Insurance for the poor, called microinsurance, has recently drawn the attention of practitioners in developing countries. There are common problems among the various schemes: (1) low take‐up rates, (2) high claim rates, and (3) low renewal rates. In the present paper, we investigate take‐up decisions using household data collected in Karnataka, India, focusing on prospect theory, hyperbolic preference, and adverse selection. Prospect theory presumes that people behave in a risk‐averse way when evaluating gains but in a risk‐loving way when evaluating losses. Because insurance covers losses, the risk‐loving attitude toward losses might explain the low take‐up rates, and we find weak empirical support for this. Households with hyperbolic preference were more likely to purchase insurance, consistent with our theoretical prediction of demand for commitment. We also find some evidence on the existence of adverse selection: households with a higher ratio of sick members were more likely to purchase insurance.

Senegal is the only African country where sex work is legal and regulated by a health policy. Senegalese female sex workers (FSWs) are required to register with a health facility and to attend monthly routine health checks aimed at testing and treating sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Compliance to those routine visits is recorded on a registration card that must be carried by FSWs in order to avoid sanctions in case of police arrests. Although this policy was first introduced in 1969 to limit the spread of STIs, there is no evidence so far of its impact on FSWs' health and well‐being. The paper aims to fill this gap by exploiting a unique data set of registered and unregistered Senegalese FSWs. Using propensity score matching, we find that registration has a positive effect on FSWs' health. However, we find that registration reduces FSWs' subjective well‐being. This finding is explained by the fact that registered FSWs are found to engage in more sex acts, in riskier sex acts, have less social support from their peers, and are more likely to experience violence from clients and police officers. We prove that those results are robust to the violation of the conditional independence assumption, to misspecification of the propensity score model, and that covariate balance is achieved. The results suggest that more efforts should be deployed to reduce the stigma associated with registration and to address the poor well‐being of FSWs, which is counterproductive to HIV prevention efforts.

This paper empirically analyzes the determinants of child labor and school enrollment in rural Andhra Pradesh, India. A village fixed-effect logit model for each child is estimated with the incidence of child labor or school enrollment as the dependent variable, in order to investigate individual and household characteristics associated with the incidence. Among the determinants, this paper focuses on whose education matters most in deciding the status of each child, an issue not previously investigated in the context of the joint family system. The regression results show that the education of the child's mother is more important in reducing child labor and in increasing school enrollment than that of the child's father, the household head, or the spouse of the head. The effect of the child's mother is similar on boys and girls while that of the child's father is more favorable on boys.

There is an emerging consensus that lack of credit is a major cause of child labor and inequality in the intrahousehold distribution of resources. At the same time, patterns in how children spend their time appear to be strongly influenced by maternal employment decisions. This paper includes an assessment of the effect of credit constraints on maternal employment and that of maternal employment on the intrahousehold allocation of labor, a nexus which has been left unexplored by existing studies. Three findings emerge: (1) a mother is more likely to work outside when a household lacks resources, and her domestic labor can be easily replaced by other members, (2) credit market accessibility is one of the major determinants of maternal labor, and (3) elder daughters assume a large part of the burden of maternal employment by providing domestic labor. Under binding credit constraints, results of this study support the collective as opposed to the unitary model of households.

In this special issue, we use unique household data which was collected exclusively for our study in Andhra Pradesh, India, with the help of an NGO. We estimate and test the intrahousehold resource allocation rules, incidence of child labor, and the effects of credit constraints on time allocation among household members. Three empirical papers of this issue indicate the overall support for the collective model against the unitary model of households, clarified the role of household structure, and show the nature of mother‐child labor substitution under a binding credit constraint. In addition, a survey paper discussing the recent trends on educational attainment and the empirical strategies in identifyng the policy effects are included.