explaining cross cohort differences in life cycle earnings abstract college educated workers entering the labor market in 1940 experienced a 4 fold increase in their labor earnings between the ages of 25 and 55 in contrast the increase was 2 6 fold for those entering the market in 1980 for workers without a college education these figures are 3 6 fold and 1 5 fold respectively why are earnings profiles flatter for recent cohorts we build a parsimonious model of schooling and human capital accumulation on the job and calibrate it to earnings statistics of workers from the 1940 cohort the model accounts for 99 of the flattening of earnings profiles for workers with a college education between the 1940 and the 1980 cohorts 52 for workers without a college education the flattening in our model results from a single exogenous factor the increasing price of skills the higher skill price induces i higher college enrollment for recent cohorts and thus a change in the educational composition of workers and ii higher human capital at the start of work life for college educated workers in the recent cohorts which implies lower earnings growth over the life cycle

state english only policies and english language investments many states in the us have considered adopting english only legislation since the early 1980s this paper argues that this legislation has a variety of expected and unexpected outcomes using the 1980 and 1990 integrated public use microdata series ipums this study finds that asian immigrants in general and hispanic immigrants who arrived to the us prior to 1970 acquired more english fluency on average during the 1980s when residing in states that passed english only eo legislation compared to their similar peers the passage of such legislation also appears to have distorted residence decisions as well as the relative quality of immigrants between eo and non eo states

the ant or the grasshopper the long term consequences of unilateral divorce laws on savings of european households abstract unilateral divorce laws udls allow people to obtain divorce without the consent of their spouse using the staggered introduction of udls across european countries we show that households exposed to udls for a longer period of time accumulate more savings this effect holds for both financial and total wealth and is stronger at higher quantiles of the wealth distribution consistent with a precautionary motive for savings we also find that exposure to udls increases female labour supply numeracy trust in others and dispositional optimism

the enduring power of coase abstractby many measures ronald coase has been among the most influential economists of the past 60 years why is this so we suggest that coase s work has enduring appeal to and insight for social scientists in part because it addresses the biggest and most important social problems how do we solve governance and coordination problems when limited information common resource issues and public good issues produce conflicts among several people at once any scholar who works on issues of corporate or common pool governance pollution allocation of seats on legislative committees regulation of systemic risk in financial markets provision of military forces patent thickets creation of optimal communications networks regulation of decreasing cost industries or compensation of corporate officers can see his or her work stemming from several of coase s original insights just as john nash s work reshaped economic theory almost every field of economics and political science is shaped by coasean insights

spousal conflict and divorce the optimal balance between keeping marriages intact despite spousal conflict and allowing for divorce is a subject of policy debate in the united states to explore the trade offs i construct a structural model with information asymmetries which may generate inefficient outcomes parameters are estimated using data from the national survey of families and households i find that eliminating separation periods decreases the conflict rate by 9 2 of its baseline level and increases the divorce rate by 4 0 perfect child support enforcement decreases the frequency of conflict and divorce by 2 7 and 21 2 respectively and reduces the incidence of inefficient divorces

job market signaling and returns to education we compare two partially separating equilibria in a job market signaling model with unproductive education we find that in one of the two equilibria the fraction of the population with a threshold education level is higher even though the cost of education is higher moreover compared to the other equilibrium the population faces a higher threshold education level yet the educated attain lower wages the reason for this result is that the gross return to education can be higher despite the higher cost of education and a higher threshold

did unilateral divorce laws raise divorce rates a reconciliation and new results application of the coase theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from a consent divorce regime to no fault unilateral divorce laws should not affect divorce rates each iteration of the empirical literature examining the evolution of divorce rates across us states has yielded different conclusions about the effects of divorce law liberalization i show that these results reflect a failure to jointly consider both the political endogeneity of these divorce laws and the dynamic response of divorce rates to a shock to the political regime taking explicit account of the dynamic response of divorce rates to the policy shock i find that liberalized divorce laws caused a discernible rise in divorce rates for about a decade but that this increase was substantially reversed over the next decade that said this increase explains very little of the rise in the divorce rate over the past half century both administrative data on the flow of new divorces and measures of the stock of divorcees from the census support this conclusion these results are suggestive of spouses bargaining within marriage with an eye to their partner s divorce threat

divorce abortion and the child sex ratio the impact of divorce reform in china abstract this paper estimates the effect of china s pro women divorce reform on sex selection behavior within marriages the 2001 reform liberalized divorce in favor of women and secured women s property rights after separation the paper applies a regression discontinuity analysis on the child sex ratio and finds that the likelihood of having a son after a firstborn daughter decreased by 8 1 percentage points amounting to a reduction of 11 7 compared with the prior proportion of male children further analyses provide evidence in support of the hypothesis that improved divorce options empower women within marriage and enable them to avoid health damaging sex selective abortion the effect of the divorce reform is stronger in provinces where divorce is comparatively viable because of more lenient family planning policies governing fertility in the next marriage the effect is also stronger among women who face higher health costs of abortion

labor market opportunities and women s decision making power within households abstract despite the perceived importance of labor market opportunities in shaping married women s outside option and their bargaining power within households as a result this link has received very little empirical attention using longitudinal data on who makes the decision on a wide range of issues within mexican households and data from the administrative records of the mexican social security institute this paper identifies the effects of relative changes in labor market opportunities for men and women on both working and non working women s decision making power i find that increases in labor market opportunities improve women s decision making power as well as children s health using differential labor demand shocks across mexican industries caused by china s admission to the wto gives similar results

until death do you part the effects of unilateral divorce on spousal homicides this study examines how the widespread adoption of unilateral divorce influenced the prevalence of lethal spousal violence in the united states these evaluations are based on fixed effects specifications for spousal homicide counts from an annual panel of u s states from 1968 to 1978 the results indicate that unrestricted unilateral divorce laws had small and statistically insignificant effects on the amount of lethal spousal violence directed against wives however the easy access to divorce created by such laws increased spousal homicides of husbands by approximately 21 these increases were concentrated in states where the division of marital property favored husbands

an economic model of cohabitation and divorce abstract the positive correlation between the rates of cohabitation and divorce has long been established this paper seeks to determine the direction of causation between these two variables a simultaneous equations model is specified with cohabitation and divorce rates as endogenous variables and using data aggregated to the state level for 1990 this procedure suggests that the divorce rate is a significant factor in explaining variations across states in the cohabitation rate and that the divorce rate is itself influenced by cohabitation behavior this finding strengthens the results put forth by various economic and sociological single equation studies this synthesis of information and data provided by sociologists with economic theory and methodology suggests further research in modelling demographic variables as joint outcomes of the same process

improving child welfare in middle income countries the unintended consequence of a pro homemaker divorce law and wait time to divorce abstract this study identifies the impact of access to and the speed of divorce on the welfare of children in a middle income largely catholic country using difference in difference estimation techniques i compare school enrollment for children of married and cohabiting parent households before and after the legalization of divorce implementing pro homemaker divorce laws increased school enrollment anywhere from 3 4 to 5 5 percentage points and the effect was particularly salient on secondary school students i provide evidence that administrative processes influencing the speed of divorce affect household bargaining and investments in schooling with every additional six months wait to the finalization of divorce school enrollment decreased by approximately one percentage point the impact almost doubles for secondary schooling when contemplating development policies advocates policymakers and leaders should not overlook the impact changes in family policies and administrative processes can have on advancements in child welfare and ultimately economic development jel d12 d13 j12 i21 i25

the determinants of earnings a behavioral approach we survey the determinants of earnings and propose a framework for understanding labor market success we suggest that the advantages of the children of successful parents go considerably beyond the benefits of superior education the inheritance of wealth or the genetic inheritance of cognitive ability we suggest that noncognitive personality variables such as attitudes towards risk ability to adapt to new economic conditions hard work and the rate of time preference affect both earning and the transmission of economic status across generations

the gender wage gap and domestic violence three quarters of all violence against women is perpetrated by domestic partners this study exploits exogenous changes in the demand for labor in female dominated industries to estimate the impact of the male female wage gap on domestic violence decreases in the wage gap reduce violence against women consistent with a household bargaining model these findings shed new light on the health production process as well as observed income gradients in health and suggest that in addition to addressing concerns of equity and efficiency pay parity can also improve the health of american women via reductions in violence

labor market effects of language enclaves hispanic men in the united states in a model of a labor market with enclaves of spanish speakers a large enclave provides better jobs for persons lacking skills in english consequently the larger enclave lowers earnings returns to english returns to english also vary with the distribution of english skills among spanish speaking workers returns to english rise if the distribution becomes skewed toward less proficiency in english and fall if it becomes skewed toward more proficiency in english the model has broad implications for the consequences of enclaves the model is tested with an application to hispanic men in the united states using the 1980 census of population empirical results are consistent with theoretical predictions enclaves do reduce the earnings losses associated with limited english skills for hispanic men and increasing the fraction of hispanic men who speak english only does lower the returns to english

impact of changes in marriage law implications for fertility and school enrollment does the postponement of marriage affect fertility and investment in human capital i study this question in the context of a 1957 amendment to the mississippi marriage law that was aimed at delaying the age of marriage changes included raising the minimum age for men and women parental consent requirements compulsory blood tests and proof of age using a difference indifferences design at the county level i find that overall marriages per 1 000 in the population in mississippi and its neighboring counties decreased by nearly 75 percent the crude birth rate decreased between 2 and 6 percent and school enrollment increased by 3 percent after the law was enacted by 1960 an unintended consequence of the law change was that illegitimate births among young black mothers increased by 7 percent i show that changes in labor market conditions during this period cannot explain the changes in marriages births and enrollment i conclude that stricter marriage related regulations that lead to a delay in marriage can postpone fertility and increase school enrollment

love hate and murder commitment devices in violent relationships many violent relationships are characterized by a high degree of cyclicality women who are the victims of domestic violence often leave and return multiple times to explain this we develop a model of time inconsistent preferences in the context of domestic violence this time inconsistency generates a demand for commitment we present supporting evidence that women in violent relationships display time inconsistent preferences by examining their demand for commitment devices we find that no drop policies which compel the prosecutor to continue with prosecution even if the victim expresses a desire to drop the charges result in an increase in reporting no drop policies also result in a decrease in the number of men murdered by intimates suggesting that some women in violent relationships move away from an extreme type of commitment device when a less costly one is offered

the impact of divorce laws on marriage specific capital this article considers how divorce law alters the incentives for couples to invest in their marriage focusing on the impact of unilateral divorce laws on investments in new marriages differences across states between 1970 and 1980 provide useful quasi experimental variation with which to consider incentives to invest in several types of marriagespecific capital spouse s education children household specialization and home ownership i find that adoption of unilateral divorce regardless of the prevailing property division laws reduces investment in all types of marriage specific capital considered except home ownership in contrast results for home ownership depend on the underlying property division laws

bargaining and distribution in marriage the standard economic model of the family is a common preference model that assumes that a family maximizes a single utility function and implies that family behavior is independent of which individuals receive income or control resources in recent years this model has been challenged by game theoretic models of marriage that do not impose pooling and are therefore consistent with empirical evidence that income controlled by husbands and wives does have different effects on family behavior in this paper the authors review a number of simple bargaining models and relevant empirical evidence and discuss their implications for distribution within marriage

education policies and taxation without commitment we study the implications of limited commitment on education and tax policies set by benevolent governments consistent with real world practices a government can decide to subsidize different levels of education at different rates a lack of commitment however affects the optimal structure of education subsidies the direction of the effect depends on how labor taxes are designed with linear labor tax rates and a transfer for redistribution subsidies become more progressive by contrast if the government is only constrained by informational asymmetries when designing taxes subsidies become more regressive

domestic violence and divorce law when divorce threats become credible the cost of divorce influences the bargaining position of spouses and thus their behavior within the marriage this study takes advantage of a major and unexpected reduction in divorce costs in spain to estimate the causal effects on domestic violence results suggest a 30 decline in spousal conflict as a consequence of the reform spousal violence is found to have decreased among couples who remained married after the modification in the law which suggests an important role for changes in bargaining within the marriage when divorce becomes a more credible cheaper option

earnings within education groups and overall productivity growth to offer a possible interpretation for recent empirical findings on earnings growth this paper constructs a simple model with endogenous human capital investment a distribution of natural abilities and unbiased technological progress the model predicts that in the long run average earnings within any education group will grow more slowly than average wages overall it also predicts that average earnings in high education groups ultimately will rise relative to average earnings in low education groups in the model these processes do not imply secular increases in the degree of inequality in the overall cross sectional distribution of earnings

the excess sensitivity of layoffs and quits to demand excessive layoffs in bad times and excessive quits in good times both stem from the same weakness in practical employment arrangements the specific nature of worker firm relations creates a situat

cleaning in the shadow of the law bargaining marital investment and the impact of divorce law on husbands intrahousehold work abstractprevious literature has established that unilateral divorce laws may reduce women s household work and overall marital investment if unilateral divorce has differential costs by gender it may impact household work by gender through bargaining channels however little research has examined how divorce laws affect men s levels and share of household production to examine this i use data on matched couples from the panel study of income dynamics and exploit time variation in state divorce laws i find that unilateral divorce laws lead to a decrease in marital investment as measured by mens and women s household work the evidence also supports a bargaining response to divorce laws as fathers in states without joint custody laws engage in a significantly higher share of household work under unilateral divorce than those in states with joint custody laws consistent with a higher cost of marital dissolution among fathers who stand to lose custody of their children

parental responses to child support obligations evidence from administrative data abstract we study parental responses to child support obligations using rich administrative data from denmark and variation in the child support formula we estimate that a 1000 dkk 160 increase in a father s obligation is associated with a 273 dkk 45 increase in his payment a higher obligation reduces father child co residence pointing to substitution between financial and non pecuniary investments further obligations increase post separation fertility among remarried fathers but have no impacts on maternal fertility or either parent s labor supply our findings suggest that government efforts to increase child investments through mandates on parents can be complicated by their behavioral responses to them

bargaining in the shadow of the law divorce laws and family distress this paper exploits the variation occurring from the different timing of divorce law reforms across the united states to evaluate how unilateral divorce changed family violence and whether the option provided by unilateral divorce reduced suicide and spousal homicide unilateral divorce both potentially increases the likelihood that a domestic violence relationship ends and acts to transfer bargaining power toward the abused thereby potentially stopping the abuse in extant relationships in states that introduced unilateral divorce we find a 8 16 percent decline in female suicide roughly a 30 percent decline in domestic violence for both men and women and a 10 percent decline in females murdered by their partners

education and optimal dynamic taxation the role of income contingent student loans we study the optimal design of integrated education finance and tax systems the distribution of wages is endogenously determined by the costly education decisions of heterogeneous individuals before labor market entry consistent with empirical evidence this human capital investment decision is risky we find that an integrated education and tax system in which the government provides education loans to young individuals coupled with income contingent repayment can always be designed in a pareto optimal way we present a simple empirically driven application of the framework to us data in which individuals make a college entry decision we find the optimal repayment schemes for college loans can be well approximated by a schedule that is linearly increasing in income up to a threshold and constant afterwards so although the full optimum could lead to complicated non linear schedules in theory very simple instruments can replicate it fairly well the welfare gains from income contingent repayment are significant

student abilities during the expansion of us education abstract the us experienced two dramatic changes in the structure of education in a 50 year period the first was a large expansion of educational attainment the second an increase in test score gaps between college bound and non college bound students this paper documents the impact of these two trends on the composition of school groups by ability and the importance of these composition effects for wages the main finding is that there is a growing gap between the abilities of high school and college educated workers that accounts for one half of the college wage premium for recent cohorts and for the entire rise of the college wage premium between the 1910 and 1960 birth cohorts

desperate housewives communication difficulties and the dynamics of marital un happiness this paper develops a model of marital dissolution based on communication difficulties the quality of a marriage depends on the proximity of an action to a target the target is unknown and must be learned over time each individual receives private signals about the target and can communicate them only imperfectly to his or her spouse because of imperfect communication spouses may hold different beliefs about the optimal action the action actually chosen is a compromise of the spouses distinct beliefs if a couple s beliefs diverge too widely one or both of them may prefer to dissolve the marriage the paper explores how poor communication contributes to marital unhappiness as well as its implications for the dynamics of divorce risk the welfare properties of divorce decisions and the role of counseling when the distribution of decision making power in the household favors men wives but not husbands can find themselves trapped for prolonged periods in a marriage that leaves them as unhappy as it is possible to be without seeking relief through divorce

a sparsity based model of bounded rationality this article defines and analyzes a sparse max operator which is a less than fully attentive and rational version of the traditional max operator the agent builds as economists do a simplified model of the world which is sparse considering only the variables of first order importance his stylized model and his resulting choices both derive from constrained optimization still the sparse max remains tractable to compute moreover the induced outcomes reflect basic psychological forces governing limited attention the sparse max yields a behavioral version of basic chapters of the microeconomics textbook consumer demand and competitive equilibrium i obtain a behavioral version of marshallian and hicksian demand arrow debreu competitive equilibrium the slutsky matrix the edgeworth box roy s identity and so on the slutsky matrix is no longer symmetric nonsalient prices are associated with anomalously small demand elasticities because the consumer exhibits nominal illusion in the edgeworth box the offer curve is a two dimensional surface rather than a one dimensional curve as a result different aggregate price levels correspond to materially distinct competitive equilibria in a similar spirit to a phillips curve the arrow debreu welfare theorems typically do not hold this framework provides a way to assess which parts of basic microeconomics are robust and which are not to the assumption of perfect maximization jel codes d01 d03 d11 d51

the endogeneity between language and earnings international analyses this study is concerned with the determinants of dominant language fluency its effects on earnings and its endogeneity with earnings among immigrants dominant language fluency is hypothesized to

does the welfare state destroy the family evidence from oecd member countries we study the effect of the size of the welfare state on family outcomes in oecd member countries exploiting exogenous variation in public social spending due to varying degrees of political fractionalization i e the number of relevant parties involved in the legislative process we show that an expansion in the welfare state increases the fertility marriage and divorce rates with a quantitatively stronger effect on the marriage rate we conclude that the welfare state supports family formation nevertheless we also find that the welfare state decouples marriage and fertility and therefore alters the organization of the family authors abstract

the effect of joint custody on family outcomes since the 1970s almost all us states have introduced a form of joint custody after divorce i analyze the causal effect of these custody law reforms on different family outcomes my identification strategy exploits the different timing of reforms across the us states estimations based on state panel data suggest that the introduction of joint custody led to an increase in marriage rates an increase in overall fertility including a shift from nonmarital to marital fertility and an increase in divorce rates for older couples accordingly female labor market participation decreased further male suicide rates and domestic violence fell in treated states the empirical evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that joint custody increased the relative bargaining power of men within marriage

did unilateral divorce raise divorce rates evidence from panel data since early 1996 at least eight states have begun to consider rolling back unilateral and no fault divorce a major reversal of the liberalizing trend in divorce laws which began around 1970 the proponents of tightening the divorce regime often argue that making divorce more difficult will strengthen families however both theoretical and empirical evidence is decidedly mixed over whether the no fault revolution actually contributed to the sharp increase in divorce rates in the united states observed over the last 30 years in this paper i address the dispute by using a panel of state level divorce rates including state specific trends allows unobserved state divorce propensities to trend linearly and even quadratically over time and reveals that unilateral divorce raised divorce rates significantly and strongly excerpt

noncooperative bargaining models of marriage in this paper we discuss some simple noncooperative models of distribution within marriage in which the equilibria are not necessarily pareto optimal in which history and culture can affect which equilibrium is realized and in which distribution may depend on whether resources are controlled by the husband or by the wife recent moves away from single decision maker models of the family have permitted economists to address distribution within marriage and cooperative bargaining models have played the central role in these moves the next step is to permit strategic interaction between family members by modeling distribution within marriage as a noncooperative game noncooperative game theory allows great flexibility in specifying the rules of the game and unlike cooperative game theory imposes few a priori restrictions on the nature of equilibrium outcomes in particular noncooperative models neither assume nor imply that all equilibria are pareto optimal

income shocks and suicides causal evidence from indonesia we examine how income shocks affect the suicide rate in indonesia we use a difference in differences approach exploiting the cash transfer s nationwide rollout and corroborate the findings using

is the test score decline responsible for the productivity growth decline the test score decline between 1967 and 1980 was large about 1 25 grade level equivalents and historically unprecedented new estimates of the trends in academic achievement of the effect of academic achievement on productivity and of trends in the quality of the work force are developed the test score decline did not cause the post 1965 productivity growth slowdown but it did contribute to its perpetuation if test scores had continued to grow after 1967 at the rate prevailing in the previous quarter century labor force quality would have been 2 9 percent 86 billion greater in 1987 5 5 percent greater in 2000 and 6 7 percent greater in 2010 copyright 1989 by american economic association

yours mine and ours do divorce laws affect the intertemporal behavior of married couples divorce laws establish spouses individual property rights over household resources and determine when divorce is allowed this paper examines how such laws inuence the intertemporal behavior and the welfare of u s married couples i build a model of household choice about consumption labor supply and divorce under multiple divorce law regimes and i estimate it using exogenous variation in u s divorce laws from the 1970s to the 1990s couples responded to equal division of property and unilateral divorce by increasing tangible assets up to 19 which suggests the presence of a strong income eect for the primary earner and by reducing female employment by over 5 percentage points because the threat of divorce granted additional bargaining power to married woman the bargaining weight of women implied by these responses in the model corresponds to a third of the weight of men this indicates that equal division of assets beneted women when it was

marriage and divorce changes and their driving forces the family is not a static institution in recent decades marriage rates have fallen divorce rates have risen and the defining characteristics of marriage have changed the economic approach to the family seeks to explain these trends by reference to models that can also explain how and why families form gary becker s 1981 treatise on the family proposed a theory based on production complementarities in which husband and wife specialize in the market and domestic spheres respectively production complementarities also arise in the production and rearing of one s own children however production complementarities at least as initially described are decreasingly central to modern family life increased longevity and declining fertility mean that most of one s adult life is spent without one s own children in the household also the rise in marital formation at older ages including remarriage means that many families form with no intention of producing children moreover increases in female labor force participation suggest that household specialization has either declined or at least taken on a different meaning these changes have come about as what is produced in the home has been dramatically altered both by the emergence of labor saving technology in the home and by the development of service industries that allow much of what was once provided by specialized homemakers to be purchased in the market the availabil

one for the road public transportation alcohol consumption and intoxicated driving we exploit arguably exogenous train schedule changes in washington dc to investigate the relationship between public transportation the risky decision to consume alcohol and the criminal decision to engage in alcohol impaired driving using variation over time across days of the week and over the course of the day we provide evidence that overall there was little effect of expanded public transit service on dui arrests alcohol related fatal traffic and alcohol related arrests however we find that these overall effects mask considerable heterogeneity across geographic areas specifically we find that areas where bars are within walking distance to transit stations experience increases in alcohol related arrests and decreases in dui arrests we observe no sign of behavioral changes in neighborhoods without any bars within walking distance of transit stations

the evolution of the human capital of women the labour market attachment of females has increased dramatically over the last half century converging to a pattern similar to that of males human capital theory predicts an associated increase in human capital investment by females and a convergence in the life cycle human capital investment profiles of males and females this paper explores wage based and job skills based approaches to measuring the increased supply of efficiency units of human capital by females over the last four decades results suggest that the magnitude of the contribution of the increased human capital of women to post war economic growth is substantially underestimated by conventional methods of measuring human capital and labour inputs a complete picture of the evolution of the human capital of women requires new approaches to measuring their human capital l evolution du capital humain des femmes au cours des cinquante dernieres annees l activite des femmes sur le marche du travail a considerablement augmente convergeant vers un modele similaire a celui des hommes correlativement la theorie du capital humain anticipe deux phenomenes une augmentation de l investissement des femmes dans le capital humain ainsi qu une convergence des profils d investissement dans le capital humain par les deux sexes tout au long de la vie afin d evaluer la hausse de productivite du capital humain des femmes au cours des quarante dernieres annees cet article explore les approches basees a la fois sur le salaire et les competences professionnelles les resultats suggerent que l ampleur de la hausse du capital humain des femmes dans l economie d apres guerre a ete sensiblement sous evaluee par les methodes de calcul traditionnelles a la fois du capital humain et du facteur travail ainsi pour mesurer l evolution du capital humain des femmes de facon plus globale de nouvelles approches sont necessaires

galton versus the human capital approach to inheritance a century ago francis galton proposed a simple yet powerful model of inheritance gary backer s human capital model is often used to analyze important empirical and policy questions but does it dominate galton s from a positive point of view i derive nine implicatiions of the human capital approach that are distinct from galton s evidence from the pis scf and nlsy micro data sets as well as results reported in previous literatures suggest that four of the unique implications are refuted two implications are verified and mixed results are obtained for three others some extensions of economics recently developed by becker and others when applied to inheritance may improve economics predictions

female labor supply and divorce new evidence from ireland if participation in the labor market helps to secure women s outside options in the case of divorce separation an increase in the perceived risk of marital dissolution may accelerate the increase in female labor supply this simple prediction has been tested in the literature using time and or spatial variation in divorce legislation e g across us states leading to mixed results in this paper we suggest testing this hypothesis by exploiting a more radical policy change i e the legalization of divorce in ireland the right to divorce was introduced in 1996 followed by an acceleration of marriage breakdown rates we use this fundamental change in the irish society as a natural experiment we follow a difference in difference approach using families for whom the dissolution risk is small as a control group our results suggest that the legalization of divorce contributed to a significant increase in female labor supply mostly at the extensive margin results are not driven by selection and are robust to several specification checks including the introduction of household fixed effects and an improved match between control and treatment groups using propensity score reweighting

trends in quality adjusted skill premia in the united states 1960 2000 this paper presents new evidence that increases in college enrollment lead to a decline in the average quality of college graduates between 1960 and 2000 resulting in a decrease of 8 percentage points in the college premium the standard demand and supply framework katz and murphy 1992 card and lemieux 2001 can qualitatively account for the trend in the college and age premia over this period but the quantitative adjustments that need to be made to account for changes in quality are substantial furthermore the standard interpretation of the supply effect can be misleading if the quality of college workers is not controlled for to illustrate the importance of these adjustments we reanalyze the problem studied in card and lemieux 2001 who observe that the rise in the college premium in the 1980s occurred mainly for young workers and attribute this to the differential behavior of the supply of skill between the young and the old our results show that changes in quality are as important as changes in prices to explain the phenomenon they document

who marries whom in a surging housing market abstract this paper investigates the impact of a surging housing market on marital sorting our empirical analysis shows that there is increasing assortativeness on original family background in response to housing price appreciation that is for husbands when the down payment doubles one more year of paternal schooling predicts a marriage in which the father in law s schooling is 0 057 year greater than in a scenario in which the down payment does not increase the rising assortativeness could exacerbate the already expanding inequality caused by the booming housing market in addition to the benchmark analysis we find that a divorce reform which awards assets proportionate to the shares the spouses paid for the initial down payment rather than awarding equal shares upon divorce alleviates assortativeness the evidence suggests that joint investment in housing is likely to be a significant consideration in marital sorting

gender earnings and the english skill acquisition of hispanic workers in the united states i introduction recently the number of english deficient residents has escalated in the united states according to the 1980 and 1990 decennial censuses individuals aged five years and older whose reported english verbal skills are not well or not at all rose from 4 22 million 2 of the population to 6 67 million 3 this percentage is more pronounced in the public schools according to han et al 1997 over 2 12 million students 5 1 of the 41 62 million public school students in grades k 12 were identified as being limited english proficient lep in the 1993 1994 school year other estimates such as those made by henderson abbott and strang 1993 put the public school lep share at over 6 increases in the lep numbers mirror the growth in the immigrant population as well as the relatively high fertility rates of language minority americans the hispanic and asian pacific islander ethnic groups account for much of this growth as shown by the national research council 1997 hispanics in fact are projected by the u s census bureau 1996 to become this nation s largest racial ethnic minority group in less than a decade policywise the growing lep population raises economic and social questions concerning for example the best schooling programs for children in this group as well as the impact of english proficiency in labor markets answers to some of these questions clearly require detailed and inclusive analyses 1 indeed many social scientists have linked the ability to communicate in english to labor market value and occupational selection 2 the bulk of this research however primarily focuses on men less is known on whether gender differently affects the english proficiency outcomes of language minorities researchers in other social science fields such as stevens 1985 1986 1992 cameron 1992 and ellis 1994 have considered gender disparities with respect to the acquisition of english skills 3 however these investigations have not fully implemented some of the empirical advances made by economists to analyze english proficiency moreover this extant work tends to focus solely on gender related english skill differentials at a single point in time in this study we use recent empirical strategies in the economics field to analyze labor market facets associated with the english skill acquisition of hispanic men and women we also employ a two period analysis that allows us to observe whether gender differences in the accumulation of english skills exist with respect to our previous discussion such knowledge facilitates the design of programs aimed at improving the english fluency of the lep population in particular we first track synthetic cohorts to investigate if the english proficiency acquisition made by hispanic workers during the 1980s varies with respect to gender we then test whether poor english skills differently affect the earnings and occupational sorting of hispanic men and women the 1 1980 and 1990 public use microdata samples pums are utilized in these labor market analyses our findings suggest that english skill procurement varies between hispanic men and women depending on age and schooling location we also find that women face a lower english deficiency earnings penalty that rises more rapidly with education than the penalty obtained by their otherwise similar male peers our occupational selection results parallel this penalty difference where english skills serve as a stronger sorting mechanism for hispanic women than men policy prescriptions from such analyses suggest that male oriented studies overestimate the earnings gains and understate the occupational sorting associated with acquiring english fluency ii english skill acquisition in the labor market our first objective tests whether women acquire english proficiency at a different rate than their male peers all of our empirical work relies on the 1 pums of the 1980 and 1990 u

marriage and divorce informational constraints and private contracting the relationship between divorce rates in the united states and laws regulating divorce are analyzed using data from a special current population survey undertaken in 1979 with particular reference to the adoption by many states of no fault divorce laws the author utilizes a contract theoretic framework to examine the impact of both legal and informational constraints on several aspects of the marriage relationship 1 the probability of divorce 2 compensation at divorce i e the terms of the divorce settlement 3 the probability of entering marriage and 4 incentives for investment in marriage specific capital two different models are developed the first assumes that ex post information about the value of each spouses opportunites at divorce is symmetric and that since divorce would only occur if the joint benefits outweigh the joint costs the law has no effect on the divorce rate the second model asserts that the existence of asymmetric information results in a fixed wage marriage contract and that divorce would be higher in states that allow unilateral divorce the evidence supports the first of these hypotheses excerpt

does the certainty of arrest reduce domestic violence evidence from mandatory and recommended arrest laws domestic violence remains a major public policy concern despite two decades of policy intervention to eliminate police inaction in response to domestic violence many states have passed mandatory arrest laws which require the police to arrest abusers when a domestic violence incident is reported using the fbi supplementary homicide reports i find that mandatory arrest laws actually increased intimate partner homicides i discuss two potential mechanisms for this increase in homicides decreased reporting by victims and increased reprisal by abusers i investigate validity of these hypotheses by examining the effect of mandatory arrest laws on different sub groups and by analyzing family homicides where the victim is less often responsible for reporting there appears to be consistent evidence for the reporting mechanisms for family homicides mandatory arrest laws appear to reduce the number of homicides this study therefore provides evidence that these laws may have perverse effects on intimate partner violence harming the very people they seek to help

pink work same sex marriage employment and discrimination abstract this paper analyzes how the legalization of same sex marriage in the u s affected same sex couples in the labor market by using data from the american community survey access to marriage led to amendments in tax health insurance and adoption laws that could have encouraged some same sex partners to specialize in household production and decrease their labor supply nevertheless estimates from a difference in difference model show that the individual and joint probabilities of being employed increased among same sex couples additional evidence suggests that these changes in employment were driven by improvements in attitudes and lower discrimination against sexual minorities following the introduction of marriage equality

do female officers improve law enforcement quality effects on crime reporting and domestic violence escalation we study the impact of the integration of women in us policing between the late 1970s and early 1990s on violent crime reporting and domestic violence escalation along these two key dimensions we find that female officers improved police quality using crime victimization data we find that as female representation increases among officers in an area violent crimes against women in that area and especially domestic violence are reported to the police at significantly higher rates there are no such effects for violent crimes against men or from increases in the female share among civilian police employees furthermore we find evidence that female officers help prevent the escalation of domestic violence increases in female officer representation are followed by significant declines in intimate partner homicide rates and in rates of repeated domestic abuse these effects are all consistent between fixed effects models with controls for economic and policy variables and models that focus exclusively on increases in female police employment driven by externally imposed affirmative action plans resulting from employment discrimination cases

the economics of immigration this literature review concerns the impact of immigration on the economy of the host country focusing on the experience of the united states the emphasis is on the period from the 1970s to the 1990s the author shows that research earlier in this period generally concluded that the economic effects of immigration were positive but that more recent research on later migrations have generally concluded that immigration may be having an adverse effect on the earnings of native unskilled workers and be placing an increased burden on welfare programs the importance of such economic analysis for the formulation of appropriate migration policies is stressed

social insurance and the marriage market social insurance is often linked to marriage existing evidence suggests small marital responses to financial incentives and stems from settings where benefits are realized in the near future i an

can governments do it better merger mania and hospital outcomes in the english nhs the literature on mergers between private hospitals suggests that such mergers often produce little benefit despite this the uk government has pursued an active policy of hospital mergers arguing that such consolidations will bring improvements for patients we examine whether this promise is met we exploit the fact that between 1997 and 2006 in england around half the short term general hospitals were involved in a merger but that politics means that selection for a merger may be random with respect to future performance we examine the impact of mergers on a large set of outcomes including financial performance productivity waiting times and clinical quality and find little evidence that mergers achieved gains other than a reduction in activity given that mergers reduce the scope for competition between hospitals the findings suggest that further merger activity may not be the appropriate way of dealing with poorly performing hospitals

the rising college premium in the eighties return to college or return to unobserved ability the changes in the distribution of earnings during the 1980s have been studied extensively the two most striking characteristics of the decade are a a large increase in the college high school wage gap and b a substantial rise in the variance of wage residuals while this second phenomenon is typically implicitly attributed to an increase in the demand for unobserved skill most work in this area fails to acknowledge that this same increase in demand for unobserved skill could drive the evolution of the measured college premium in its simplest form if higher ability individuals are more likely to attend college then the increase in the college wage premium may be due to a increase in the relative demand for high ability workers rather than an increase in the demand for skills accumulated in college this paper develops and estimates a dynamic programming selection model in order to investigate the plausibility of this explanation the results are highly suggestive that an increase in the demand for unobserved ability could play a major role in the growing college premium the changes in the distribution of earnings during the 1980s have been studied extensively the two most striking characteristics of the decade are a a large increase in the college high school wage gap and b a substantial rise in the variance of wage residuals while this second phenomenon is typically implicitly attributed to an increase in the demand for unobserved skill most work in this area fails to acknowledge that this same increase in demand for unobserved skill could drive the evolution of the measured college premium in its simplest form if higher ability individuals are more likely to attend college then the increase in the college wage premium may be due to an increase in the relative demand for high ability workers rather than an increase in the demand for skills accumulated in college this paper develops and estimates a dynamic programming selection model in order to investigate the plausibility of this explanation the results are highly suggestive that an increase in the demand for unobserved ability could play a major role in the growing college premium there are at least two reasons to be interested in this topic first for policy makers intent on helping the american workforce adjust to the changing wage structure this distinction is crucial if the value added of attending college truly rises they may consider policies aimed at subsidizing the skills learned in college however if it results from an increase in the payoff to other types of skills then policies focused on skill acquisition earlier in life would be more appropriate second it will also aid in understanding the

human capital prices productivity and growth separate identification of the price and quantity of human capital has important implications for understanding key issues in labor economics and macroeconomics price and quantity series are derived and subjected to robustness checks the human capital price series associated with dierent education levels are highly correlated and exhibit a strong secular trend three result

renouncing personal names an empirical examination of surname change and earnings we study the effects of surname change to swedish sounding or neutral names on earnings for immigrants from asian african slavic countries to estimate this effect we exploit the variation resulting from different timing of name changes across individuals during the 1990s the results imply that there is a substantial increase in annual earnings after a name change no effects on earnings prior to a name change and no positive general effects of a new name for other groups that renounced a foreign name based on these findings we argue that these effects are due to name change as a response to discrimination

disentangling bargaining power from individual and household level to institutions evidence on women s position in ethiopia summary women s bargaining power is generally analyzed only with individual level and household level variables we add a third level namely institutional bargaining power we define this as bargaining power which one party freely derives from unequal social norms in the bargaining literature there is a common paradoxical finding namely that more access to and control over individual resources sometimes decreases rather than increases women s bargaining outcomes with household survey data from ethiopia and making use of multilevel modeling and an aggregate model with interaction terms we suggest that this paradoxical effect can be explained by very unequal gender norms gendered institutions at the group level in our case we used ethnic groups to show that in groups where gender norms are very unequal individual and household level bargaining power variables effects are mediated by ethnic gendered institutions a policy implication of our findings is that gender policy may become more effective with shifting the emphasis from a largely individual approach to an institutional approach to support women s empowerment

women s inheritance rights and bargaining power evidence from kenya abstractthis paper investigates the human capital effects of a legal reform granting kenyan women equal inheritance rights i employ a difference in differences strategy exploiting variation in pr

the expansion of college education in the united states is there evidence of declining cohort quality i introduction in 1940 approximately 5 of men aged 20 64 were college graduates by 1990 the fraction with a college degree had more than quadrupled to 22 6 conversely more than 70 of men aged 20 64 had not finished high school in 1940 by 1990 the fraction of the male population who were high school dropouts had dipped below 20 these changes imply that there has been an enormous increase in the supply of skilled workers in the u s economy over the past five decades the magnitude of these changes also suggests that the composition of these groups in terms of their underlying ability and talents have also changed making it difficult to compare these groups over time in this article we focus on the expansion of college education we ask whether the increase in the number of college graduates over time lead to a decline in the average ability of college graduates following becker 1967 we introduce a simple model of human capital accumulation with individuals who differ in ability and borrowing costs under the assumption that the ability distribution is fixed and the more able attend college we examine the conditions under which a rising share of college graduates leads to a decline in the average ability of the college educated group the relationship between the expansion of higher education and the average ability of college attendees was explored by taubman and wales 1972 in their well known study putting together evidence from a variety of test score studies they reported that the average aptitude of those who attended college actually rose relative to those who did not attend college we take an alternative more aggregate approach in examining the expansion of college education and average ability in this article using the 1940 90 census we compare across cohorts with different levels of educational attainment we ask whether college graduates from more educated cohorts receive a smaller college premium even controlling for the relative supply effect thus we do not observe changes in ability directly but infer changes in ability through changes in relative wages there are several reasons why we view this alternative approach as useful first the test score studies are based on different tests administered in different states which raises questions about the comparability of the results over time second the test scores are often available only for those who finished high school because the selection of high school graduates is also changing it is difficult to infer changes in ability of college graduates third test scores typically have little explanatory power in earnings regressions suggesting that other dimensions of ability are important for earnings determination finally many of these studies refer to the first half of the twentieth century whereas we extend the analysis to the more recent period a number of recent papers murphy and welch 1992 katz and murphy 1992 topel 1997 autor et al 1998 have argued that the rapid increase in the share college graduates depressed college premiums in the 1970s welch 1979 berger 1985 and card and eemieux 2000 show that these declines in college premiums were particularly associated with the baby boom cohorts who entered college in record numbers in this article we examine to what extent these cohort effects may reflect a decline in quality associated with an accelerated pace of college attendance to preview our results we find a small and marginally significant cohort quality effect that suggests that a 10 increase in the cohort specific college share leads to a 0 6 decline in the college premium holding everything else constant these results suggest that changes in cohort quality played a minimal role in the recent period with relative supply and demand shocks accounting for most 87 of the variation in relative wages these small relative wage effects related to changes in ability are in line with evidence from test scores reported in murnane et al

separate spheres bargaining and the marriage market this paper introduces the separate spheres bargaining model a new model of distribution within marriage it differs from divorce threat bargaining models e g manser brown mcelroy horney in that the threat point is not divorce but a noncooperative equilibrium within marriage this noncooperative equilibrium reflects traditional gender roles the predictions of our model thus differ from those of divorce threat bargaining models in the separate spheres model cash transfer payments to the mother and payments to the father can but need not imply different equilibrium distributions in existing marriages in the long run the distributional effects of transfer policies may be substantially altered by changes in the marriage market equilibrium

the economics of the marriage contract theories and evidence abstract we analyze the role of the marriage contract we first formalize three prominent hypotheses on why people marry marriage provides an exogenous payoff to married partners it serves as a commitment device and it serves as a signaling device for each theory we analyze how a reduction in the costs of divorce affects the propensity to divorce for couples at any given duration of marriage we then use individual marriage and divorce certificate data from the united states to bring these alternative views of the marriage contract to bear on the data we exploit variations in the timing of the adoption of unilateral divorce laws across states to proxy a one off and permanent reduction in divorce costs the results suggest that the dominant reason that couples enter into a marriage contract is that it serves as a commitment device

the effect of credit constraints on the college drop out decision a direct approach using a new panel study a serious difficulty in determining the importance of credit constraints in education arises because standard data sources do not provide a direct way of identifying which students are credit constrained this paper differentiates itself from previous work by taking a direct approach made possible by unique longitudinal data from the berea panel study the results from our study of berea college students suggest that while credit constraints likely play an important role in the drop out decisions of some students the large majority of attrition of students from low income families should be primarily attributed to reasons other than credit constraints jel i21 i22

the impact of legalized abortion on crime we offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions crime began to fall roughly eighteen years after abortion legalization the five states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation which legalized in 1973 with roe v wade states with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s in high abortion states only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime