https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14178/963 Tue, 07 Apr 2026 02:17:32 GMT 2026-04-07T02:17:32Z https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14178/2830 Income Fluctuations and Subjective Well-being: The Mediating Effects of Occupational Switching and Remittances Tokhirov, Azizbek Does money bring happiness? To answer this question, I study the consequences of income fluctuations caused by commodity price changes on well-being patterns in regions specializing in export agriculture. Using nationally representative survey data in a difference-in-differences framework, I investigate the effects of the 2010/11 short-term increase in the global price of cotton. I demonstrate that it can be viewed as a positive income shock for the cotton-producing communities of Tajikistan. The main results indicate that the net subjective well-being effects of the cotton price increase are negative: exposure to the shock at the aggregate level is associated with a notable decrease in the reported levels of financial and life satisfaction. To explain this paradox, I consider split sample analyses, which suggest that the shock led to within-community occupational sorting and that its well-being effects are negative among households that were in the agriculture sector before the shock and barely positive for newly become farmers. Observing the increasing volume of remittances in the world and their significance to the economy of Tajikistan, I also study how remittances affect the relationship between income volatility and happiness. Further estimations reveal that family remittances are not significantly affected by and can partially mediate the negative effects of short-term income changes. The mediating effects of remittances only affect financial satisfaction, suggesting that a mere compensation of losses does not fully restore the quality of life. Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14178/2830 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14178/2822 Fertility, economic development, and remittances in post-communist times Tokhirov, Azizbek; Suchánek, Jonáš This study investigates fertility responses to remittances across developed and developing countries in post-communist times. We first collected fertility, remittances, and income statistics over the 1995-2020 period and created a new vulnerability index that identifies less economically developed states with high fertility rates and dependent on remittances. We then examined the global fertility effects of remittances between 1995 and 2015 via Ordinary Least Squares, Fixed Effects, and Instrumental Variable estimation methods. The baseline regression results suggest that the relationship between remittances and fertility rates of remittances-receiving countries is generally inverse. We also found that the fertility-reducing power of remittances is heterogeneous worldwide. To illustrate the findings, we constructed two heat maps for 196 countries. The first one depicts the distribution of the vulnerability index, and the second one is dedicated to variations in the fertility effects ofremittances across countries based on the vulnerability index. Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14178/2822 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z