state abortion legislation as a public good before and after roe v wade utilization of a theoretical model of the public demand for abortion legislation suggests that should the 1973 roe vs wade ruling be overturned the availability of abortion in the us would not be as limited as it was before this landmark decision the model conceptualized public demand for abortion as a combination of 2 factors 1 external demand measured by voter preference and reflecting the external costs or benefits conferred on the public by the relative availability of abortion and 2 private demand based on the direct effect of abortion access by women of childbearing age the type of abortion legislation in each state prior to roe vs wade prohibited except to save the mothers life or in cases of rape restricted to specific situations such as preserving the mothers health and unrestricted was used as an indicator of public sentiment toward abortion among the factors considered to correlate with sentiment toward abortion availability were income education marital status race and religious affiliation the model predicts that 20 states compared to 30 in 1970 would prohibit abortion and 8 compared to 4 in 1970 would place no restrictions on abortion if each state were to select its own abortion policy omission of the private demand component from the model resulted in even less restrictive access to abortion 11 states with an abortion ban and 11 with unrestricted access these findings are consistent with the national opinion polls indicating support for less restrictive abortion legislation

the effect of unemployment compensation on unemployment duration in germany in west germany during the 1980s law changes cut the level of unemployment compensation for the unemployed without children and extended the duration of unemployment insurance for unemployed aged over 41 analysis of these changes using the german socioeconomic panel shows that transitions from unemployment for those under 49 were particularly responsive to extensions of unemployment insurance the implied elasticity for escapes of men to employment is similar to estimates for men in the united states suggesting that differences in the potential duration of unemployment insurance only partially explain the difference in spell lengths between germany and the united states

teen motherhood and abortion access it is argued that the net effect of any restriction of abortion access on birth rates is an empirical question this study examines the impact of access to abortion on county teenage birth rates birth rates are expected to decrease by 1 among white adolescents aged 15 19 years for a 25 mile increase in the distance to the nearest abortion provider particularly among in wedlock births data are obtained from 1973 88 national natality local area summary files for counties in the us and four other national sources data did not provide useful information on the empirical relationship between access and birth rate for densely populated urban areas cross sectional findings that had omitted variable bias indicate that an increase of 25 miles in distance to a provider was associated with an additional 1 4 births per 1000 white teenage women or a 3 increase in the average teen birth rate of 45 1000 white teenagers the findings from a county fixed effects model that controlled for omitted variable bias indicate that an increase of 25 miles was associated with a reduction in teen births of 0 5 1000 or about 1 of the mean birth rate both medicaid restrictions and parental consent laws were negative and significant and more negative in poor and more isolated counties the state year effects models did not change findings on distance and medicaid restriction effects the effects of changes in timing of laws suggests that laws followed preexisting trends changes in distance to provider were primarily in the first 2 years following the change out of wedlock births were unaffected by changes in distance to providers the out of wedlock teen birth rate increased with a complete ban on abortions fewer wanted births were associated with small restrictions findings imply that closing of clinics during 1977 88 had an impact on teen birth rates of under one tenth of 1 the 20 increase in teen births was unexplained

skill biased technological change and rising wage inequality some problems and puzzles the recent rise in wage inequality is usually attributed to skill biased technical change sbtc associated with new computer technologies we review the evidence for this hypothesis focusing on the implications of sbtc for overall wage inequality and for changes in wage differentials between groups a key problem for the sbtc hypothesis is that wage inequality stabilized in the 1990s despite continuing advances in computer technology sbtc also fails to explain the evolution of other dimensions of wage inequality including the gender and racial wage gaps and the age gradient in the return to education

correlations of brothers earnings and intergenerational transmission correlations between parent and child earnings reflect intergenerational mobility and more broadly correlations between siblings earnings reflect shared community and family background these earnings relationships capture important aspects of relations in socioeconomic status more generally we estimate intergenerational transmission and sibling correlations of life cycle earnings jointly within a unified framework that nests previous models using data on the danish population of father first son second son triads we find that intergenerational effects account for on average 72 percent of sibling correlations this share is higher than all previous studies because we allow for heterogeneous intergenerational transmission between families sibling correlations exhibit a u shape over the working life consistent with differences in human capital investments between families

provider availability race and abortion demand variations in the availability of abortion providers may impact the demand for abortions since greater provider availability reduces the travel cost associated with obtaining an abortion this paper applies a fertility control model to estimate the responsiveness of abortion demand to travel cost variations using individual data from all births and abortions of women over age 20 in the state of texas for 1993 the probability that a pregnant woman chooses an abortion appears to be sensitive to availability induced variations in the travel cost of abortion services controlling for the endogeneity of travel distance the results suggest that pregnant women who reside in counties with longer travel distances to the nearest abortion provider have lower probabilities of aborting their pregnancies than women in counties closer to abortion providers simulations show that changes in travel distance will have relatively large impacts on overall abortion rates and furthermore that these effects vary across race in addition these simulations show substantial differences by race in the effects of changes in other explanatory variables

social approval values and afdc a re examination of the illegitimacy debate this paper models the fertility decision of individuals who differ in their wage rate and their intensity of preferences for rearing children and whose utility of having a child out of wedlock depends on the level of social approval associated with doing so this social approval in turn is a function of the fraction of individuals in previous generations that chose to have children out of wedlock the model is a straightforward extension of the typical rational choice model that motivates much of the empirical literature a literature that has cast doubt on a strong link between afdc and illegitimacy however the model introduces elements from epidemic models that many have in mind when arguing for such a link as a result the predictions of this extended model are consistent with empirical findings while at the same time linking the rise in illegitimacy solely to government welfare programs specifically a program similar to afdc is introduced into an economy with low illegitimacy rates and a trans

incentive effects of the u s welfare system a review the author would like to acknowledge support for prior work on this topic from the u s department of health and human services and helpful comments from three anonymous referees rebecca blank howard chernick john fitzgerald irwin garfinkel peter gottschalk edward gramlich david greenberg judith gueron james heckman v joseph hotz robert hutchens michael keane frank levy larry mead michael murray robert plotnick anuradha rangarajan philip robins howard rolston jeffrey smith and daniel weinberg all opinions and errors are those of the author alone

alternative paths to parenthood ivf or child adoption this article analyzes the effects of child adoption on the utilization of assisted reproductive technology art in the united states using state level longitudinal data for 1999 2006 we show that art use is responsive to changes in adoption markets after controlling for state specific fixed effects our estimates reveal that a 10 increase in adoptions leads to a 1 3 1 5 decrease in the number of art cycles performed the responsiveness is higher when we consider infant adoptions adoptions by older women and international adoptions while there is no substitutability between art and adoption of related children jel i11 j13 j18

comparing income mobility in germany and the united states using generalized entropy mobility measures based on a derivation of the asymptotic sampling distribution of the generalized entropy mobility measures this paper provides a statistically rigorous analysis of income mobility in germany and the united states using the panel data set psid soep equivalent data file several alternative measures of income aggregation inequality measures and groupings are considered to establish robustness we find that to a high degree of statistical confidence post government income mobility is much higher in germany possible reasons for these findings are revealed through disaggregation of the samples by population subgroups

earnings inequality and mobility in the united states evidence from social security data since 1937 this paper uses social security administration longitudinal earnings micro data since 1937 to analyze the evolution of inequality and mobility in the united states annual earnings inequality is u shaped decreasing sharply up to 1953 and increasing steadily afterward short term earnings mobility measures are stable over the full period except for a temporary surge during world war ii virtually all of the increase in the variance in annual log earnings since 1970 is due to increase in the variance of permanent earnings as opposed to transitory earnings mobility at the top of the earnings distribution is stable and has not mitigated the dramatic increase in annual earnings concentration since the 1970s long term mobility among all workers has increased since the 1950s but has slightly declined among men the decrease in the gender earnings gap and the resulting substantial increase in upward mobility over a lifetime for women are the driving force behind the increase in long term mobility among all workers

sources of lifetime inequality is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime we answer this question within a model that features idiosyncratic shocks to human capital estimated directly from data as well as heterogeneity in ability to learn initial human capital and initial wealth we find that as of age 23 differences in initial conditions account for more of the variation in lifetime earnings lifetime wealth and lifetime utility than do differences in shocks received over the working lifetime jel d31 d91 j24 j31 to what degree is lifetime inequality due to differences across people established early in life as opposed to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime among the individual differences established early in life which ones are the most important a convincing answer to these questions is of fundamental importance first and most simply an answer serves to contrast the potential importance of the myriad policies directed at modifying or at providing insurance for initial conditions e g public education against those directed at shocks over the working lifetime e g unemployment insurance second a discussion of lifetime inequality cannot go too far before discussing which specific type of initial condition is the most critical for determining how one fares in life third a useful framework for answering these questions should also be central in the analysis of a wide range of policies considered in macroeconomics public finance and labor economics we view lifetime inequality through the lens of a risky human capital model agents differ in terms of three initial conditions initial human capital learning ability and financial wealth initial human capital can be viewed as controlling the intercept of an agent s mean earnings profile whereas learning ability acts to rotate

health related life cycle risks and public insurance abstract based on a dynamic life cycle model this study analyzes health related risks of consumption and old age poverty the model allows for health effects on employment risks on productivity on longevity the correlation between health risks productivity and preferences and the financial incentives of the german public insurance schemes the estimation uses data on male employees and an extended expectation maximization algorithm simulations suggest that health shocks induce average losses in annual consumption of about 10 and account for more than two thirds of the cases of old age poverty annuity markets that account for differences in the longevity risk by health status can effectively reduce the consumption risks but only slightly decrease old age poverty a policy analysis of minimum pension benefits indicates that a means test mitigates the associated moral hazard problem substantially

comment sequential moment restrictions in panel data 1992 comment sequential moment restrictions in panel data journal of business economic statistics vol 10 no 1 pp 20 26

four themes in fertility research this study is concerned with four main themes that have been combined to describe u s fertility trends since 1920 these themes are identified as a time adjustment mechanism income the wifes labor force activities and some intergenerational factor in order to obtain an unambiguous picture each theme will be represented by only one variable after selecting the variables and estimating a model an examination of the changing role these variables have had in explaining changes in fertility the total fertility rate throughout much of this century will be made finally the implications these themes have for future fertility will be examined the authors conclude that in interpreting historical u s fertility rates the results seem to indicate that much of the early decline in u s fertility was due to falling infant mortality after the second world war fertility rose sharply as the age structure variable declined and income rose eventually both womens labor force participation rates and the age structure variable rose and consequently fertility fell they also suggest that the age structure variable may cause a temporary upward swing in fertility in the near future excerpt

habit persistence and teen sex could increased access to contraception have unintended consequences for teen pregnancies we develop a dynamic discrete choice model of teen sex and pregnancy that incorporates habit persistence habit persistence has two sources here the first is a fixed cost of having sex which relates to a moral or psychological barrier that has been crossed the first time one has sex the second is a transition cost whereby once a particular relationship has progressed to sex it is difficult to move back we estimate significant habit persistence in teen sex implying that the long run effects of contraception policy may be different from their short run counterparts especially if the failure rate of contraception is sufficiently large programs that increase access to contraception are found to decrease teen pregnancies in the short run but increase them in the long run

expected revenue from open and sealed bid auctions in his preceding piece paul milgrom has neatly laid out many of the core results of the recent literature on the theory of competitive bidding my immediate goal here is to provide the simplest possible derivation of three basic revenue ranking theorems each of these compares the expected revenue obtained from open bidding as in the typical art auction with the expected revenue obtained when bids are sealed and the winner pays his bid the first of the ranking theorems is the revenue equivalence theorem which establishes conditions under which these two seemingly very different auctions generate the same expected revenue for the seller the other two theorems establish the effect of relaxing one of the key assumptions when buyers are risk averse the seller gains if buyers submit sealed bids and the winner pays his bid on the other hand if valuations of different buyers are positively correlated rather than unrelated the seller extracts more revenue in an open ascending bid auction in reducing these theorems to their basic elements my deeper goal is to provide the reader with a better intuitive understanding of the results

regulation and the optimal size and type of abortion provider between 1973 the year the supreme court ruled in roe v wade that women have the right to decide whether or not to terminate their pregnancies and 1982 the number of abortion providers increased by 81 per cent however between 1982 and 1992 a period of increasing state level abortion regulation the number of abortion providers decreased by 18 per cent we know very little about the factors that influence the willingness and ability of hospitals clinics and physicians to provide abortion services over time based on state data from 1978 to 1992 the results of this paper suggest that large abortion providers are better able to compete and survive in the market also clinics and physicians offices appear to be gaining market share relative to hospitals further this paper includes analysis of the impact of state level medicaid funding regulations on the number size and type of abortion provider these results have important implications for women s access to abortion services and thus have impor

access to abortion investments in neonatal health and sex selection evidence from nepal the impact of abortion reforms on the human capital of subsequent generations including health has been documented in several developed countries however i evidence relative to the impact on health in early life is not unanimous ii there is no evidence for a developing country where health human capital is low and iii existing econometric studies have been unable to disentangle the effect of abortion reform on individual behavior from that on the composition of mothers in this paper i exploit variation in the timing and location of newly introduced legal abortion centers in nepal to estimate the effect of reducing the psychological and nancial cost of abortion on fertility investments in prenatal care neonatal mortality and sex selection consistent with the prediction that the opening of a legal abortion center nearby reduces the cost of abortion i find that the probability of a live birth conditional on conception decreases by 8 3 percentage points 9 percent of the mean for a given mother similarly the unconditional monthly probability of a live birth decreases by 0 4 percentage points 21 percent of the mean however there is no evidence that improved access to abortion increases observed investments in antenatal care and little evidence that it increases unobserved investments in neonatal health contrary to ndings in lin et al 2008 for taiwan abortion reform in nepal does not appear to have led to sex selective terminations on the contrary there is some evidence that it may have led to a decrease in sex selective abortion which could be due to the substitution of first trimester legal abortions to illegal abortions at a later gestational stage

an empirical analysis of adoption i introduction adoption is as old as recorded history it was practiced by the ancient egyptians greeks and romans technically adoption is a legal procedure by which a couple or less commonly an individual takes someone else s child into their family and raises it as their own the child may be unrelated to either adoptive parent but is often the child of one member of the couple or related in some other way to the adoptive parents adoption severs all legal ties between the birth parents and the child and replaces them by a legal relationship between the child and the adoptive parents in most cases of adoption the birth parents voluntarily surrender their parental rights so that an adoption can take place it seems highly likely that the u s supreme court will allow further restrictions on the availability of abortion as a consequence considerable attention is certain to be focused on the adoption option and its social implications prior to 1970 fertility behavior was little studied by economists partly because it was thought that the determinants were largely noneconomic during the past two decades however economists using a choice theoretic framework have examined a variety of fertility issues such as marriage becker 1974 procreation and children detray 1973 birth control willis 1973 and abortion leibowitz eisen and chow 1986 surprisingly no economic research exists on the issue of adoption despite the fact that it represents a natural extension of the traditional theory of consumer choice most adoption research focuses on sociological issues such as infertility or adoption procedures this paper empirically estimates the supply of adoptions using the decision making economic framework of completed fertility developed by becker 1960 and extended by michael 1973 i believe their model s determinants of desired fertility and family size will also be significant in explaining a household s decision to give up a child for adoption section ii outlines the adoption model and relates it to the economic theory of desired fertility and family size the third and fourth sections discuss the empirical estimates of the adoption model the fifth section examines the impact of various state regulations on the adoption decision and the last section discusses public and social implications of the empirical results ii the adoption model michael argues that households decisions concerning desired family size and the timing of childbearing can be explained in terms of a household production function michael s model is based on a comparison of the benefits and costs from an additional child over time his theory of completed fertility purports to be over a household s full reproductive age span but it is in actuality a period by period analysis households are myopic in that although they consider the future costs and benefits of a child an independent decision is made in each period regarding whether to have a child a household s optimal family size may be for example two children but if when the first child is conceived the household perceives the timing of the birth as undesirable then at that point in time the net benefit from the additional child is negative the consequence is that the child is unwanted and the household will take steps to reduce the discrepancy between the desired and actual stock of children one possible solution is an adoption once a child is born a household has two choices keep the child or put it up for adoption michael s framework implies that the likelihood that a household will place a child for adoption is positively related to the negative discrepancy between the household s desired and actual stock of children at that time the factors affecting a household s desired family size income time values relative productivities and revealed tastes are reflected in the discrepancy between the desired and actual stock of children

new jersey s family cap experiment do fertility impacts differ by racial density using experimental design this research examines the impact of the nation s first family cap policy implemented in new jersey on the fertility behavior of welfare recipients we explore whether the change in welfare parameters mandated by the policy induces differential impact among black white and hispanic recipients we examine if impacts are conditioned by racial ethnic group concentration results show that reduced welfare payments have contributed to a decline in births for black women while we find a large response for blacks on average we find no response for blacks who live in geographic areas where they form a racial ethnic majority

the polarization of the u s labor market this paper analyzes a marked change in the evolution of the u s wage structure over the past fifteen years divergent trends in upper tail 90 50 and lower tail 50 10 wage inequality we document that wage inequality in the top half of distribution has displayed an unchecked and rather smooth secular rise for the last 25 years since 1980 wage inequality in the bottom half of the distribution also grew rapidly from 1979 to 1987 but it has ceased growing and for some measures actually narrowed since the late 1980s furthermore we find that occupational employment growth shifted from monotonically increasing in wages education in the 1980s to a pattern of more rapid growth in jobs at the top and bottom relative to the middles of the wage education distribution in the 1990s we characterize these patterns as the u201cpolarization u201d of the u s labor market with employment polarizing into high wage and low wage jobs at the expense of middle wage work we show how a model of computerization in which computers most strongly complement the non routine abstract cognitive tasks of high wage jobs directly substitute for the routine tasks found in many traditional middle wage jobs and may have little direct impact on non routine manual tasks in relatively low wage jobs can help explain the observed polarization of the u s labor market this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

job polarization in europe the structure of employment is always changing and economists are always trying to understand those changes in the 1990s the idea of skill biased technological change sbtc was used to understand the shift in employment toward more educated workers see david h autor and lawrence f katz 1999 for a survey however in recent years it has become appar ent that a more nuanced approach is needed the idea of sbtc might lead one to predict a uni form shift in employment away from low skilled and toward high skilled occupations but studies for the united states autor katz and melissa s kearney 2006 and the united kingdom goos and manning 2007 have shown that there is growth in employment in both the high est skilled professional and managerial and lowest skilled personal services occupations with declining employment in the middle of the distribution manufacturing and routine office jobs this is what goos and manning 2007 term job polarization although see the introduc tion to goos and manning 2007 for antecedents of these ideas there are several hypotheses about the rea sons for job polarization first the routiniza tion hypothesis first put forward by autor frank levy and richard murnane 2003 sug gests that the effect of technological progress is to replace routine labor which tends to be clerical and craft jobs in the middle of the wage distribution second there is the view that globalization in general and offshoring in par ticular is an important source of change in the job structure in the richest countries see for example alan s blinder 2007 third there may be a link between job polarization and

can beer taxes affect teen pregnancy evidence based on teen abortion rates and birth rates economists have investigated the effects of increased alcohol taxes on various alcohol related phenomena like traffic fatalities but to my knowledge this study is the first to investigate the effects of beer taxes on teen pregnancy outcomes namely abortion and birth rates the study employs statelevel data for 15 19 year old women for the years 1985 1988 1992 and 1996 the smallness of the panel imposes some constraints on the statistical methods used results indicate that higher beer taxes have statistically significant negative effects on teen abortion rates though the magnitudes of the effects are quite small effects on birthrates are statistically insignificant this suggests that increased beer taxes may help prevent some unwanted pregnancies that would typically be terminated via abortions rather than culminating in live births however the small magnitudes of the effects strongly caution against relying on increased beer taxes to noticeably reduce teen pregnancy rates

uniqueness of equilibrium in sealed high bid auctions abstract for the case of two buyers we show that equilibrium in the sealed high bid auction is unique when i buyers reservations prices are drawn independently from distributions with finite support and positive mass at the lower endpoint ii buyers have private values and iii buyers preferences are log supermodular for more than two buyers we obtain the same result under the additional assumptions that iv buyers with the same reservation price have the same preferences v buyers are risk neutral or risk averse with non increasing absolute risk aversion and vi the supports of the different buyers distributions of reservation prices have the same upper endpoint

welfare generosity the importance of administrative efficiency community values and genuine benevolence using 1988 1991 state level data a public expenditure model is estimated for benefits paid through the aid to families with dependent children afdc programme the paper investigates whether differences in programme efficiency community attitudes perceptions of the effects of afdc on recipient behaviour and tastes for redistribution explain the variation in public support for welfare across states

a cross national comparison of permanent inequality in the united states and germany traditional cross sectional measures find greater inequality in the united states than in industrialized western european countries but are unable to distinguish transitory from permanent inequality with longitudinal data we measure cross sectional inequality during the 1980s using the shorrocks measure of income stability to find the degree to which single period measures exaggerate permanent inequality surprisingly given the smaller social welfare system and the less restrictive labor markets in the united states we find that both single period inequality and the share of that inequality that persists over time are greater in the united states than in germany

children as income producing assets the case of teen illegitimacy and government transfers this paper develops a classical model of the teen fertility decision in the presence of public income transfers the theoretical model predicts that welfare payments will encourage fertility holding constant other economic opportunities and that better economic opportunities will discourage fertility considering the possible simultaneity of illegitimacy rates and benefit levels due to the collective choice process the authors confirm the theoretical models predictions with state level data from 1980 through 1990 the authors find that including fixed effects in the regression to control for unobserved differences between states does not sufficiently control for endogeneity after controlling for endogeneity real welfare benefits are strongly and robustly related to teen illegitimacy the point estimates of the elasticity with respect to changes in the illegitimacy rate are around 1 3 for white teens and 2 1 for black teens real wages for women with a high school education or less are negatively related to teen illegitimacy for white teens with an elasticity of around 0 4 finally male wages appear to have little effect on the illegitimacy rate for white teens but appear negatively correlated with the illegitimacy rate for black teens in some model specifications authors

abortion legalization and child living circumstances who is the marginal child weexaminethe impact ofincreased abortion availabilityon the averageliving standards of children through a selection effect would the marginal child whowas not born have grown up in different circumstances than the average child we use variation in the timing of abortion legalization across states to answer this question cohorts born after legalized abortion experienced a signiecant reduction in a number of adverse outcomes we end that the marginal child would have been 40 60 percent more likely to live in a single parent family to live in poverty to receive welfare and to die as an infant access to abortion is one of the most contentious public policy issues facing the united states today the period since the legalization of abortion under the roe v wade decision of 1973 has been marked by incessant debate over the appropriate government enancing and legal status of abortions meanwhile pregnancy resolution through abortion is a very common outcome in the united states roughly 25 percent of all pregnancies are aborted ventura et al 1995 as a result major changes in abortion access could have substantial effects on the birthrate indeed levine staiger kane and zimmerman end that the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s led to an 8 percent reduction in the birthrate 1

uniqueness of the equilibrium in first price auctions abstract if the value cumulative distribution functions are strictly log concave at the highest lower extremity of their supports a simple geometric argument establishes the uniqueness of the equilibrium of the first price auction in the asymmetric independent private values model

equilibrium in sealed high bid auctions there is a voluminous theoretical literature on sealed high bid auctions auctions in which bids are sealed and the high bidder pays his bid see for example vickrey 1961 myerson 1981 riley and samuelson 1981 milgrom and weber 1982 matthews 1983 maskin and riley 1984 holt 1980 cox smith and walker 1988 a critical property on which this literature relies is the existence of equilibrium in which buyers bidding strategies are monotonic in their types this enables the analyst to perform comparative statics as the distribution of types changes and to compare the welfare properties of the high bid auction with those of other auction institutions one case in which the existence of monotonic equilibrium is readily established is that in which buyers types are distributed smoothly independently and symmetrically in this case there exists a symmetric equilibrium one in which all bidders share the same bidding behaviour as a function of their valuations and this bid function is the solution to a first order differential equation

state abortion rates the impact of policies providers politics demographics and economic environment abstract this paper uses data on abortion rates by state from 1974 1988 to estimate two stage least squares models with fixed state and year effects restrictions on medicaid funding for abortion are correlated with lower abortion rates in state and higher rates among nearby states a maximal estimate suggests that 19 25 of the abortions among low income women that are publicly funded do not take place after funding is eliminated parental notification laws for teen abortions do not significantly affect aggregate abortion rates a larger number of abortion providers in a state increases the abortion rate primarily through inducing cross state travel

welfare effects on female headship with area effects the existing literature on welfare effects on female headship in the united states shows significant positive correlations in cross section possibly increasing over time however when geographic or area effects are permitted in the estimation these correlations either disappear or reverse in sign the results have implications for the study of welfare effects in other countries including canada where benefits vary considerably across provinces and localities within them

an analysis of out of wedlock childbearing in the united states this paper relates the erosion of the custom of shotgun marriage to the legalization of abortion and the increased availability of contraception to unmarried women in the united states the decline in shotgun marriage accounts for a significant fraction of the increase in out of wedlock first births several models illustrate the analogy between women who do not adopt either birth control or abortion and the hand loom weavers both victims of changing technology mechanisms causing female immiseration are modeled and historically described this technology shock hypothesis is an alternative to welfare and job shortage theories of the feminization of poverty excerpt

an economic analysis of the demand for abortions research in estimating the demand for abortions is conducted by using an economic model and examining socioeconomic factors some suggest that a households fertility control decision is decided by a comparison of the costs and benefits of an additional child over a period of time therefore abortion is a choice related to the interaction of preference cost and income a womans marital status is another factor in the abortion decision an unmarried women may having a greater demand for abortion since the demands on her are greater another factor is a womans employment status an employed woman more likely having a higher abortion religious affiliation may be another determinant in lower demand for abortion since most religions oppose abortion however in surveys of catholic women 74 believed that a woman less than 3 months pregnant should make her own choice on abortion educational status was also thought to effect abortion demand but results showed no significance if the laws were changed abortion were illegal and the price increased 50 the abortion rate would drop by 40 5 the prohibiting of government funding for abortions would cause a 17 5 decrease future trends in abortion are likely to increase however due to the declining marriage rates and increased divorce rate other factors that will effect these trends include sexual behavior patterns contraceptive availability and the perceived risks involved in birth control

children and their parents a review of fertility and causality childbearing decisions are not made in isolation they are taken in concert with decisions regarding work marriage health investments and stocks as well as many other observable and non observable considerations drawing causal inferences regarding the effect of additional children on family outcomes is complicated by these endogenous factors this paper lays out the issues involved in estimating the effect of additional child births on family outcomes and the assumptions underlying the range of estimators and methodologies proposed in the economic literature the common pitfalls of these estimators are discussed as well as their potential to bias our interpretation of the effect additional births have on children and parents both in the existing literature and in future work in the face of changing patterns of childbearing and child rearing

life cycle variations in the association between current and lifetime income replication and extension for sweden we apply haider and solon s generalized errors in variables model to swedish income tax data to produce estimates of the association between current and lifetime income our estimates demonstrate strong life cycle patterns this implies that the widespread use of current income as a proxy for lifetime income leads to inconsistent parameter estimates i e life cycle bias even when the proxy is used as the dependent variable estimates for comparable cohorts of swedish and american men demonstrate surprising similarities there are however significant gender and cohort differences in this association that lead to statistically significant and quantitatively meaningful differences in life cycle biases

snapshots versus movies empirical studies of the intergenerational inheritance of economic status should use observations on complete lifetime status profiles of parents and children to be consistent with underlying theory but they cannot only snapshots rather than movies on status are currently available in samples estimates of the degree of intergenerational inheritance may therefore be subject to lifecycle biases the paper investigates these in the context of a lifecycle earnings model and shows that these biases may be large that their direction varies and that correction methods suggested hitherto have questionable reliability until more complete data sets become available researchers should be more temperate in the conclusions they draw

welfare and the family the u s experience after describing the development and dimensions of the american welfare system this paper explores the relationship of illegitimacy to welfare alternative measures of illegitimacy are discussed the relationship of the welfare package and the illegitimacy ratio is examined over time and across states by race a bivariate relationship of welfare and illegitimacy exists among whites but not among blacks among blacks a strong cross state relationship exists between density of the black population and the illegitimacy ratio the relationship is robust persisting after controlling for a variety of demographic and economic variables and persisting across time

regulation imperfect competition and the u s abortion market the u s abortion market has grown increasingly concentrated recently while many states tightened abortion laws using data on abortion providers i estimate an equilibrium model of demand price competition entry and exit to capture the effect of regulation on industry dynamics estimates show regulations played an important role in determining the abortion market structure and evolution counterfactual simulations reveal increases in demand aimed regulation were the most important observed factor in explaining recent abortion declines simulating utah s regulatory regime nationally shows tightening abortion restrictions can increase abortions in equilibrium mainly through tilting the competitive landscape toward low price providers

debt ceiling and fiscal sustainability in brazil a quantile autoregression approach abstract in this paper we investigate fiscal sustainability by using a quantile autoregression qar model we propose a novel methodology to separate periods of nonstationarity from stationary ones allowing us to identify various trajectories of public debt that are compatible with fiscal sustainability we use such trajectories to construct a debt ceiling that is the largest value of public debt that does not jeopardize long run fiscal sustainability we make an out of sample forecast of such a ceiling and show how it could be used by policy makers interested in keeping the public debt on a sustainable path we illustrate the applicability of our results using brazilian data

the effect of medicaid abortion funding restrictions on abortions pregnancies and births this paper considers whether state medicaid abortion funding restrictions affect the likelihood of getting pregnant having an abortion and bearing a child we exploit a natural experiment afforded by supreme court decisions and employ more traditional multivariate models with alternative fixed effect specifications an analysis of 12 years of state level data indicate that restrictions are associated with a reduction in abortions and either no change or a reduction in births implying fewer pregnancies subsequent analysis of the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy is consistent with these findings and show the response is concentrated among the low income population

games the states don t play welfare benefits and the theory of fiscal federalism fiscal federalism theory predicts that states will behave strategically in welfare programs because voter demand for welfare is sensitive to tax price while the tax price itself changes because of welfare induced migration this paper tests these propositions on afdc in the united states for a panel from 1982 88 using new models for the determination of the recipiency ratio the tax price and composite neighbors the data do not support any substantial tax price elasticity of demand for welfare estimates of migration effects on tax price are found to be sensitive to specification copyright 1995 by mit press

the supply of infants relinquished for adoption did access to abortion make a difference motivated by a theory of desired fertility i use three years of aggregate state level data to examine the impact of abortion access on the supply of infants relinquished for adoption i show evidence that abortion access affected the supply of infants relinquished during the 1980s in two different ways first the availability of abortion providers has the expected effect of reducing the supply of infants relinquished particularly relative to the demand for abortion second abortion law has an unexpected negative effect this suggests that as abortion laws become more restrictive the total number of unwanted births may decrease jel j13

lifetime earnings inequality in germany we employ german social security records to investigate intragenerational lifetime earnings inequality and mobility of yearly earnings for 35 cohorts starting with the birth year 1935 our main result is a striking secular rise of intragenerational inequality in lifetime earnings west german men born in the early 1960s are likely to experience about 85 more lifetime inequality than their fathers in contrast both short term and long term intragenerational mobility are stable longer unemployment spells of workers at the bottom of the distribution of younger cohorts contribute to explaining 20 40 of the overall increase in lifetime earnings inequality

the effect of the u s welfare system on marital status abstract an issue of long standing importance in the u s welfare system has been its lack of neutrality with respect to family composition which generally provides payments only to female headed families that is families with no able bodied male present using data from 1969 to 1985 to examine the issue this study finds that 1 the simple cross sectional correlations between marital status and welfare benefits are almost always in the expected direction but are generally weak in significance 2 that the magnitude and significance of the correlations have nevertheless grown over time and 3 that the correlations for men are no weaker and usually stronger especially for blacks than those for women

estimating the factors determining the demand for induced abortions among married women in taiwan this paper purports to estimate the characteristics of women who had experiences of abortion in 1991 based on an economic model of fertility the study makes use of a national survey on the knowledge of attitude towards and practice of family planning and reproductive health among married women in taiwan the results show that older women with higher family income and who live in urban areas were more likely to have the pregnancy terminated in addition the decision to have an abortion was negatively correlated with prior pregnancy loss but positively associated with the number of previous live births on the other hand the availability of abortion services as measured by the number of legal abortion providers at city and county levels had a negative effect on the demand for abortions the local female unemployment rate was found to be positively correlated with the woman s decision to have an abortion

fertility and the tax benefit system a reconsideration of the theory of family taxation the author examines the simultaneous nature of the decision to have children the decision to spend money on them and the decision to seek employment it will be argued that the children income trade off emphasised by the present paper is more relevant to most family decisions than the income leisure trade off on which much of the policy debate has been centred in order to do that we shall bring together the recently developed economic theory of the family or new home economics with the microeconomic branch of the theory of public finance a model of family choice is developed the main message of the present paper is that if as the evidence suggests parents have some control over the number of children they put into the world then the effect of taxes and subsidies on the familys allocation of time and money will be generally weaker and in some respects the opposite of what it would be if the number of children were physiologically constrained or exogenously given another is that if parents derive utility from having children this has to be taken into account in any welfare calculation fertility may thus affect the design of optimal policy in two ways indirectly through its effect on market behaviour and directly through its effect on welfare excerpt

income inequality and early nonmarital childbearing using individual level data from the united states we empirically investigate the role of lower tail income inequality in determining rates of early nonmarital childbearing among low socioeconomic status ses women we present robust evidence that young low ses women are more likely to have a nonmarital birth when they live in places with larger lower tail income inequality all else held constant we calculate that differences in the level of inequality are able to explain a sizeable share of the geographic variation in teen fertility rates we propose a model of adolescent decision making that facilitates the interpretation of our results

first price auction symmetric equilibria with a general distribution abstract in this paper i obtain the mixed strategy symmetric equilibria of the independent private values first price auction for any distribution of valuations the equilibrium strategy is a pure strategy at the continuity points of the distribution and bids a mixed strategy at the discontinuity points of the distribution

the trade off between child quantity and quality an empirical investigation of trade offs between number of children and their scholastic performance confirms that family size directly affects children s achievement though parents show no favori

the role of economic incentives in teenage nonmarital childbearing choices abstract in this paper we explore whether behaviors of youths that are likely to result in a teen nonmarital birth event are influenced by their expectations of the net economic benefits or costs associated with the occurrence of such a birth we posit and find that an increase in the perceived costs associated with the occurrence of a nonmarital birth would lead to a reduction in these risky behaviors and to a lower probability of a nonmarital birth event we represent these economic incentives by the income expectations of young women conditional on either giving birth as an unmarried teen or forgoing childbearing while unmarried and an adolescent we also measure the effects of an extensive list of other factors including the characteristics of the girl s family and its choices the social and economic environment in which she lives including policy related factors such as expenditures by states on family planning programs and the generosity of aid to families with dependent children and her own prior choices

the impact of state abortion restrictions on minors demand for abortions this study uses a weighted least squares model and a fixed effects model to estimate the impact of parental consent laws and laws governing medicaid funding of abortions on the adolescents demand for abortion in the united states during 1978 90 the focus is on adolescent pregnancy because 12 of total legal abortions in 1987 were to adolescents aged under 18 years the rate of abortion and types of abortion law range widely between states data are obtained from the us center for disease control on reported abortions from the naral foundation on the dates of actual enforcement restrictions and from the alan guttmacher institute on abortion providers the empirical model is based on a model developed by grossman and joyce proxy measures are used to represent abortion sentiment fixed effects models indicated that there was a decline of 13 17 in adolescents demand for abortion in states with enforced parental involvement laws compared to states without enforced laws the results implied a 9 15 decline in adolescents demand for abortion in states that restricted medicaid funding of abortion compared to states that did not there was a positive association between abortion demand and income and between abortion demand and the availability of abortion providers the inclusion of the abortion sentiment proxies did not change the signs and magnitudes of the impact very much in the fixed effects models it is posited that the negative impacts of abortion restrictions on adolescent abortion demand cannot be attributed to unobserved heterogeneity four methods of modeling are used to account for the potential role of unobserved heterogeneity