidies aimed at mitigating the cost of child care, may not have their desired impact in encouraging greater female labour force participation. However, an increase in the probability of child care unambiguously increases female labour supply and purchase of child care.childcare; female labour supply

A multi-objective framework for the optimisation of life-cycle costs of wind turbines

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Demand for Microcredit by Indonesian women

The poverty alleviating benefits of gender-targeted microcredit programs has successfully been demonstrated in South Asia. In this paper, we examine the demand for credit by Indonesian women, in the absence of such a targeted microcredit program. We argue that when credit markets are imperfect and there are informational asymmetries, it is important to take into account the possibility that individuals may have no knowledge of or be unwilling to borrow due to constraints. Our results show that selection bias cannot be neglected, and ignoring double-selection may lead to an underestimation of loan demand by nearly one hundred percent. We find that given knowledge of credit facilities, women in female-headed households, and better networked women are more likely to borrow.Indonesia; microcredit; women