Changing opportunities and constraints: Women in Bangladesh and Brazil in the 1980's.

Abstract

The dissertation consists of essays entitled Changes in Female Labor Force Participation in Brazil 1976-1990: Pushed by Need or Pulled by Opportunity?; How Do Family Planning Worker Visits Affect Women's Behavior in Bangladesh? and Is Doorstep Delivery of Contraceptives Equitable and Efficient? Evidence from Bangladesh's Extension Project. The first essay examines how Brazilian women increased their labor force participation rates during the 1980s in response to the country's weak macroeconomic situation and in response to their increased educational attainment. Using a series of large household surveys, the Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra do Domicilios, I develop a fixed effect methodology to distinguish long-term cohort-educational effects from short-term responses to changes in income and wages. I find significant effects of wage and income changes on participation rates. Changes in income can explain up to fifty percent of the increase in female labor force participation between 1976 and 1990 for all women and twenty percent of the increase for married women. Over the long term, educational levels explain between 49 and 70 percent of the variance among cohort life time participation rates. In the second essay, I develop and test a theory of how family planning worker visits in Bangladesh affect women's behavior. Visits lower the costs of contraception and may increase demand for contraception. If visits increase demand or if workers are targeting their visits, past family planning worker visits should have a positive and significant effect on later probabilities of adopting contraceptives. Using longitudinal data collected from 1982 to 1989 by the International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, I find that past visits are not significant in hazard models for contraceptive method adoption, while visits in the current round are significant. Therefore, family planning worker visits affect women's contraceptive behavior by decreasing the costs of contraception. Results for contraceptive discontinuation hazard models provide further support for this hypothesis. The results are robust to numerous tests for bias. Visits to women with no education and to women who live in less developed areas have the largest impact on contraceptive adoption and continuation. In the third essay, I find that during the period of the study, the proportion of women who were visited by family planning workers increased, but women with high education were more likely to be visited than women with low education. The effect was primarily due to behavior by individual family planning workers rather than the allocation of workers across areas. Changing workers' incentives so that they target visits to uneducated women may be a cost effective way to improve the equity and efficiency of the program.