The poverty of solidarity: the size and structure of informal income smoothing among worker households in Helsinki, 1928

Saaritsa, Sakari

doi:10.1080/03585522.2011.572585

Cited by 9 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…While remittances existed, the transfers recorded in the survey were tiny compared to contributions from coresident children, even if the burden of grown children to household consumption is considered. For the 24 % of worker households receiving transfers in cash from any source-including but not limited to remittances from adult children-the mean receipt was FIM 573, which was about 11 % of the mean positive contribution from children living with the family (for an analysis of informal transfers in Helsinki in the same data, see Saaritsa 2008bSaaritsa , 2011. Figure 3 tracks the presence of working-age children (ages 15-29) of both sexes in households by social group and the contribution of children as ratio to total expenditure (right axis), against household head age using locally weighted scatterplot smoothing (cf.…”

Section: Expected Returnsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Good for girls or bad for boys? Schooling, social inequality and intrahousehold allocation in early twentieth century Finland

Saaritsa

Kaihovaara

2014

Cliometrica

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Apart from the commonly emphasized historical or cultural explanations, was there an economics behind the early, extensive schooling of girls in Europe's Nordic periphery? This article analyses factors behind the emerging female majority in secondary schooling in early twentieth century Finland through resource allocation within households. We argue that a significant part of the female educational advantage can be explained with a classic unitary Beckerian schooling investment model. We apply an Engel specification widely used in development economics to a household budget dataset from the 1920s to estimate the effect of the age and gender of children on schooling investment across social groups. We find a pro-girl bias among households of low socio-economic status, explained primarily by the sizable penalty to boys caused by opportunity costs and expected returns. Worker boys could generate significant income from an early age, making their education initially expensive for cash-constrained families. Contrary to previous claims, the dropout rates of boys were also higher than those of girls. Together with a propensity to leave home earlier, this lowered the expected net returns to schooling. Meanwhile, the expansion of modern services created attractive job opportunities for secondary educated girls. We find no evidence of intrahousehold bargaining. The findings resemble certain cases in development economics and the economic history of advanced countries including the USA. Rather than matching with patterns of anti-girl discrimination in many developing countries, our results highlight the prehistory of the currently emerging pattern of female educational advantage-and male disadvantage-in OECD countries.Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (

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Section: Expected Returnsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…State share of female students was41 % in 1920-1921, slightly over 43 % in 1927-1928 and 44 % in 1937-1938 …”

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Good for girls or bad for boys? Schooling, social inequality and intrahousehold allocation in early twentieth century Finland

Saaritsa

Kaihovaara

2014

Cliometrica

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“…9 Following in their footsteps, other scholars have used historical household budgets to study a range of themes. These include diet and nutrition (Vecchi and Coppola, 2006;Logan, 2006Logan, , 2009Gazeley and Horrell, 2013;Gazeley and Newell, 2015;Lundh, 2013), inequality and poverty (Rossi et al 2001, Amendola andVecchi, 2016), intra-household dynamics (Horrell and Oxley, 2013;Saaritsa and Kaihovaara, 2016;Scott, Walker and Miskell, 2015;Guyer, 1980), labor force participation (Baines and Johnson, 1999), child labor (Moehling, 2001(Moehling, , 2005, consumption behavior (Scott and Walker, 2012;Lilja and Bäcklund, 2013), agriculture and home-production (Federico, 1986(Federico, , 1991, economies of scale and child well-being (Hatton and Martin, 2010;Logan, 2011), and informal transfers of cash and goods between households (Saaritsa, 2008(Saaritsa, , 2011.…”

Section: Household Budgets In Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

On Historical Household Budgets

2016

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The paper argues that household budgets are the best starting point for investigating a number of big questions related to the evolution of the living standards during the last two-three centuries. If one knows where to look, historical family budgets are more abundant than might be suspected. And statistical techniques have been developed to handle the associated problems of small, incomplete, and unrepresentative samples. We introduce the Historical Household Budgets (HHB) Project, aimed at gathering data and sources, but also at creating an informational infrastructure that provides i) reliable storage and easy access to historical family budget data, along with ii) tools to configure the data as it is entered so as to harmonise it with present-day surveys.

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“…Japanese private pawnshops, which date back to the Kamakura period (1185–333), were the primary financial institutions for poor people in the early twentieth century. They were common even in the 1920s, in contrast to the decline of pawnbroking in European countries (Saarista 2011, p. 107; Scott and Walker 2012, p. 798; Murhem 2016). In fact, there were more than 17,000 pawnshops and approximately 25 million pawnshop loans were provided per year.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Against this background, many studies have examined how low-income people coped with risks such as a sudden earnings shock in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Previous literature has highlighted the importance of informal transfers and assistance between relatives, friends and neighbors (Kiesling 1996; Horrell and Oxley 2000; Saaritsa 2008, 2011). However, little is known about whether financial institutions that provided loans for low-income people served as a risk-coping device.…”

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The role of pawnshops in risk coping in early twentieth-century Japan

Inoue

2021

Financial History Review

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This study examines the role of pawnshops as a risk-coping device in Japan in the early twentieth century, when the poor were very vulnerable to unexpected shocks such as illness. In contrast to European countries, Japanese pawnshops were the primary financial institution for low-income people up to the 1920s. Using data on pawnshop loans for more than 250 municipalities and exploiting the 1918–20 influenza pandemic as a natural experiment, we find that the adverse health shock increased the total amount of loans from pawnshops. This is because those who regularly relied on pawnshops borrowed more money from them than usual, and not because the number of people who used pawnshops increased. Our estimation results indicate that pawnshop loan amounts increased by approximately 7–10 percent due to the pandemic. These findings suggest that pawnshop loans were widely used as a risk-coping strategy.

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The poverty of solidarity: the size and structure of informal income smoothing among worker households in Helsinki, 1928

Cited by 9 publications

References 5 publications

Good for girls or bad for boys? Schooling, social inequality and intrahousehold allocation in early twentieth century Finland

Good for girls or bad for boys? Schooling, social inequality and intrahousehold allocation in early twentieth century Finland

On Historical Household Budgets

The role of pawnshops in risk coping in early twentieth-century Japan

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