Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in Determinants of Empowerment in a Capability Based Poverty Approach:Evidence from The Gambia Sofia Karina Trommlerová (IHEID Geneva)Stephan Klasen (University of Göttingen)Ortrud Lessmann (Helmut-Schmidt-Universität Hamburg) August 2013 AbstractAlthough empowerment is seen as intrinsically important and instrumentally valuable to escape poverty, there is very little research on the empirical drivers of empowerment. Using custom-made household-level information and using advanced econometric techniques that also correct for endogeneity, we examine what empowers individuals in The Gambia to change their own lives and affect changes in their communities. We show that people's self-reported capabilities are the most important drivers of empowerment. We also show that respondents' confidence that they will be the most powerful agents in their lives is higher for men, foreigners, people free of health limitations, and younger people. JEL codes: I30, I32, O15, Z13, Z18Keywords: empowerment, agency, capability approach, The Gambia, correction for endogeneity AcknowledgmentsThe authors would like to thank Jean-Louis Arcand for including their questions to the CDDP survey he was in charge of in The Gambia and Eric Djimeu for conducting the survey and for helpful comments.

Growth faltering describes a widespread phenomenon that height- and weight-for-age of children in developing countries collapse rapidly in the first two years of life. We study age-specific correlates of child nutrition using Demographic and Health Surveys from 56 developing countries to shed light on the potential drivers of growth faltering. Applying nonparametric techniques and exploiting within-mother variation, we find that maternal and household factors predict best the observed shifts and bends in child nutrition age curves. The documented interaction between age and maternal characteristics further underlines the need not only to provide nutritional support during the first years of life but also to improve maternal conditions.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13524-015-0449-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

This paper investigates the possible drivers of the large improvements in infant survival that have taken place in recent years in Kenya. The rate of postneonatal deaths per 1000 live births fell by more than half, dropping from 47 to 22 over the period 2003-2008. Among the possible causes of the decline are various targeted new public health initiatives, improved access to water and sanitation, and overall improvements in living conditions as a product of overall economic growth. A Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition using Demographic and Health Survey data shows that the increased ownership of insecticide-treated bednets (ITN) in endemic malaria zones explains 39 percent of the decline in postneonatal mortality and 58 percent of the decline in infant mortality. Changes in other observable candidate factors do not explain substantial portions of the decline. The widespread ownership of ITNs in areas of Kenya where malaria is rare suggests that better targeting of ITN provision programs could improve the cost-effectiveness of such programs.

We study the impact of a universal child benefit on fertility, identifying separately the effects driven by conceptions and those by abortions, and analyzing the potentially asymmetric impact of the benefit's introduction and its later cancellation. We focus on a generous lump-sum maternity allowance that was introduced in Spain in 2007 and then eliminated in 2010. Using administrative, population-level data, we create a panel data set of the 50 Spanish provinces, with monthly data on birth rates and weekly data on abortion rates between 2000 and 2017. Our identification is based on the timing of the introduction and cancellation of the policy (both announcement and implementation), from which we infer when the changes in births and abortions can be expected. We find that the introduction of the policy led to a 3% increase in birth rates, due to both a decrease in abortions and an increase in conceptions. The announcement of the cancellation led to a transitory increase in birth rates just before the benefit termination was implemented, driven by a short-term decrease in abortions. The actual cancellation then led to a 6% decline in birth rates. A heterogeneity analysis suggests that the positive fertility effect of the benefit's introduction was driven by high-skilled parents, while the negative impact of the cancellation was larger among low-skilled and out-of-labor-force parents, and in poorer regions and areas that were more affected by the 2008 recession. We also find suggestive evidence that the child benefit had both a timing ("tempo") effect, such that some women had children earlier, and a level ("quantum") effect, where some women had more children than they would have had otherwise. JEL Codes: J13, J18

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