Caridad Araujo (The World Bank and Georgetown University) Alain de Janvry (University of California, Berkeley) Elisabeth Sadoulet (University of California, Berkeley)
Abstract
Empirical evidence has shown that off-farm non-agricultural (OFNA) employment offers a major pathway from poverty for rural populations. However, the pattern of participation in these activities is heterogeneous across categories of individuals and poorly understood. We explore the role of spillovers from peers on an individual's participation in formal and informal OFNA employment using village census data for rural Mexico. We test and reject the possibility that peers' decisions could be proxying for unobserved individual, village-level, or individual-type effects. We find that peers' participation in OFNA employment has a large impact on an individual's ability to engage in this type of employment, both formal and informal, even after controlling for individual attributes and village characteristics. Peer effects are structured by similarities in gender, ethnicity, educational level, and land endowment. We find that marginal peer effects tend to be stronger for categories of individuals that are already more engaged in OFNA employment, such as men, non-indigenous people, the more educated, and the landless, contributing to reinforcing inequalities in accessing these jobs. However, the role of peer effects relative to that of education in obtaining formal OFNA employment is more important for members of groups that are less engaged in these jobs, such as women, indigenous people, the less educated, and smallholders.
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Marianne Bertrand & Erzo F. P. Luttmer & Sendhil Mullainathan, 1999.
"Network Effects and Welfare Cultures,"
Working Papers
9903, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago.
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Bertrand, M. & Luttmer, E.F.P. & Mullainathan, S., 1998.
"Network Effects and Welfare Cultures,"
Papers
201, Princeton, Woodrow Wilson School - Public and International Affairs.
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