On the Risks of Belonging to Disadvantaged Groups: A Bayesian Analysis of Labour Market Outcomes

Although methods of analysis based on Bayes’ theorem have had rich applications in Law and in Medicine they have not been much used in Economics. We use Bayes’ theorem to construct two concepts of the “risk” associated with belonging to a particular group in terms of a favourable labour market outcome; this, in the Indian context, is taken as being in “regular employment”. The first concept, the Employment Risk Ratio, measures the odds of a person being in regular employment to being in non-regular employment, given that he belongs to a particular group. The second, the Group Risk Ratio, measures the odds of a person being in regular employment, given that he belongs to one group against belonging to another group. We then apply these concepts of risk to data for four subgroups in India: forward-caste Hindus; Hindus from the Other Backward Classes; Dalits (collectively the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes); and Muslims. We show that, on both measures of risk, forward caste Hindus do best in the Indian labour market. This is partly due to their superior labour market attributes and partly due to their better access to good jobs. When inter-group differences in attributes are neutralised, the favourable labour market performance of forward caste Hindus is considerably reduced. We conclude that it is the lack of attributes necessary for, rather than lack of access to, regular employment that holds back India’s deprived groups

Gender Bias Among Children in India in their Diet and Immunisation Against Disease

This paper conducts an econometric analysis of data for a sample of over 4000 children in India, between the ages of 1-2 years of age, with a view to studying two aspects of the neglect of children: their likelihood of being immunised against disease and their likelihood of receiving a nutritious diet. The starting hypothesis, consistent with an universal interest in gender issues, was that girls were more likely to be neglected than boys. The analysis confirmed this hypothesis. In respect of vaccinations, the likelihood of girls being fully vaccinated, after controlling for other variables, was five percentage points lower than that for boys. In respect of receiving a nutritious diet, the treatment of girls depended very much on whether or not their mothers were literate: there was no gender discrimination between children of literate mothers; on the other hand, when the mother was illiterate, girls were five percentage points less likely to be well-fed relative to their brothers and the presence of a literate father did little to dent this gender gap. But the analysis also pointed to a broader conclusion which was that all children in India suffered from sharper, but less publicised, forms of disadvantage than that engendered solely by gender. These were the consequences which stemmed from children being born to illiterate mothers and being brought up in the more impoverished parts of India.Children, gender, diet, vaccination, India

The unequal treatment of voters under a single transferable vote

The method of Single Transferable Voting (STV) underpins electionsin several countries. The advantages claimed for STV are that, firstly, it allows each voter to express his/her preferences over all the candidates and, secondly, it takes account of each voter’s range of preferences in determing the electoral outcome. A disquieting feature of STV - and one that has hardly been commented upon - is that the second point is not true: some voters have more than just their first preference taken account of; for other voters, it is only their first preference votes which are counted, their remaining preferences being ignored. This creates two classes of voters - termed in this paper as ‘further-preference’ and ‘first-preference only’ voters. Applying these concepts to the (STV based) Northern Ireland Assembly elections of 2003, this paper shows that over half of all voters were ‘first-preference only’ voters. Moreover, the different parties had different endowments of voters from these groups: in particular, the Unionist parties had a disproprtionately larger share of ‘further-preference’ voters compared to the Nationalist parties. This might go some way to explaining why, even though the vote share of the Democratic Unionist Party was only slightly higher - and the vote share of the Ulster Unionist Party was actually lower - than that of Sinn Féin, both parties had disproportionately more seats in the Assembly. The paper proceeds to argue that, if society is averse to inter-voter inequality, it might prefer a voting method which treated all voters equally - even though it allowed them a more limited expression of preferences over candidates - to the STV method.Elections, Single Transferable Vote, Inequality

A Duration-Sensitive Measure of the Unemployment Rate: Theory and Application.

The measurement of unemployment, like that of poverty, involves two distict steps: identification and aggregation. In this two-step process, the issue of identifying the unemployed has received considerable attention but, once the unemployed have been identiified, the aggregation issue has been addressed by simply "counting heads": the unemployment rate is conventionally defined as the proportion of the labour force that, on a given date, is unemployed. This, in particular, leads to differences between individuals, in their unemployment experiences being ignored when the unemployment rate is being computed. This paper - predicated on the proposition that what matters to a person is not just the fact of unemployment but also its duration - proposes a methodology, derived from the measurement of income inequality, for adjusting unemployment rates so as to make them "duration-sensitive". In consequence, different values of the "duration-sensitive" rate will, depending upon the degree of inequality in the distribution of unemployment duration, and upon the extent to which society is averse to such inequality, be associated with the same value of the conventionally defined unemployment rate. A numerical example, based on published data for seven major OECD countries, illustrates the methodology.

A General Measure of the "Effective" Number of Parties in a Political System.

This paper proposes a general measure of the effective number of parties, based on the family of generalized entropy inequality indices. This measure encompasses existing measures in the sense that these can be derived, through an appropriate configuration of parameter values, from this general measure. The proposed measure has attractive properties both in terms of interpretation and in terms of aggregation. In terms of interpretation, this measure always yields a value between 1 and N (N=the number of parties contesting) and takes one, or the other, extreme value depending on whether vote (or seats) are monopolized by a party or shared equally between the contesting parties. In terms of aggregation, it is always the case that the effective numbers of parties at sub-national levels can be aggregated to yield a national figure. The aggregation is effected through weights which, themselves, have an appealing interpretation in terms of the different sub-national contributions to overall inequality in the distribution of votes (or seats). The use of this general measure is illustrated by applying it to the results of the 1997 and 2001 Parliamentary (Westminster) elections in Northern Ireland. The central message of the paper is that the construction of indices or measures which purport to give scalar representation to vectors of distributive outcomes cannot be wholly based on "objective" considerations. This observation applies in full to the measurement of the effective number of parties in a political system.

Home is Where the Hurt is: An Econometric Analysis of Injuries Caused By Spousal Assault

Using data on injuries presenting at the emergency departments of participating hospitals in the Australian state of Queensland we examine the nature of injuries resulting from spousal assault and compare them to injuries from nonspousal assault and accidental injuries. We ask: who are the persons most vulnerable to spousal assault?, Are spousal assault injuries more (or less) severe than injuries from nonspousal assault and accidental injuries? Do the recorded figures for assault injuries on womenunderstate the true number of assault injuries, and if so, by how much?Spousal Assault; hospital data; econometric estimation

Public Choice: an Overview

Public Choice begins with the observation that in politics, as in economics, individuals and institutions compete for scarce resources and that, therefore, the same methods of analyses used by economists to explain the behaviour of consumers and producers might also serve well to explain the behaviour of governments and other (allegedly) “public-spirited” organisations . As Tullock (1988) succinctly put it, Public Choice is "the invasion of politics by economics". Public Choice derives its rationale from the fact that, in many areas, 'political' and 'economic' considerations interact so that a proper understanding of issues in one field requires a complementary understanding of issues in the other. Although the incursion of the analytical methods of economics into political science - which is the hall-mark of Public Choice - began in the 1950s, it was not until at least three decades later that the trickle became a flood. This chapter provides an overview of this field

How much did working wives contribute to changes in income inequality between couples in the UK?

A number of studies have established that income inequality in the United Kingdom has gone up quite dramatically since the late 1970s (see Goodman and Webb (1994) and Jenkins (1995)). There is also agreement on the proximate causes of this rise: the growing dispersion of incomes from work (Gosling,Machin and Meghir, 1994); the increase in benefit-dependent families; and the growing polarisation between dual-earner and no-earner families (Gregg and Wadsworth, 1994; Harkness, Machin and Waldfogel, 1994; Machin and Waldfogel, 1994). This paper focuses on the last phenomenon. A major cause of