household resource allocation in stepfamilies darwin reflects on the plight of cinderella the living conditions of american children have changed dramatically during the past 50 years in 1950 the vast majority of children were born to married parents and lived with both parents until they reached adulthood today over a third of all children are born to unmarried parents and over half will live apart from at least one of their parents before reaching age 18 larry bumpass and james sweet 1989 a majority of these children will live with a stepparent or foster parent and a substantial minority will experience multiple family disruptions and multiple changes in parental personnel numerous studies have shown that remarriage is not the panacea it was once thought to be children who grow up in two parent families consisting of a biological parent and a stepparent have outcomes very similar to children who grow up with only one parent and worse than children who are raised by both of their biological parents these differences cannot be explained by differences in income since stepfamilies and original two parent families enjoy similar levels of income one explanation for why children in stepfamilies do poorly is that stepparents are less altruistic and indeed may be quite hostile toward nonbiological children according to the theory of parental solicitude such feelings are rooted in psychological mechanisms that have evolved over time through the process of natural selection thus while household incomes may be similar for biological and nonbiological children investments in children may be quite different this paper examines differences in one input food consumption between different types of two parent families using data from the panel study of income dynamics psid these data contain information on all dyadic relationships within households between 1968 and 1985 and they allow us to identify several types of parent child relationships including biological adoptive step and foster relationships the paper addresses three questions

preference based vs market based discrimination implications for gender differentials in child labor and schooling abstract this paper studies the effects of son preference by parents and earnings function bias on child labor and schooling in a model in which parents are altruistic it finds that son preference leads to gender differential in child labor with female children working more than male children but it does not lead to gender differential in schooling except when the bequest constraints are binding on the other hand the earnings function bias results in gender differential in both child labor and schooling dowry and marriage expenses can lead to inefficiently low level of schooling and high level of child labor son preference magnifies gender differential in child labor and schooling in the presence of dowry and marriage expenses

off the cliff and back credit conditions and international trade during the global financial crisis abstract we study the collapse of international trade flows during the global financial crisis using detailed data on monthly us imports we show that credit conditions were an important channel through which the crisis affected trade volumes by exploiting the variation in the cost of capital across countries and over time as well as the variation in financial vulnerability across sectors countries with higher interbank rates and thus tighter credit markets exported less to the us during the peak of the crisis this effect was especially pronounced in sectors that require extensive external financing have limited access to trade credit or have few collateralizable assets exports of financially vulnerable industries were thus more sensitive to the cost of external capital than exports of less vulnerable industries and this sensitivity rose during the financial crisis the quantitative implications of our estimates for trade volumes highlight the large real effects of financial crises and the potential gains from policy intervention

marriage bequest and assortative matching in rural ethiopia abstract this article examines the determinants of human and physical capital at marriage using detailed data from rural ethiopia we find that assets brought to marriage are distributed in a highly unequal manner for first unions assets brought to marriage are positively associated with parents wealth indicating that a bequest motive affects assets at marriage parental wealth affects the inheritance of neither groom nor bride sibling competition from brothers affects grooms inheritance but sisters have no effect the marriage market is a major conduit for rural and gender inequality although avenues do exist for couples to accumulate wealth over their life cycle

son preference children s gender and parents time allocation evidence from china this article investigates the effect of children s gender on parents time allocation in developing countries due to the long existing tradition of son preference a collective model generates pred

optimal policy and the risk properties of human capital reconsidered abstract this paper considers how optimal education and tax policy depends on the risk properties of human capital a key feature of human capital investments is whether they increase or decrease wage risk in a benchmark model it is shown that this feature alone determines whether a constrained optimal allocation should be characterized by a positive or a negative education premium in the same model a positive intertemporal wedge is optimal the robustness of these results is explored in two generalizations nonobservability of education and nonobservability of consumption finally policies that implement the constrained efficient allocations are considered

forecasting the world economy in the short term 1433 audrone jakaitiene and stephane dees forecasting the world economy is a difficult task given the complex interrelationships within and across countries this paper proposes a number of approaches to forecast short term changes in selected world economic variables and aims first at ranking various forecasting methods in terms of forecast accuracy and second at checking whether methods forecasting directly aggregate variables direct approaches outperform methods based on the aggregation of country specific forecasts bottom up approaches overall all methods perform better than a simple benchmark for short horizons up to 3 months ahead among the forecasting approaches used factor models appear to perform the best moreover direct approaches outperform bottom up ones for real variables but not for prices finally when country specific forecasts are adjusted to match direct forecasts at the aggregate levels top down approaches the forecast accuracy is neither improved nor deteriorated i e top down and bottom up approaches are broadly equivalent in terms of country specific forecast accuracy

a solvable continuous time dynamic principal agent model abstract i study the provision of incentives in a continuous time dynamic moral hazard model with hidden actions and hidden states i consider a principal agent model with linear production and exponential utility whose explicit solution allows me to show how allocations are distorted for incentive reasons and how access to hidden savings further alters allocations i solve the model by applying a stochastic maximum principle where the co state variables from the agent s optimization problem become state variables for the principal s problem of choosing an optimal contract i show that the main effect of moral hazard is a distortion on the effort margin with a smaller effect on the intertemporal consumption allocation access to hidden savings shuts down the intertemporal distortions and increases the effort distortion i also show how the optimal contracts can be implemented via a constant equity share a constant flow payment and a constant tax on savings

you are close to your rival and everybody hates a winner a study of rivalry in college football we use a recent survey of college american football fans to study rivalry where we find the most intense rivalries occur between in state teams relatedly within a conference fans are more likely to target rivalrous feelings toward the winningest teams and in bowl championship series conferences teams who have been conference members for a longer proportion of time while the stakes are different from other settings such as warring nations college football teams compete for resources and often have loyal followings with strong emotional ties thus examining rivalrous feeling in this setting provides insights into rivalry more generally besides being of interest in its own right as college football is a multi billion dollar industry jel l22 l83 i introduction for millions of americans saturdays in the fall are synonymous with college american football college football has a pageantry all its own as people gather in groups sometimes in excess of 100 000 to cheer for their team and socialize even though many fans have no real connection to the university on the field the teams compete to win games and over the course of a season teams compete to win their conference title however many fans do not view all opponents in the conference in the same way games against some opponents are considered more important irrespective from their impact on conference standings for example the university of arizona and arizona state university have played for the territorial cup for over 100 years 1 similarly the university of wisconsin and the university of minnesota compete for paul bunyan s axe while the university of alabama and the university of tennessee play on the third saturday in october 2 sanford and scott 2014 find that fans are willing to pay higher ticket prices for rivalry games and these games generate significant television revenue despite the amateur status of the players college football is an 8 billion industry 3 several high profile teams are valued at over 100 million dollars each brewer et al 2011 team revenue comes from a variety of sources television rights merchandising fan support etc and on the field success and profit are connected through these channels in addition teams find themselves repeatedly battling over the resources needed to compete on the field namely players and coaches in this sense football rivalries are similar to rivalries between siblings firms or nations sibling rivalries form when children compete for scarce resources financial attention etc from their parents garg and morduch 1998 morduch 2000 the cola wars between coke and pepsi and the diaper wars between kimberly clark and procter gamble arise because these comparable companies offer slightly differentiated products in the same markets rivalries between warring nations also often involve prolonged competition over scarce resources goertz and diehl 1993 klein goertz and diehl 2006 rivalry is a subjective phenomenon kilduff elfenbein and staw 2010 but it has an identifiable set of antecedents geographical proximity is typically an important determinant of conflict even in the context of firm level rivalries as argued for instance in yu and canella 2007 identity also plays an important role in the creation of a rivalry menon thompson and choi 2006 finally history and the outcomes of previous interactions are another key determinant of rivalries kahneman and miller 1986 miller and chen 1996 all three of these factors are at play in college football conferences are typically comprised of comparable schools in a particular region fans identify with their team by wearing certain clothes and in more extreme cases with body paint and other adornments despite periodic conference realignment many teams play each other year after year thus we believe that in addition to being interesting in its own right examining what drives rivalrous feelings in college football can provide insight into rivalry more generally

hidden child labor determinants of housework and family business work of children in 16 developing countries summary two forms of hidden child labor housework and family business work are studied for 178 000 children in 16 african and asian countries about 30 of african children and 11 of asian children work over 15 h a week in hidden child labor girls are more involved in housework and boys more in family business work but this division is not strict most 80 90 of variation is due to household factors children work less in urban less traditional and more educated areas gender differences are larger in asia probably due to a stricter form of patriarchy

pathways into and out of poverty a study of rural household wealth dynamics in kenya this study identifies the factors associated with smallholder farm households that have risen out of poverty or descended into poverty between 1997 and 2007 in kenya the study uses data from a nationwide balanced panel of 1 275 households and data from detailed retrospective life history survey of 84 households that had experienced either an appreciable improvement or decline in their asset wealth over the 10 year panel period the results indicate that household welfare dynamics are associated with a disparate set of idiosyncratic and unexpected shocks such as death and chronic illness demographic factors proximity to infrastructural facilities as well as intergenerational wealth transfers

all for one family size and children s educational distribution under credit constraints this paper examines the possibility that a child s years of schooling could increase in the number of siblings instead of being diminished by competition for parents resources if unable to finance the education of their younger children parents may do so through their older children s labor income we examine this possibility in a model combining convex returns to education and credit constraints our model predicts correlations among family size years of schooling and birth order which would not exist when either of these two elements is absent empirical patterns shown in the united states mexico and south korea support the model predictions

schooling search and spouse selection testing economic theories of marriage and household behavior the implications of the economic theories of marriage and of household fertility behavior are tested in a framework in which educational investment marital search and marital matches are responsive to marriage market conditions and the personal traits of individual agents some of which are unobserved by the econometrician implications are also derived and tested for the effects of longevity attractiveness preferences and labor and marriage market conditions on schooling marriage age and spouse choice the empirical results indicate that inattention to heterogeneity and martial selection leads to a false rejection of the economic theory of marriage but to a false acceptance of the value of time fertility hypothesis

education preferences for leisure and the optimal income tax schedule abstract this paper characterizes optimal income taxes and human capital policies in a two period mirrlees economy agents differentiated by their preferences at birth invest in human capital not knowing in advance the returns of such investment clear cut prescriptions are not always possible even when we focus on specific assumptions about the relative importance of heterogeneity at birth and heterogeneity that arises later in life yet we are still able to identify which combinations of policies are compatible with pareto efficiency and which are not with regards to implementation income taxes that depend on an agent s schooling play a role in committing her to more restricted budget sets in the second period this type of commitment is shown to improve agents expected utilities

child labour a review of recent theory and evidence with policy implications in recent years a growing number of authors have turned their attention to the question of why children work the purpose of this paper is to review some of the more recent theoretical and empirical research into the topic of child labour and to illustrate the fact that no one factor on its own can account for the phenomenon of child labour therefore policies aimed at eradicating child labour will need to address the broad range of underlying factors that contribute to the incidence of child labour such as poverty market imperfections and access to education

the global child labor problem what do we know and what can we do the problem of child labor has moved from a matter of regional and national concern to one of international debate and possible global persuasion and policy intervention in crafting policy for mitigating this enormous problem of our times it is important to start with a proper theoretical and empirical understanding of the phenomenon what gives rise to child labor and what are its consequences what interventions might end child labor without hurting children a well meaning but poorly designed policy can exacerbate the poverty in which these laboring children live even leading to starvation the article surveys the large and rapidly growing literature on this subject focusing mainly on the new literature based on modern economic theory and econometrics it also looks at some of the broad policy implications of these new findings with the objective of contributing to better informed discussion and policy design

impact of microfinance on schooling evidence from poor rural households in bolivia summary channels for the influence of microfinance programs on a rural household s demand for schooling are identified income growth risk management child labor demand gender empowerment and parent information within a random utility framework a model of household consumption investment in education and borrowing suggests determinants at the individual household and regional levels of the probability of schooling gaps using data from two surveys of households of clients of microfinance organizations in bolivia regression models examine determinants of schooling gaps inferences about otherwise positive microfinance impacts identify potential negative effects of increased child labor demand which challenge usual assumptions and pose dilemmas for policymakers

birth order and the intrahousehold allocation of time and education this paper develops a model of intrahousehold allocation with endogenous fertility which captures the relationship between birth order and investment in children it shows that a birth order effect in intrahouse hold allocation can arise even without assumptions about parental preferences for specific birth orders of children or genetic endowments varying by birth order the important contribution is that fertility is treated as endogenous a possibility that other models of intrahousehold allocation have ignored the implications of the model are that children with higher birth orders that is who are born later have an advantage over siblings with lower birth orders and that parents who are inequality averse will not have more than one child the model furthermore shows that not taking account of the endogeneity of fertility when analyzing intrahousehold allocation may seriously bias the results the effects of a child s birth order on its human capital accumulation are analyzed using a longitudinal

investments in schooling in two generations in pre revolutionary nicaragua the roles of family background and school supply abstract family background and school supply underlie the demand and supply for schooling but are usually ignored in empirical estimates these considerations are investigated for two generations in nicaragua using unique data on adult sisters and their offspring to identify inter versus intrafamilial effects and to control for unobserved family background the results suggest that the standard interpretations are misleading 1 unobserved family background and school supply factors are important in schooling determination 2 omission of these factors leads to overestimates of impacts of parental schooling and family size 3 both parental schooling and family size primarily represent unobserved family background and school supply in standard estimates

the effect of sibling sex composition on women s education and earnings this paper documents the impact of siblings on the education of men and women born in the united states between 1920 and 1965 we examine the effect of the number and sex composition of a boy or girl s siblings on that child s educational attainment we find that throughout the century women s educational choices have been systematically affected by the sex composition of her siblings and that men s choices have not women raised only with brothers have received on average significantly more education than women raised with any sisters controlling for household size since sibling sex composition affects women s educational attainment and plausibly may be unrelated to other determinants of earnings it may provide a useful instrument for education in earnings functions for women our results suggest that standard estimates significantly underestimate the return to schooling for women

endogenous altruism theory and evidence from chinese twins this paper studies the endogenous formation of intersibling altruism the theory suggests that parental incentive to foster children s fraternal love is positively related to efficiency gains from

unintended consequences of sanctions for human rights conflict minerals and infant mortality abstractare victims of human rights abuses better off with or without economic sanctions targeted at their perpetrators we study this question in the context of a us human rights policy the conflict minerals section of the 2010 dodd frank act by discouraging companies from sourcing tin tungsten and tantalum from the eastern democratic republic of the congo the policy has acted as a de facto boycott on mineral purchases that may finance warlords and armed militias we estimate the policy s impact on the mortality of children born before 2013 and find that it increased the probability of infant deaths in villages near the policy targeted mines by at least 143 percent we find suggestive evidence that the legislation induced boycott did so by reducing mothers consumption of infant health care goods and services

fertility household size and poverty in nepal population control policies keep attracting attention by increasing the household size having more children would directly contribute to a household s poverty using nationally representative household level data from nepal we investigate the links between a household s fertility decisions and variations in their size and composition we show that the relationship between number of births and household size is positive when the mothers are young but becomes negative as the mothers grow older elderly couples who had fewer children host on average more relatives who are outside the immediate family unit this result sheds light on the heterogeneous relation between the number of children and household size over the life cycle it also implies that reductions in a household s fertility may have an ambiguous impact on its per capita consumption which depends on how the household s composition responds to new births and changes over time in this sample an old household s per capita consumption is not affected by the number of births we use the gender of the first born child to instrument the total number of consecutive children

birth spacing fertility selection and child survival analysis using a correlated hazard model if fertility reflects the choice of households results of their choice duration between successive births and health of the children cannot be considered to be determined randomly most existing studies of child health however tend to overlook the effects of fertility selection on child health this paper argues that not accounting for this selection issue yields biased estimates and it is difficult a priori to predict the direction of this bias we find that the estimates of birth spacing on child mortality are different when we do not account for fertility selection additionally the correlated hazard estimates that we present here better fit our samples than the corresponding bivariate probit estimates used in the literature a comparison of the fertility behaviour of households in the indian and the pakistani punjab highlights the differential nature of institutions on demographic transition in these neighbouring regions

inattentive professional forecasters abstract using the ecb survey of professional forecasters to characterize expectations at the micro level we emphasize two new facts forecasters i fail to systematically update their forecasts and ii disagree even when updating it is moreover found that forecasters have predictable forecast errors these facts are qualitatively supportive of recent models of inattention and suggest a setup where agents imperfectly process information due to both sticky information a la mankiw reis and noisy information a la sims however building and estimating such an expectation model we find that it cannot quantitatively replicate the error and disagreement observed in the data

marriage institutions and sibling competition evidence from south asia using data from south asia this article examines how arranged marriage cultivates rivalry among sisters during marriage search parents with multiple daughters reduce the reservation quality for an older daughters groom rushing her marriage to allow sufficient time to marry off her younger sisters relative to younger brothers younger sisters increase a girls marriage risk relative to younger singleton sisters younger twin sisters have the same effect these effects intensify in marriage markets with lower sex ratios or greater parental involvement in marriage arrangements in contrast older sisters delay a girls marriage because girls leave school when they marry and face limited earning opportunities when they reach adulthood the number of sisters has well being consequences over the life cycle younger sisters cause earlier school leaving lower literacy a match to a husband with less education and a less skilled occupation and marginally lower adult economic status data from a broader set of countries indicate that these cross sister pressures on marriage age are common throughout the developing world although the schooling costs vary by setting

education and human capital externalities evidence from colonial benin colonial benin we investigate the effect of education on living standards occupation and political participation since both school locations and student cohorts were selected with very little information treatment and control groups are balanced on observables we can therefore estimate the effect of education by comparing the treated to the untreated living in the same village as well as those living in villages where no schools were set up we find a significant positive treatment effect of education for the first generation of students as well as their descendants they have higher living standards are less likely to be farmers and are more likely to be politically active we find large village level externalities descendants of the uneducated in villages with schools do better than those in control villages we also find extended family externalities nephews and nieces directly benefit from their uncle s education and show that this represents a family tax as educated uncles transfer resources to the extended family

school inputs and educational outcomes in south africa we examine the relationship between educational inputs primarily pupilteacher ratios and school outcomes in south africa immediately before the end of apartheid government black households were severely limited in their residential choice under apartheid and attended schools for which funding decisions were made centrally by white controlled entities over which they had no control the allocations resulted in marked disparities in average class sizes controlling for household background variables we find strong and significant effects of pupilteacher ratios on enrollment on educational achievement and on test scores for numeracy

nutrition health birth order and seasonality intrahousehold allocation among children in rural india abstract nutrients available to children are determined largely by intrahousehold allocations there are a number of reasons why birth order may affect these allocations a model is developed to estimate critical parameters of parental preferences regarding the allocation of nutrients among their children latent variable estimates for rural south india indicate that parental preferences have productivity equity tradeoffs and parents favor older children the productivity equity tradeoff however is much less for the lean season therefore when food is scarcest parents follow more closely a pure investment strategy exposing their more vulnerable children to greater malnutrition tisk

effects of a sibship extension to foster children on children s school enrolment a sibling rivalry analysis for indonesia in this paper we question whether and how the sibship extension to foster children a common practice in many developing countries affects children s school enrolment status based on indonesian data we show that children s school enrolment increases with the number of foster grandchildren in their sibship given that grandchildren fostering is associated with positive transfers from biological to host parents this result reflects either a release of liquidity constraints in the host household or the uncommon preferences of host grandparents conversely the proportion of other foster children in a sibship does not have any effect the latter result s explanation depends on the reason children other than grandchildren are fostered

the global child labor problem the problem of child labor has moved from a matter of regional and national concern to one of international debate and possible global persuasion and policy intervention in crafting policy for mitigating this enormous problem of our times it is important to start with a proper theoretical and empirical understanding of the phenomenon what gives rise to child labor and what are its consequences what interventions might end child labor without hurting children a well meaning but poorly designed policy can exacerbate the poverty in which these laboring children live even leading to starvation the article surveys the large and rapidly growing literature on this subject focusing mainly on the new literature based on modern economic theory and econometrics it also looks at some of the broad policy implications of these new findings with the objective of contributing to better informed discussion and policy design

land inheritance and schooling in matrilineal societies evidence from sumatra abstract this paper explores statistically the implications of the shift from communal to individualized tenure on the distribution of land and schooling between sons and daughters in matrilineal societies based on a sumatra case study the inheritance system is evolving from a strictly matrilineal system to a more egalitarian system in which sons and daughters inherit the type of land which is more intensive in their respective work effort while gender bias is either non existent or small in land inheritance daughters tend to be disadvantaged with respect to schooling the gender gap in schooling however appears to be closing for the generation of younger children

dynamic optimal taxation with private information we study dynamic optimal taxation in a class of economies with private information optimal allocations in these environments are complicated and history dependent yet we show that they can be implemented as competitive equilibria in market economies supplemented with simple tax systems the market structure in these economies is similar to that in bewley 1986 agents supply labour and trade risk free claims to future consumption subject to a budget constraint and a debt limit optimal taxes are conditioned only on two observable characteristics an agent s accumulated stock of claims or wealth and her current labour income we show that optimal taxes are generally non linear and non separable in these variables and relate the structure of marginal wealth and income taxation to the properties of agent preferences this paper studies optimal taxation in a class of dynamic economies with private information we consider an environment in which agents preferences are defined over consumption and labour and each agent receives a privately observed sequence of i i d preference shocks incentivecompatibility constraints stemming from private information imply that socially optimal or constrained efficient allocations in this environment are complicated and history dependent yet we show that they can be implemented as competitive equilibria in market economies supplemented with simple tax systems the market structure in these economies is identical to that in bewley 1986 huggett 1993 or aiyagari 1994 agents can trade current consumption for claims to future consumption subject to a budget constraint and a borrowing limit these claims have a non contingent pre tax return crucially taxes are conditioned upon only two observable characteristics of an agent current wealth given by the agent s accumulated stock of claims and current labour income they do not depend on any other aspect of an agent s past history most models of dynamic optimal taxation follow the ramsey approach in which the set of fiscal instruments available to the government is exogenously specified 1 linear labour and capital income taxes are typically included in this set while lump sum taxes are ruled out the exclusion of the latter is justified by appealing to incentive or administrative constraints but these are not explicitly modelled these exogenous restrictions on fiscal instruments represent frictions that the government seeks to ameliorate through its optimal choice of tax rates the approach we adopt in this paper builds on the optimal taxation literature initiated by mirrlees 1971 mirrlees assumes that agents receive privately observed shocks to their

optimal indirect and capital taxation we consider an environment in which agents skills are private information and follow arbitrary stochastic processes we prove that it is typically pareto optimal for an individual s marginal benefit of investing in capital to exceed his marginal cost of doing so this wedge is consistent with a positive tax on capital income we also prove that it is pareto optimal for the marginal rate of substitution between any two consumption goods to equal the marginal rate of transformation this lack of a wedge is consistent with uniform taxation of consumption goods within a period

when do the usda forecasters make mistakes this study analysed forecasts for all us corn soya bean and wheat categories published within the world agricultural supply and demand estimates wasde reports over the 1987 88 through 2009 10 marketing years in an attempt to identify patterns and better understand when the usda forecasters make mistakes two general sources of errors were investigated behavioural and macroeconomic factors the first objective was to examine how these factors affect the size of the forecast error and the second concentrated on the direction of the error due to these effects our findings suggest that the largest increase in the size of usda forecast errors was associated with structural changes in commodity markets that took place in the mid 2000s corn soya bean and wheat forecast errors also grew during the periods of economic growth and with changes in exchange rates while inflation and changes in oil price had a much smaller impact with respect to behavioural sources we identified patterns consistent with leni

foreign exchange rate expectations micro survey data this paper analyzes the panel data of biweekly surveys on the yen dollar exchange rate expectations of forty four institutions for two years and contains four major findings first market participants are heterogeneous that is significant individual effects exist in their expectation formation second the individual effects have a characteristic of wishful expectations exporters expect yen depreciation and importers expect yen appreciation relative to others third many violate the rational expectations hypothesis fourth forecasts with long horizons show less yen appreciation than those with short horizons cross equation constraints implied by the consistency of the forecast term structure are strongly rejected in the data copyright 1990 by american economic association

macroeconomic expectations of households and professional forecasters economists have long emphasized the importance of expectations in determining macroeconomic outcomes yet there has been almost no recent effort to model actual empirical expectations data instead m acroeconomists usually simply assume that expectations are rational this paper shows that while empirical household expectations are not rational in the usual sense expectational dynamics are well captured by a model in which households views derive from news reports of the views of professional forecasters which in turn may be rational the model s estimates imply that people only occasionally pay attention to news reports this inattention generates stickyness in aggregate expectations with important macroeconomic consequences

alimony rights and intrahousehold allocation of resources evidence from brazil can family policy affect well being of individuals without altering the resources available to their families this article examines the extension of alimony rights and obligations to cohabiting couples in brazil for women in intact relationships alimony rights upon dissolution should improve outside options strengthening their negotiating positions and increasing their influence over intrahousehold allocation of resources robust econometric evidence indicates that more decision power in the hands of women impacts hours worked by female adults and investments in the education of children this suggests that family policy and models of family decision making should take intrahousehold heterogeneity of preferences into account

educational choice families and young people s earnings this paper presents two optimizing models of educational choice discusses issues of identification estimates earnings equations in the context of these models and presents conditions under which we can test one against the other the estimates indicate that education is endogenous for young people s earnings creating a downward bias in estimated returns from education that assume exogeneity identification and estimation relies on family background information from a special sample from the british household panel study 1991 95 which matches mothers and their young adult children our estimates favor a family model over an individual model and they suggest that parents allocate resources to education to compensate for differences in their children s earnings endowments

assessing the impact of a school subsidy program in mexico using a social experiment to validate a dynamic behavioral model of child schooling and fertility this paper uses data from a randomized social experiment in mexico to estimate and validate a dynamic behavioral model of parental decisions about fertility and child schooling to evaluate the effects of the progresa school subsidy program and to perform a variety of counterfactual experiments of policy alternatives our method of validation estimates the model without using post program data and then compares the model s predictions about program impacts to the experimental impact estimates the results show that the model s predicted program impacts track the experimental results our analysis of counterfactual policies reveals an alternative subsidy schedule that would induce a greater impact on average school attainment at similar cost to the existing program

forecasting ecb monetary policy accuracy is a matter of geography abstract monetary policy in the euro area is conducted within a multi country multi cultural and multi lingual context how does this heterogeneity affect the ability of economic agents to understand and to anticipate monetary policy by the european central bank ecb using a database of surveys of professional ecb policy forecasters in 24 countries we find remarkable differences in forecast accuracy and show that these have important repercussions on market behaviour explaining the differences in forecast accuracy we provide evidence that they are partly related to geography and clustering around informational hubs as well as to country specific economic conditions in large part this heterogeneity can be traced to differences in forecasting models

the family inheritance and the intergenerational transmission of inequality unequal inheritance of material wealth is commonly considered a major cause of inequality in consumption however theoretical models of the intergenerational transmission of inequality by becker blinder and ishikawa imply that unequal inheritance may either increase or reduce consumption inequality differences in inherited wealth resulting from unequal parental incomes increase inequality in recipients consumption however unequal bequests caused by differences among families in the endowed ability of children or the costs of producing human capital are equalizing empirical results confirm these predictions the inheritance received by children is inversely related to both children s income and parental education thus bequests are compensatory in that ceteris paribus low income children inherit more than their advantaged contemporaries

specialization and competition in marriage models abstract i present a marriage model that includes pre marital investments in human capital individuals expect the future role specialization in marriage the specialization effect but at the same time before marriage individuals have the incentive to invest in order to make themselves more attractive the competition effect the interaction of two effects generates multiple equilibria no equilibria are ex ante efficient when the benefits of role specialization exist the competition effect is a source of coordination failure in the match formation this result stands in contrast to those of other models in which the competition effect leads to efficiency in some equilibrium

evaluating the joint efficiency of german trade forecasts a nonparametric multivariate approach i analyse the joint efficiency of export and import forecasts by leading economic research institutes for the years 1970 to 2017 for germany in a multivariate setting to this end i compute in a

do parents favor boys in an optimizing model of parental allocation systematic differences in human capital investments betwen the sexes may originate in at least 3 ways 1 parents may respond to expected gender wage differentials 2 parents may respond to systematic differences by gender in the price of human capital investments 3 parental preferences may favor girls or boys in the sense that they value identical outcomes at the same cost more highly for one sex than for the other this paper analyzes the role of parental preferences in general and unequal concern in particular in the allocation of human capital investments among children the authors generalize their earlier model of the human capital investments among children to incorporate the possibility that the returns to such investments may include not only the childs own ecpected earnings but also the expected earnings of his or her spouse thus the model assumes that parents may value returns that accrue trough the marriage market as well as through education the relevant returns to education may include marrying a spouse with higher expected earnings the empirical analysis indicates that gender wage differentials like endowment differentials are mildly reinforced by the parental allocation of human capital investments marriage market outcomes are significant determinants of the allocation of human capital investments among children there is no evidence that parental preferences favor boys this study shows that parental preferences either exhibit equal concern or slightly favor gils

biological basics and the economics of the family many economic models of the family are based on a generic person one person two household or parent child family rather than their anatomically correct counterparts sons and daughters fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers these economic models can offer powerful insights into family behavior but also can leave certain patterns unexplained and neglect potentially important crosscurrents melding biological insights with family economics can cast new light on existing knowledge and open up novel paths for research for example study after study has found that putting family income in the hands of mothers rather than fathers tends to increase the consumption of children as noted in this journal in lundberg and pollak 1996 yet the way such results are usually described might strike a noneconomist as exceedingly circumspect economists point out that these findings reject the common preference model of household decision making in favor of one with independent decisionmaking spouses but usually make little mention of motherhood or fatherhood per se or consider the dramatic expansion of south african government pension programs in the early 1990s which put lots of extra money in the hands of grandparents many of whom lived with their grandchildren in a compelling and oft cited study duflo 2003 found evidence of pension spillovers to grandchildren but the most intriguing patterns were demographic pensions to maternal grandmothers redounded to the benefit of granddaughters economic analysis uncovers the income effects but turns out to be of little help for explaining why these particular gender effects predominated

investments time preferences and public transfers paid to women abstract the literature suggests that men and women may have different preferences this paper exploits a social experiment in which women in treatment households were given a large public cash transfer progresa in an effort to disentangle the effect of additional income in the household from the effect of changing the distribution of income within the household the impact of progresa income on savings and investments decisions is compared with all other income sources after taking into account participation in the program additional money in the hands of women is spent on small livestock which are traditionally managed and cared for by women improved nutrition and child goods particularly clothing among single headed households progresa income is not treated differently from other income direct evidence on intertemporal preferences gathered in the mexican family life survey indicates that women are more patient than men when thinking about the future taken together the results suggest t

sibling rivalry endowment and intrahousehold allocation in gansu province china abstractthis article evaluates the strategies employed by households in rural china to allocate educational expenditure to children of different physical endowments examining whether parents use educational funding to reinforce or compensate for these differences climatic shocks are employed as an instrument for endowment measured as height for age allowing for the identification of the impact of quasi exogenous variation in endowment on parental allocations conditional on household fixed effects the results suggest that educational expenditure is directed to the relatively weaker child in response to the mean difference in height for age between siblings parents redirect around 25 of discretionary educational spending to the child with the lower height for age and this effect is robust to the potentially confounding effects of gender and birth order there is some evidence that time allocation may also be a relevant margin of compensation but no evidence that medical expenditure responds to diff

risky human capital and deferred capital income taxation abstract we study the structure of optimal wedges and capital taxes in a dynamic mirrlees economy with endogenous distribution of skills human capital is a private stochastic state variable that drives the skill process of each individual building on the findings of the labor literature we construct a tractable life cycle model of human capital evolution with risky investment and stochastic depreciation in this setting we demonstrate the optimality of a a human capital premium i e an excess return on human capital relative to physical capital b a large intertemporal wedge early in the life cycle and c a non zero intratemporal wedge even at the top of the skill distribution at all dates except the last date in the life cycle the main implication for the structure of optimal linear capital taxes is the necessity of deferred taxation of physical capital the average marginal tax rate on physical capital held in every period is zero in present value however expected capital tax payments do not equal zero in every period necessarily agents face negative expected capital tax payments early in the life cycle and positive expected capital tax payments late in the life cycle

exchange rate pass through into german import prices a disaggregated perspective this study analyses the exchange rate pass through into german import prices based on disaggregated data taken on a monthly basis between 1995 and 2012 our main contribution is twofold firstly we employ various time series techniques to analyse data for different product categories and also cointegration techniques to carefully distinguish between short run and long run pass through coefficients secondly in a panel data approach we estimate time varying pass through coefficients and explain their development with regard to various macroeconomic factors our results show that long run pass through is only partly observable and incomplete whereas short run pass through shows a more unique character although heterogeneity across product groups does exist we are also able to identify several macroeconomic factors that determine changes in the degree of pass through which is especially relevant for policymakers

market opportunities genetic endowments and intrafamily resource distribution child survival in rural india the authors examine how intrafamily resource allocations respond to changes in economic conditions and to genetic differences in children by estimating the determinants of variations in the sex specific survival differentials of rural indian children based on standard census and household survey data they explore in particular the hypothesis that such differences are related to the relative returns to survival with households selectively allocating resources to children in response to variation in sex differences in their expected earnings opportunities as adults data are from the 1961 census and a 1971 household survey excerpt

inheritance patterns in migration prone communities of the peruvian highlands abstract on the basis of detailed information on inheritance practices collected in the course of an in depth survey of three andean communities of peru and unlike most empirical studies which rely on remittance functions we have been able to estimate an inheritance function with a view to identifying the main factors associated with particular patterns of land bequests a central result is that the positive relationship between caring and a favourable access to land bequest indeed exists yet is only observed for migrant children whether urban or rural long distance or short distance migrants combined with other findings and observations this result strengthens the case for an interpretation based on an active role of potential heirs in the determination of inheritance outcomes it therefore calls into question the strategic bequest theory which presumes that parents are the ultimate decision makers in this matter in addition our study shows that inheritance patterns are complex besides migration and caring behavior personal characteristics of potential heirs such as gender birth order and family status having children or not do appear to influence division of parental land

what you don t know can hurt you or at least mislead you family behaviors unobserved heterogeneities and the determinants and impacts of human resources over the life cycle what one does not know in the form of unobserved heterogeneity can mislead one in empirical estimates a simple model of intrahousehold allocations illustrates the possible importance of unobserved factors such as abilities in determining human resources and their impacts the author reviews over forty years of studies primarily from latin america and the caribbean but also from elsewhere to illustrate the substantial empirical importance of unobserved heterogeneity with regard to preferences and intrahousehold allocations schooling returns school quality early life nutrition and program evaluation