an empirical analysis of life cycle fertility and female labor supply this paper examines us household fertility and female labor supply over the life cycle using data from the panel study of income dynamics the authors investigate how maternal time inputs and market expenditures on offspring as well as the benefits they yield their parents vary with ages of offspring and influence female labor supply and contraceptive behavior the econometric framework combines a female labor supply model and a contraceptive choice index function it also accounts for the fact that conceptions are not perfectly controllable events using longitudinal data on married couples the authors estimate these equations and test alternative specifications of the technologies governing child care the findings suggest that while parents cannot perfectly control conceptions variations in child care costs do affect life cycle spacing of births furthermore the results demonstrate the gains of modeling the linkages between female labor supply and fertility behavior at the household level authors modified

from maize to haze agricultural shocks and the growth of the mexican drug sector understanding how economic incentives affect illegal drug production is essential for crafting policies in response to the international drug trade policymakers typically face a choice between two strategies targetingcriminalgroupsvialawenforcement andofferingproducersincentivestoengage in alternate activities yet little is known about how the returns to alternate legal activities affect drug supply we contribute to this literature by examining how shocks to legal commodity prices affect the drug trade in mexico our analysis exploits exogenous movements in the mexican maize price stemming from weather conditions in u s maize growing regions as well as exports of other major maize producers using data on over 2200 municipios spanning 1990 2010 we show that lower prices differentially increased the cultivation of both marijuana and opium poppies in municipios

the impact of children on married women s labor supply black white differentials revisited previous studies have documented that the depressing effect of children on labor supply is greater for white wives than for their black counterparts the present paper examines the hypothesis that this difference by race is less pronounced in the highly educated segments of the population multinomial logit estimates of a labor supply model using data from the 1982 national survey of family growth are consistent with the hypothesis

the labor supply effects of delayed first birth in this paper i compare the relationship between first birth timing and post birth labor supply for high school and college graduate mothers given that pre birth wages are increasing in fertility delay the rising opportunity cost of time would suggest that among both groups later mothers work more yet i only find this pattern for high school graduates for college graduates i instead find that there is a strong u shaped pattern between hours worked within motherhood and the career timing of first birth

the value of children inter generational support fertility and human capital abstract this paper offers robust empirical evidence of a darwinian pro natalist mechanism parents can improve their old age support with an additional child using the incidence of first born twins as an instrument for fertility outcomes i find that chinese senior parents with more children receive more financial transfers and are more likely to co reside with an adult child they are also less likely to work past retirement age the estimated effects are large despite the evidence that adult children from larger families are less educated and earn significantly less interestingly the effect of an increase in the number of children on old age support does not depend on the child s gender

estimating the causal effect of forced eradication on coca cultivation in colombian municipalities summary colombia has aggressively pursued forced coca eradication to reduce the amount of land that agricultural households devote to illegal crops however few rigorous empirical studies have assessed its causal effect on land allocation decisions i use a 6 year panel covering the entire country for the years 2001 06 to estimate this effect i instrument eradication with changes in the expected cost of protecting eradication crews as they get far from the airports used as a point of departure estimates show the causal effect of a 1 increase in eradication to be approximately a 1 increase in coca cultivation

crime and social interactions the high variance of crime rates across time and space is one of the oldest puzzles in the social sciences this variance appears too high to be explained by changes in the exogenous costs and benefits of crime we present a model where social interactions create enough covariance across individuals to explain the high cross city variance of crime rates this model provides an index of social interactions which suggests that the amount of social interactions is highest in petty crimes moderate in more serious crimes and almost negligible in murder and rape

on the effects of enforcement on illegal markets evidence from a quasi experiment in colombia this paper studies the effects of enforcement on illegal behavior in the context of a large aerial spraying program designed to curb coca cultivation in colombia in 2006 the colombian government pledged not to spray a 10 km band around the frontier with ecuador due to diplomatic frictions arising from the possibly negative collateral effects of this policy on the ecuadorian side of the border this variation is used to estimate the effect of spraying on coca cultivation by regression discontinuity around the 10 km threshold and by conditional differences in differences the results suggest that spraying one additional hectare reduces coca cultivation by 0 022 to 0 03 hectares these effects are too small to make aerial spraying a cost effective policy for reducing cocaine production in colombia

the economic consequences of unwed motherhood using twin births as a natural experiment social scientists have long concluded that premarital childbearing exacerbates problems of both poverty and family instability out of wedlock and adolescent childbearing may reduce a mothers educational attainment lower the probability of her eventual marriage increase her probability of welfare recipiency and decrease family income the authors use an exogenous fertility event the birth of twins to estimate the economic effects of unplanned births the approach compares the economic outcomes of women experiencing premarital twin first births to those experiencing premarital single first births in the attempt to identify the consequences of an unplanned birth upon womens future fertility and marital decisions education labor force participation labor earnings welfare receipt and poverty status 1970 and 1980 us census micro data are used to identify twin births to unmarried women analysis found large short term effects of unplanned births on labor force participation poverty and welfare recipiency among unwed mothers but not among married mothers furthermore most adverse economic effects of unplanned motherhood dissipate over time for whites but larger and more persistent negative effects weigh upon black unwed mothers

water security and irrigation investment evidence from a field experiment in rural pakistan this study examines the relationship between water security features and irrigation investment using data from a field survey with a choice experiment conducted in rural pakistan our results gener

fertility and labor supply evidence from the one child policy in china this study provides new evidence on on the causal effect of fertility on maternal labor supply in rural china using the fact that in some parts of rural china couples are allowed to have a second

do hypothetical and actual marginal willingness to pay differ in choice experiments application to the valuation of the environment abstract in this paper we test the validity of choice experiments with donations for environmental projects in particular we test whether or not there are differences in preferences between a hypothetical and an actual choice experiment our experiments indicate no differences in addition internal tests of validity indicate transitive and stable preferences in both experiments although there are some indications of possible learning effects during the experiment

fertility and the household s economic status a natural experiment using indian micro data abstract we model fertility as endogenous to the family s economic status because poor households choose to have large families in the absence of adequate social insurance because of a strong son preference in india having two girls first can proxy an exogenous increase in fertility and is therefore a good instrument for fertility in determining poverty of rural households the 1993 1994 indian quinquennial survey data shows that even though poverty rates are comparable 74 per cent of two girl families have a third child compared to 63 per cent of other families fertility significantly positively affects poverty when treated as exogenous but vanishes once endogenised these results are robust to omitting states with skewed sex ratios and to proxying economic status by expenditures

the sensitivity of an empirical model of married women s hours of work to economic and statistical assumptions this study undertakes a systematic analysis of several theoretic and statistical assumption s used in many empirical models of female labor supply using a singl e data set psid 1975 labor supply data the author is able to replic ate most of the range of estimated income and substitution effects fo und in previous studies in this field he undertakes extensive specif ication tests and finds that most of this range should be rejected du e to statistical and model misspecifications the two most important assumptions appear to be the tobit assumption used to control for sel f selection into the labor force and exogeneity assumptions on the wi fe s wage rate and her labor market experience copyright 1987 by the econometric society

counterproductive counternarcotic strategies we model the economic incentives surrounding opium poppy cultivation in afghanistan specifically we examine the impact of eradication policies when opium is used as a means of obtaining credit and when the crops are cultivated in sharecropping arrangements the analysis suggests that when perfect credit markets are available an increased risk of eradication will lead to less land being allocated to opium poppy however when opium is used as a means of obtaining credit an eradication policy can rather increase land under poppy cultivation furthermore the unintended effects of eradication can be augmented in sharecropping arrangements

the effect of a first child on female labor supply evidence from women seeking fertility services estimating the causal effect of a first child on female labor supply is complicated by the endogeneity of fertility this paper addresses this problem by focusing on a sample of women from the national survey of family growth nsfg who sought help to become pregnant after a certain period only some of these women gave birth results using this strategy show that having a first child younger than one year old reduces female employment by 26 percentage points these estimates are close to ols estimates from census data and to those from ols and fixed effects models on nsfg data

motherhood and female labor supply in the developing world evidence from infertility shocks abstract we introduce a new instrument for family size infertility to investigate the causal relationship between children and female labor force participation infertility mimics an experiment where nature assigns an upper bound for family size independent of a woman s background this new instrument allows us to investigate the differential labor supply without restrictions on initial family size using the demographic and health surveys from 26 developing countries we show that ols estimates are biased upward we find that the presence of children affects neither the likelihood of work nor its intensity but impacts the type of work a woman pursues

the effects of child bearing on married women s labor supply and earnings using twin births as a natural experiment we use exogenous variations in fertility due to twin births to measure the impact of an unplanned child on married women s labor supply and earnings although the overall effects of an unplanned birth on labor supply are small we find significant effects in the years immediately following the unplanned birth especially in 1970 we estimate that declining fertility explains between 6 and 13 percent of the increase in married women s labor supply between 1970 and 1980 twin births are also associated with a substantial short run loss in earnings this effect persists longer than the labor supply effects though it does eventually disappear

a survey based choice experiment on coca cultivation from 1997 to 2005 an astonishing 5200 million usd was invested to reduce cocaine production in colombia the world s main cocaine producer however little is known about the effectiveness of policies targeting coca cultivation this paper uses a survey based experiment to evaluate the effects of the two main policies eradication and alternative development programs our results support becker s 1968 model of crime participation and in addition shed light on other non monetary factors that affect the coca cultivation decision religion legitimacy remoteness and poverty are found to be important we find that coca cultivation is inelastic to increases in perceived risk and relative profit so eradication and alternative development would have a rather small effect on coca cultivation a simple simulation exercise predicts that investing additional hundred thousand dollars in eradication decreases coca cultivation in only 1 5 c 2009 elsevier b v all rights reserved less

children and their parents labor supply evidence from exogenous variation in family size although theoretical models of labor supply and the family are well developed there are few credible estimates of key empirical relationships in the work family nexus this study uses a new instrumental variable the sex composition of the first two births in families with at least two children to estimate the effect of additional children on parents labor supply in the united states instrumental variables estimates using the sex mix are substantial but smaller than the corresponding ordinary least squares ols estimates moreover unlike the ols estimates the female labor supply effects estimated using sex mix instruments appear to be absent among more educated women and women with high wage husbands we also find that married women who have a third child reduce their labor supply by as much as women in the full sample while there is no relationship between wives child bearing and husbands labor supply excerpt

more power to the pill the impact of contraceptive freedom on women s life cycle labor supply the release of enovid in 1960 the first birth control pill afforded u s women unprecedented freedom to plan childbearing and their careers this paper uses plausibly exogenous variation in state consent laws to evaluate the causal impact of the pill on the timing of first births and extent and intensity of women s labor force participation the results suggest that legal access to the pill before age 21 significantly reduced the likelihood of a first birth before age 22 increased the number of women in the paid labor force and raised the number of annual hours worked

the twin instrument fertility and human capital investment twin births are often used as an instrument to address selection of women into fertility however recent work shows selection of women into twin birth such that while ols estimates tend to be downward biased twin iv estimates will tend to be upward biased this is pertinent given the emerging consensus that fertility has limited impacts on women s labour supply or on investments in children using data for developing countries and the united states to estimate the trade off between fertility and children s human capital we demonstrate the nature and size of the bias in the twin iv estimator and estimate bounds on the true parameter

an econometric analysis of coca eradication policy in colombia abstract we estimate an econometric model of coca production in colombia our results indicate that coca eradication is an ineffective means of supply control as farmers compensate by cultivating the crop more extensively the evidence further suggests that incentives to produce legal substitute crops may have greater supply reducing potential than eradication

tax evasion and social interactions the paper extends the standard tax evasion model by allowing for social interactions in manski s manski c f 1993 identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem review of economic studies 60 3 531 542 nomenclature our model takes into account endogenous interactions i e social conformity effects exogenous interactions i e fairness effects and correlated effects our model is tested using experimental data participants must decide how much income to report given individual and group tax rates and audit probabilities and given a feedback on the other members reporting behavior myopic and self consistent expectations are considered in the analysis in the latter case the estimation is based on a two limit simultaneous tobit with fixed group effects a unique social equilibrium exists when the model satisfies coherency conditions in line with brock and durlauf brock w a durlauf s n 2001b interactions based models in j heckman and e leamer eds handbook of econometrics 5 elsevier science b v 3297 380 the intrinsic nonlinearity between individual and group responses helps identify the model our results provide evidence of fairness effects but reject social conformity

heterogeneous preferences regarding global climate change we examine the structure of preferences for mitigating impacts of global climate change that will not occur during the lifetimes of most who are alive today because no market data exist for such distant markets a statedpreference approach is used the analysis is based on the random parameters logit model and the results indicate substantial heterogeneity in respondent preferences that mean willingness to pay is a significant and increasing function of the scope of the impact and provocatively that respondents have the same preferences over the two very different time horizons that we consider e examine the structure of preferences for mitigating impacts of global climate change that will not occur during the lifetimes of most who are alive today studies using current market data have estimated the potential costs of climate change on agriculture mendelsohn nordhaus shaw 1994 and on other aspects of measured production nordhaus 1994 but market data can not reveal the willingness of those currently alive to pay for measures to mitigate impacts that may not happen for 100 years or more there is serious public discussion involving diplomats at the highest levels about measures to mitigate emissions that would cost the united states alone 100 to 200 billion dollars annually therefore estimating the willingness of those currently alive to pay for mitigation measures is not a fanciful exercise but rather a crucial effort to determine how much mitigation should be undertaken it is the preferences of those alive today regarding acceptable levels of climate impacts and not the unknowable preferences of those who do not yet exist that will ultimately determine how much mitigation we pursue in the next quarter century as this question cannot be answered with market data we use the stated preference sp approach and elicit preferences for preventing climate change induced impacts a host of climate change impacts have been enumerated this study focuses on one type of impact that may be important but has received little attention from economists scientists have predicted that widespread ecosystem shifts may accompany changes in climate vemap 1995 ecosys tem shifts are likely to evolve slowly indicating that lost use values are likely to be small for those alive today yet the public may still be willing and asked to pay for mitigation measures that are designed to slow the transformation of ecosystems the current debate over climate change demon strates two things the first is that some people do care about long term changes that will never affect them or perhaps even their children the second is that preferences regarding the impacts of climate change are very heterogeneous as other members of the public appear much less concerned long term horizons combined with heterogeneous prefer ences makes ecosystem shifts a useful place to begin analyzing preferences for mitigating climate change im pacts a stated preference survey was designed that asked respondents to choose their most preferred program to reduce ecological impacts from a set menu of five or six different programs the programs varied in terms of costs the degree of ecosystem change and in the mitigation method four different menus provided to each respondent yielded four distinct valuation responses section ii de scribes the random parameters logit model for repeated choices that allows for a flexible correlation structure based on heterogeneous preferences the ecosystem change and the stated preference survey are discussed in section iii in section iv we estimate the random parameters model and estimate the willingness to pay to prevent various levels of ecosystem change section v concludes with a discussion of how the scope of the impact preference heterogeneity and the time horizon affect willingness to pay

profiles of fertility labour supply and wages of married women a complete life cycle model of all the major economic and demographic events in the postwar united states period the trends in fertility and female labour supply stand out as among the most dramatic fertility rates after their depression lows rose unexpectedly after world war ii far more than was anticipated as an adjustment to the war and continued to rise until the late 1950 s and early 1960 s when they again took an unexpected turn downward all the way to today s historical lows female labour force participation rates continuing their historical climb grew throughout the postwar period at an increasing pace by 4 percentage points during the 1950 s by 5 percentage points during the 1960 s and by 8 percentage points during the 1970 s these two trends are of course closely related for most married women have traditionally spent at least some minimal time out of the labour force while caring for their own children thus for example the slower growth rate of labour force participation rates in the 1950 s is probably connected with the higher fertility rates in that period in this paper a complete model of female labour supply and fertility choice is constructed and estimated the model is more complete than previous models in several respects first labour supply and fertility decisions are modelled as completely joint in the same sense as the consumption of two goods is joint second both are modelled as life cycle decisions that is as decisions regarding sequences of labour supply and fertility events rather than levels of the same hence the timing of both is important third the life cycle path of wage rates is made endogenous to the model given a wage function showing the effect of work experience on future wages the path of wages is determined automatically by the chosen path of labour supply which in turn is related to fertility decisions that require some period of non work econometrically the three profiles for labour supply fertility and wages are estimated with a full information maximum likelihood technique that solves several econometric problems such as the problem of heterogeneity of tastes the selectivity problem of missing wage rates for non workers and the problem of simultaneous equations bias the value of constructing a complete model is best seen by briefly reviewing past work in this area the modern literature in the area is based upon the work of becker

motherhood and female labor force participation evidence from infertility shocks women are underrepresented in the paid labor force in both developed and developing countries recent scholarship has argued that labor force differentials are not due to gender per se but can be attributed to the fact that women disproportionately face the responsibilities associated with bearing and raising children while the negative relationship between the presence of children and participation in the labor force is well established interpretation of this relationship is complicated by the endogeneity of fertility the number of children a woman has is a choice variable which could be influenced by her labor force participation additionally there are likely to be omitted factors that influence both fertility and labor force participation for instance women with high career based unobservables such as ambition or talent may choose to have fewer or no children and these women may be overrepresented in the labor force thus the observed negative relationship between children and labor force participation could be spurious several studies have exploited exogenous changes in family size in order to identify the

the toll of fertility on mothers wellbeing using multiple births as source of variation we study the impact of fertility on the overall wellbeing of mothers first using us census data for the year 1980 we study the impact of number of children on family arrangements welfare participation and poverty status second using the national health interview survey nhis for the period 1982 2003 we study the impact on a series of health risk factors the findings reveal first that an increase in family size increases the likelihood of marital breakdown second we find evidence that mothers facing an increase in family size are not only more likely to live with other family members such as grandparents aunts and uncles they are also more likely to receive help from welfare programs third consistent with an increase in welfare participation families mothers are more likely to fall below the poverty line and they face a reduction in total family income the results using nhis confirm a negative impact of fertility on marriage stability and an increase in welfare participation measured by the likelihood of using medicaid and for some samples a reduction in the take up of private health insurance finally we find evidence that a shock in fertility increases the likelihood of mothers suffering from high blood pressure and becoming obese

binary choice with binary endogenous regressors in panel data this article considers the estimation of the causal effect of fertility on female labor force participation equations my main concern is to examine two considerations the endogeneity of fertility and the impact of controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and for predetermined existing children using psid data a switching binary panel data model that accounts for selectivity bias as well as for other forms of time invariant unobserved heterogeneity is estimated individual effects are allowed to be correlated with the explanatory variables which can be predetermined as opposed to strictly exogenous family sex composition is used as an instrument for exogenous fertility movements the results indicate that exogeneity assumptions of children variables induce a downward bias in absolute value in the estimated negative effect of fertility on participation although the failure to account for unobserved heterogeneity overstates this effect moreover stronger effects of fertility are found when existing c

are prosumer households that much different evidence from stated residential energy consumption in germany abstract this paper discusses the effect of residential energy prosuming on households energy consumption behavior with the objective of finding evidence of a prosumer rebound effect on energy consumption prosuming is the partial self consumption of distributed energy production we hypothesize that prosumer households are systematically different from consumer households with regard to housing situation and socio economic characteristics we ensure an appropriate quasi randomized comparison by using propensity score matching as our identification strategy we employ data from a nationwide online survey among homeowners in germany while the data show a correlation between lower energy consumption and prosumer households we find no significant difference in energy consumption behavior between prosumers and non prosumers in a comparable sample with regard to socio economic and housing characteristics instead the lower energy consumption of prosumer households is attributed to more energy efficient technical equipment and thus to purchasing behavior our results do not show evidence of either negative or positive externalities of prosuming on residential energy consumption behavior and therefore we conclude that there is no need for additional governmental measures e g in the form of taxation or subsidies to address behavioral changes in energy prosuming