Gender differences in time allocation of poor children in Colombia

This paper studies the effect of credit constraints and constraints on transfers between parents and children, on differences in labor and schooling across children within the same household, with an application to gender. When families are unconstrained in these respects, differences in labor supply or education are driven by differences in wages or returns to education. If the family faces an imperfect capital market, the labor supply of each child is inefficient, but differences across children are still driven by comparative advantage. However, if interfamily transfers are constrained so that parents cannot offset inequality between their children, they will favor the human capital accumulation of the more disadvantaged child -generally the one who works more as a child. We use our theory to examine the gender gap in child labor. Using a sample of poor families in Colombia, we conform our predictions among rural households, although this is less clear for urban households. The gender gap is largely explained by the wage gap between girls and boys. Moreover, families with the potential to make capital transfers to adult children (e.g. those with large animals), can compensate adult sons for their greater child labor and reduced educational attainment. In such families, as predicted, the male/female labor gap is greater.

An approximation to the digital divide among low income people in Colombia, Mexico and Perú: two composite indexes

El estudio analiza los determinantes de uso y acceso a las tecnologías de información y comunicación en personas de bajos ingresos en pasases como Colombia, México y Perú. El punto central está en analizar las diferencias entre países de acuerdo a diferentes variables socioeconómicas. Se encuentra que la variable que más explica el nivel de acceso digital es la escolaridad. De otro lado no se encuentra una brecha por género sino en Perú. Los resultados también indican que cuando solo se tienen en cuenta las tecnologías más ‘avanzadas’, las diferencias entre la población son más notorias

Use of informal mobile telephony in low income households in Colombia

El acceso a la telefonía móvil en Colombia evidencia ciertas particularidades con respecto a otros países. En Colombia surgió una nueva alternativa de comunicación que consistía en la venta de minutos de celular en las calles y en pequeños negocios durante los primeros años de ésta década. En este documento se analizan las principales características de quienes usan esta modalidad de comunicación con base en una encuesta dirigida a usuarios y no usuarios de bajos ingresos. Se usa un modelo probabilístico para explicar las características de las personas que lo usan y se encuentra que las personas que están en la modalidad de contrato prepago y que viven en ciudades pequeñas tienen una mayor probabilidad de usar esta alternativa de comunicación. De otro lado se encuentra que quienes están con el operador dominante tienden a usar este servicio también de una forma más notoria. Estos resultados parecen indicar que los diferenciales de precios entre las llamadas off-net y on-net así como entre prepago y postpago son los que alimentaron el surgimiento de esta actividad

Interacciones de género estudiante-profesor, deserción y rendimiento académico en Colombia

En este trabajo se estima el efecto del género del profesor sobre la deserción y el rendimiento educativo de los estudiantes en Colombia durante el periodo 2009-2012. La estrategia empírica se fundamenta en un modelo de regresión lineal que establece la relación entre la proporción de profesoras interactuada con el género del estudiante. Los resultados sugieren que existe un sesgo de selección debido a que las profesoras aumentan la probabilidad de que las niñas finalicen la educación media, lo que implica que la composición de habilidades entre hombres y mujeres no es la misma. Luego de corregir este sesgo de selección, se encuentra un resultado significativo en el género del profesor. Un aumento de una desviación estándar en la proporción de profesoras incrementa en 0.01 desviaciones estándar el puntaje de los niños en la prueba de matemáticas y el puntaje de las niñas en la prueba de lenguaje. Este trabajo utiliza información proveniente de la prueba Saber 11, la Resolución 166 y el concurso docente.

Choques al hogar, trabajo Infantil y acumulación de capital humano : evidencia para Colombia

En este trabajo se estima el efecto que tienen distintos choques a los hogares sobre el logro académico de los niños. Mediante un modelo de regresión lineal, se encuentra un efecto adverso de la presencia de choques sobre el puntaje de la prueba Saber 11. Además, los resultados sugieren que el trabajo infantil es un mecanismo por el cual los choques afectan negativamente la acumulación de capital humano. Al explorar efectos heterogéneos por sexo y edad, las estimaciones indican que el efecto de los choques es guiado por los hombres y los adolescentes mayores a 14 años.

Is there a motherhood penalty? decomposing the family wage gap in Colombia

The aim of this paper is to provide an estimation and decomposition of the motherhood wage penalty in Colombia. Our empirical strategy was based on the matching procedure designed by Ñopo (The Review of Economics and Statistics, 90(2), 290–299, 2008a ) for the case of gender wage gaps. This is an alternative procedure to the well-known Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition method. Using the cross-sectional data of the Colombian Living Standard Survey, the wage gap was decomposed into four components, according to the characteristics of mothers and non-mothers. Three of the components are explained by differences in observable characteristics of women, while the other is the unexplained part of the gap. We found that mothers earn, on average, 1.73 % less than their counterparts without children and that this gap slightly decreased when the group included older women. It is observed from the results that, once schooling was included as a matching variable, the unexplained part of the gap considerably decreased and became non-significant. Thus, we did not find evidence of wage discrimination against mothers in the Colombian labor market. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Overcoming Gender Disadvantages. Social Policy Analysis of urban middle-class women in Colombia

The World Bank Report 2012 starts with this statement: “Gender equality matters in itself andit matters for development because, in today’s globalized worlds, countries that use the skillsand talents of their women would have an advantage over those which do not use it.” With theframe that suggest that gender equality matters, this paper describes some policy alternativesoriented to overcome gender disadvantages in the formal labor market incorporation of theurban middle class women in Colombia. On balance, the final recommendation suggest that itis desirable to adopt policy alternatives as Community Centers, which are programs orientedto a social redistribution of the domestic work as a way to encourage women participationin the formal labor market with the social support of the members of their own community.The problem that the social policy needs to address is the segregation of women in the formallabor market in Colombia. Although the evidence shows that the women overcome theeducational gap by showing better performance in education that their male peers, womenare still segregated of the labor market. The persistence of high rates of unemployment on thefemale population, the prevalence of the informal labor market as a women labor market, andthe presence of the payment difference between men and women with similar professionaltrainings are circumstances that sustain the segregation statement. These circumstances areinefficient for the society because an economic analysis shows that the cost of maintain the statuquo is externalized in the social security system that includes health, pension and maternityleave regimens. Therefore, the women segregation involves a market failure.This paper evaluates five policy alternatives each directed to the progress of a different causaldimension of the problem: (i) Quotas in the private market, (ii) Flexible working hours,(iii) replace the maternity leave with a family leave, (iv) Increase the Community Centers forredistributing the care work, and (v) Equal payment enforcement. The first alternative looksto increase women’s participation in the formal labor market. The second, third, and fourthalternatives constitute a package addressed at redistributing care work by reducing women’sresponsibility for reproductive work in the household with the help of husbands and the localgovernment. The fifth alternative intervenes to resolve the equal payment problem.After a four criteria evaluation that measure effectiveness, robustness and improbability inimplementation, efficiency and political acceptability or social opposition, the strongest alternativeis the fostering of Community Centers that promote a redistribution of care work. Thispolicy performs well in the assessment process because it combines gender focus with importantindirect effects: child support and human capabilities. The policy also shows a bottomup implementation process that overcomes the main adoption difficulties in the gender focusprograms and is supported by strong evidence of success in the Colombian context; this evidenceis produced by both transnational actors as a World Bank and also in local accountabilityreporters executed by local institutions like Colombian Institute of Family Welfare (ICBF).