sustainable de growth mapping the context criticisms and future prospects of an emergent paradigm article i nfo sustainable de growth is both a concept and a social grassroots northern movement with its origins in the fieldsofecologicaleconomics socialecology economicanthropologyand environmentalandsocialactivistgroups this paper introduces the concept of sustainable de growth by mapping some of the main intellectual influences fromthese fields with special focus on the francophone and anglophone thinking about this emergent notion we propose hypotheses pertaining to the appeal of sustainable de growth and compare it to the messages enclosed within the dominant sustainable development idea we scrutinize the theses contradictions and consequences of sustainable de growth thinking as it is currently being shaped by a heterogeneous body of literature and as it interacts with an ample and growing corpus of social movements we also discuss possible future paths for the de growth movement compared to the apparent weakening of the sustainable development paradigm

learning your earning are labor income shocks really very persistent in this paper we examine the risk situation facing individuals in the labor market the current consensus in the literature is that the labor income process has a large random walk component we argue two points first the estimates of persistence from income data appear to be upward biased due to the omission of heterogeneity in income pro les across the population that would be implied for example by a human capital model with heterogeneity when we allow for dierences in pro les the estimated persistence falls from 0 99 to about 0 8 moreover the main evidence against pro le heterogeneity in the existing literature that the autocorrelations of income changes are small and typically negative is also replicated by the pro le heterogeneity model we estimate casting doubt on the previous interpretation of this evidence second we embed this process in a life cycle model to examine how it alters individuals consumption saving decision we assume that as seems plausible individuals do not know their pro les exactly at the beginning of life but learn in a bayesian way with successive income observations we nd that learning is very slow and aects consumption decision throughout the life cycle the model generates substantial rise in consumption inequality over the life cycle which matches empirical observations deaton and paxson 1994 moreover the shape of the age inequality pro le is non concave as in the data but unlike in a model with very persistent shocks finally the consumption pro les of college graduates are steeper than those of high school graduates in the model consistent with the data because they face a wider dispersion of and hence uncertainty about income growth rates overall this evidence indicates that income shocks may be signi cantly less persistent than what is currently assumed

control rights in complex partnerships this paper develops a theory of the allocation of authority between two players who are in a complex partnership that is a partnership which produces impure public goods we show that the optimal allocation depends on technological factors the parties valuations of the goods produced and the degree of impurity of these goods when the degree of impurity is large control rights should be given to the main investor irrespective of preference considerations there are some situations in which this allocation is optimal even if the degree of impurity is very low as long as one party s investment is more important than the other party s if the parties investments are of similar importance and the degree of impurity is large shared authority is optimal with a greater share going to the low valuation party if the importance of the parties investments is similar but the degree of impurity is neither large nor small the low valuation party should receive sole authority we analyze an extension in which side payments are infeasible we check for robustness of our results in several dimensions such as allowing for multiple parties or for joint authority and apply our results to interpret a number of complex partnerships including those involving schools and child custody jel d02 o23 h41 l31

rational household labor supply traditionally household behavior is derived from the maximization of a unique utility function in this paper we propose an alternative approach in which the household is modeled as a two member collectivity taking pareto efficient decisions the consequences of this assumption are analyzed in a three good model in which only total consumption and each member s labor supply are observable if the agents are assumed egoistic i e they are only concerned with their own leisure and consumption it is possible to derive falsifiable conditions upon household labor supplies from both a parametric and nonparametric viewpoint if alternatively agents are altruistic restrictions obtain in the nonparametric context useful interpretation stems from the comparison with the characterization of aggregate demand for a private good economy

building the family nest premarital investments marriage markets and spousal allocations we develop a model of the household in which spousal incomes are determined by premarital investments the marriage market is characterized by assortative matching and endogenously determined sharing rules form the basis of intra household allocations by incorporating pre marital investments and spousal matching into the collective household model we are able to identify the fundamental determinants of endogenously determined and maritally sustainable intra marital sharing rules in particular we find that all sharing rules along the assortative order support unconditionally efficient outcomes where both pre marital investments and intra household allocations are efficient the efficiency of both pre marital choices and household allocations then enables us to show that for each couple the marriage market generates a unique and maritally sustainable sharing rule that is a function of the distribution of pre marital endowments and the sex ratios in the market

children as collective goods and divorce settlements the failure of many divorced fathers to comply with court mandated child support awards has been identified as a major reason why a growing number of children live in poverty in female headed households this paper presents a model that seeks to explain why so many divorced fathers allow their children s welfare to suffer as a consequence of divorce the point of departure is the recognition that children are collective consumption goods from the point of view of the father and mother within marriage proximity and altruism serve to overcome the free rider problem associated with the provision of public goods however on divorce the noncustodial parent suffers a loss of control over the allocative decisions of the custodial parent and it is not feasible for the couple to achieve a pareto optimal allocation of their joint resources a model of optimal marriage contracts is constructed in which a couple decides on the allocation of resources within marriage and on the terms of a settlement in the event

the gender gap fertility and growth changes in fertility have long been recognized as important correlates of economic growth with the relationship between the level of fertility and the level of income per capita being one of the strongest observable correlations in cross country data this paper examines the linkages between fertility and growth theory the structure of the model is presented in sections on production couples decision making system dynamics and steady state equilibria the first component of the model is that increases in capital per worker raise womens relative wages since capital is more complementary to womens labor input than to mens the second component is that increasing womens relative wages reduces fertility by raising the cost of children more than household income finally lower fertility raises the level of capital per worker a positive feedback loop generates demographic transition a rapid decline in fertility accompanied by accelerated output growth

female labour supply and marital status decisions a life cycle model this paper studies the interdependence between and the determinants of life cycle marital status and labour force participation decisions of women a dynamic utility maximization model is presented and estimated using longitudinal data on women from the panel study of income dynamics the mle method employed involves solving a dynamic programming problem further a minimum distance estimator is proposed which allows for the incorporation of wage data in a computationally simple way the estimates are used to predict changes in the life cycle patterns of employment marriage and divorce due to differences in education race the female s earnings and her potential husband s earnings the estimation results indicate that the utility gains to marriage are decreasing in the female s wage rate and increasing in her potential husband s earnings while the opposite is found for gains to working ignoring the endogeneity of marital status decisions is shown to lead to an underestimation of own and husband s wage effects on female labour supply

household energy and climate mitigation policies investigating energy practices in the housing sector abstract one central aim of climate change mitigation in the european union is to reduce energy consumption in the housing sector in order to ensure effectiveness of policies targeting household energy conservation it is important to investigate existing energy practices of different social groups this article describes and explains energy practices in three leading states in environmental politics technological innovation and support for renewable energy production denmark austria and the united kingdom based on a longitudinal analysis of housing utility costs from the european community statistics on income and living conditions we show that income plays a central role in households energy practices while high income households have higher overall energy consumption low income groups spend a larger share of their income on utility costs the variation of energy consumption across income groups is related to household characteristics characteristics of the dwellings and cross national differences in the housing sector

the impact of regulation on input substitution and operating cost we investigate the impact of rate of return regulation on the substitutability between pairs of inputs where substitutability is measured using morishima elasticities of substitution mes and on operating cost theory does not provide a qualitative characterization of the impact of regulation on input substitutability although it does provide a basis for speculation we test our speculation using a 1977 87 panel of 20 u s interstate natural gas pipelines that were subject to rate of return regulation during the period we find that regulation increased the mes of each rate base input for the non rate base input and reduced the mes between the two rate base inputs and of the nonrate base input for each rate base input we also find that the

renewable energy as a luxury a qualitative comparative analysis of the role of the economy in the eu s renewable energy transitions during the double crisis the european union eu faces a double crisis both economic and environmental which has brought into stark relief the question of whether climate change mitigation and economic growth are mutually exclusive is saving the environment a luxury reserved for wealthy countries with less affluent countries being too poor to be green we seek to address this important and timely question using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis fsqca to analyse the causal relationship between economic growth and stability and the expansion of renewable electricity shares among the european union s eu 28 member states during the recent economic recession 2008 2013 our paper analyses the recent economic and financial crisis and its effects on sustainability transitions and establishes a new indicator for progress in renewable electricity transitions in the context of europe s 2020 targets it therefore extends the sustainability as a luxury debate to include renewable energy the analysis reveals an ambivalent picture of the role of wealth in renewable energy transitions ret in europe indeed driven by the eu s common renewable energy targets the findings suggest that rets are promoted both because and in spite of the means

on sustainability and materiality homo faber a new approach abstract this paper explicitly engages with recent debates in ecological economics on what mode of humanity and person the sustainability project requires e g becker 2006 siebenhuner 2000 and responds to calls to widen our understanding of the human being beyond homo economicus e g bina and guedes vaz 2011 using the example of the increasing attention to well being both within policy and academic circles we seek to contribute to current critical considerations of the sustainable person becker 2010 2012 we do this by incorporating often neglected perspectives from disciplines rooted in the arts and humanities specifically anthropology and philosophy introducing to debates on sustainability the notion of homo faber our aim is threefold 1 to invite creative thinking about the role that materiality and practice play in the constitution of alternative notions of being 2 to soften the anthropocentrism of western worldviews by considering the possibility of a different mode of humanity based upon connection rather than separation interdependence rather than autonomy gibson graham 2011 2 and 3 to encourage deeper reflection about the need for and the challenge of interdisciplinary sustainability research

cyclical dynamics in idiosyncratic labor market risk is individual labor income more risky in recessions this is a difficult question to answer because existing panel data sets are so short to address this problem we develop a generalized method of moments estimator that conditions on the macroeconomic history that each member of the panel has experienced variation in the cross sectional variance between households with differing macroeconomic histories allows us to incorporate business cycle information dating back to 1930 even though our data do not begin until 1968 we implement this estimator using household level labor earnings data from the panel study of income dynamics we estimate that idiosyncratic risk is i highly persistent with an annual autocorrelation coefficient of 0 95 and ii strongly countercyclical with a conditional standard deviation that increases by 75 percent from 0 12 to 0 21 as the macroeconomy moves from peak to trough

the effect of child support policies on visitations and transfers recent research on child support issues has been concerned with normative problems involvingthe distribution of welfare between divorced parents and their children as well as with the assess ment of the behavioral responses of parents to child support orders and custody arrangements see e g del boca and flinn 1995 gar nkel and klawitter 1990 bartfeldt and gar nkel 1996 del boca 1996 del boca and ribero 1998 and flinn 2000 while there is bynow an extensive literature analyzing the e ects of child support policies on monetary transfersof noncustodial parents and the extent of compliance with child support orders little researchhas been done on the relationship between monetary transfers between parents and the divisionof the child s time while income transfers to the custodial parent are no doubt importantfor the child s consumption and general well being there exists considerable empirical evidencesuggesting that the division of the child s time between the parents has important e ects on thechild s welfare beller and graham 1993 there have been few analyses of this relationship weiss and willis 1985 provide one theoretical motivation for the positive relationship betweenthe noncustodial parent s contact time with the child and their level of transfers they claimthat increased contact time allows better monitoring of the custodial parent s expenditures onthe child which induces higher levels of transfers to the custodial parent we have developed a model del boca and ribero 1999 in which visitations and childsupport are the outcomes of a negotiation process whereby the father exchanges income forvisitation time institutional agents such as judges state legislatures etc can impact thewelfareofthemembersofthenonintactfamilybyalteringtheendowmentsofeachofthe1

rationalizing child support decisions the authors provide a framework within which the child support compliance decisions of noncustodial fathers and the child support awards set by institutional agents can be coherently interpreted the model of child support transfers is able to capture qualitatively the features of the monthly payment distribution estimated parental decision rules are used to infer the implicit weights given by institutional agents to the postdivorce welfare of parents and children the authors find that the weight attached to the combined welfare of the custodial mother and child is significantly less than the weight given to the father s welfare in most sample cases copyright 1995 by american economic association

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

intra household allocation of resources inferences from non resident fathers child support payments a large proportion of divorced and separated fathers form new partnerships the new partner s preferences are not likely to put much weight on expenditures on the man s children from his previous union thus his own and his partner s income would have different impacts on his child support payments if partners relative incomes affect bargaining power in household decisions this article exploits within father variation in the british household panel survey 1991 2005 to estimate the impacts of the intra household income distribution on child support payments and the father s welfare we find that a higher share of father s income in household income increases the probability of paying child support and its amount relative to household income

opening the black box of intra household decision making theory and non parametric empirical tests of general collective consumption models we provide revealed preference tests of general collective consumption models that account for public consumption and externalities within the household we further propose a novel approach to model special cases of this model which imply alternative assumptions regarding the sharing rule our application uses the panel data from the russia longitudinal monitoring survey we find that the general model together with a large class of special cases cannot be rejected by contrast we do reject the standard unitary model since our tests are entirely nonparametric this provides strong evidence in favor of models focusing on intrahousehold decision making

beyond environmental and ecological economics proposal for an economic sociology of the environment the vast majority of approaches in environmental economics attribute the current ecological crisis to the fact that from its inception the industrial economic system was founded on premises that made no allowance for the limits and regulatory functions of ecosystems according to these approaches we must therefore remedy the historical error of dissociating the fields of economics from the natural sciences notably by restoring the links between these two disciplines distinguishing themselves from the two historic approaches environmental economics and early ecological economics the emerging institutionalist schools evoke not only the constructed nature of the environmental crisis generally viewed as an objective fact by both traditional environmental economists and ecological economists but also the socially constructed nature of the economy and its institutions an actionalist regulationist approach allows us to formalize this twofold construction and lays the groundwork for a new economic sociology of the environment in which the technical modalities of ecological modernization are studied in light of social relations with the understanding that social relations are also affected by the materiality of the environmental crisis this actionalist regulationist approach also lends itself to anticipating likely trajectories in the future ecological modernization of economic institutions

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

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

marriage squeeze marriage age and the household savings rate in china abstract recent influential papers claim that single men s saving competition for marriage intensified by an increase in the male to female ratio in the pre marital cohort explains 60 percent of the rise of china s aggregate household savings rate in this paper we analyze whether the marriage competition remains a first order effect on saving when another margin of adjustment to sex ratio imbalance men s postponement of marriage is considered we construct a theoretical and quantitative life cycle model with a frictionless marriage market where a single man s rank is determined by his wealth and age by calibration we find that with the option to postpone marriage the response of the aggregate savings rate to the rising sex ratio is dampened by 45 percent moreover the model generates an unusual downward sloping age savings rate profile with young households saving more than their middle aged counterparts as observed in the data

does ecological economics have a future contradiction and reinvention in the age of climate change abstract this paper addresses the role of neoclassical methodologies in ecological economics and the contradictions these methodologies pose to the field s critical founding principles we first consider robert costanza s treatment of nicholas stern s global deal and then survey climate change related articles published in this journal over the past five years this survey reveals how mainstream neoclassical methodologies dominate discourse and do so by marginalizing more critical political economy analyses this situation imperils the field s founding vision of a no growth steady state it also fails to address the related growth dynamics of capitalism without such a critical treatment the field s formal embrace of methodological pluralism actually entails an ideological empiricism that renders ecological economics theoretically incoherent this situation undermines the field s historical promise as an alternative economic paradigm ecological economics now faces a problematic future its survival in a form faithful to its founding vision will require an explicit choice to address its internal contradictions and reinvent itself in ways relevant to our contemporary context without such a choice ecological economics will likely succumb to an implicit acceptance of the hegemony of mainstream economic methodologies and their pro growth imperatives

parametric analysis of cost inefficiency and the decomposition of productivity growth for regulated firms this paper examines the contributions of technical change scale economies regulation and efficiency on productivity growth in the interstate natural gas pipeline industry following bauer 1990 productivity growth for firms subject to regulation is decomposed into technical change scale economies regulation and efficiency components the data sample consists of 20 pipeline companies and covers the period 1977 to 1987 results indicate that scale economies cost inefficiency and regulation on average accounted for 64 16 and 4 of productivity growth respectively cost efficiency declined over the sample period most of which can be attributed to technical inefficiency

the effects of marital status and children on savings and portfolio choice this paper investigates the impact of demographic shocks on optimal decisions about saving life insurance and most centrally asset allocation we analyze these choices within the framework of a life cycle model that features exogenous changes in family composition heterogeneity in lifetime income and uninsurable fluctuations in earnings and medical costs our analysis indicates that marital status transitions and children can have important effects on optimal household decisions widowhood induces sharp reductions in the portfolio shares in stock and the impact is largest for women and individuals with children divorce causes men and women to reallocate their portfolios in different directions men choose much riskier allocations while women opt for safer ones children play a fundamental role in the optimal portfolio decisions men with children for example increase their shares in response to divorce by less than half as much as men without children comparing our simulation results with panel data evidence on stockholding from the psid and the hrs we conclude that changes in marital status and children matter empirically as well but not always in the ways that the model predicts

divorce risk wages and working wives a quantitative life cycle analysis of female labour force participation this article develops a quantitative life cycle model to study the increase in married women s labour force participation lfp we calibrate the model to match key life cycle statistics for the 1935 cohort and use it to assess the changed environment faced by the 1955 cohort we find that a higher divorce probability and changes in wage structure are each able to explain a large proportion of the lfp increase higher divorce risk increases lfp not because the latter contributes to higher marital assets or greater labour market experience however instead it is the result of conflicting spousal preferences towards the adjustment of marital consumption in the face of increased divorce risk the dramatic increase in the second half of the twentieth century in married women s labour force participation lfp has given rise to a large and growing literature that explores the roles of the multiple forces that led to this evolution some explanations have emphasised technological change in the household greenwood et al 2005 or in medical contraceptive technology goldin and katz 2002 albanesi and olivetti 2009a b knowles 2007 other explanations have emphasised changes in the wage

competition and allocative efficiency the case of the u s telephone industry this study investigates the effect of competition on the productive efficiency of the u s telephone industry taking into account the fact that the industry was subject to rate of return regulation it is shown that competition induces the incumbents to use capital inputs closer to the unconstrained optima thereby reducing the allocative inefficiency caused by the averch johnson effect this effect is in addition to the usual technical efficiency improvement induced by competition empirical results based on annual data for the u s telephone industry for the 1951 90 period suggested that competition improved the allocative efficiency of the incumbent firms which had been under a rate of return regulation until 1989 copyright 1995 by mit press

promise and shortcomings of a green turn in recent policy responses to the double crisis abstract the paper analyses six international scale responses to the financial and climate change double crisis in order to review how they define problems and solutions analyse what underpins the policy choices revealed in these responses the green turn reflect on the implications of the proposed solutions in terms of sustainability and global environmental justice and to suggest three elements for a paradigm shift towards an alternative turn embedded in ecological economics theory the analysis reveals that responses by leading international organisations continue to appeal to the precepts of neoclassical economy we argue that from an ecological economics perspective policy responses under the various labels of green economy green growth sustainable growth green new deal fall well short of what is needed to fight the environmental crisis and rising inequality across and within countries the idea of justice and equity that underpins the mainstream approach seems inadequate in terms of sustaining our environmental base and global environmental justice based on this critical review we propose an alternative turn centred on three elements of a paradigm shift leading to a new economy where the environmental base and global environmental justice are at the centre of the discourse

humans environment and economies from vicious relationships to virtuous responsibility abstract the debates questioning the meaning of growth point to a need for a more holistic understanding of human beings and of the economic actor fundamental to economic theory and practice this contribution turns to virtue ethics in order to reframe the self in more reflexive relational and environmental terms we explore the significance of understanding humans sense of responsibility that is quintessentially relational and of their capacity and need to relate to nature as well as community and society we begin by reviewing the main arguments in the thriving debate in ecological economics around what the characteristics of the human being can contribute to implement an ecologically sustainable development our aim is then to draw a link between this debate and that of virtue ethics that leads to a different understanding of the human being of what can contribute to individual wellbeing and a good life responsibility we argue is not only a value but a virtue that enables individuals to find meaning in acting responsibly towards the environment emphasising the multiple benefits that arise from framing good lives in active terms we conclude reflecting on the challenges to and implications of our proposition for government institutions particularly education

engines of liberation electricity was born at the dawn of the last century households were inundated with a flood of new consumer durables what was the impact of this consumer durable goods revolution it is argued here that the consumer goods revolution was conducive to liberating women from the home to analyse this hypothesis a beckerian model of household production is developed households must decide whether or not to adopt the new technologies and whether a married woman should work can such a model help to explain the rise in married female labour force participation that occurred in the last century yes the housewife of the future will be neither a slave to servants nor herself a drudge she will give less attention to the home because the home will need less she will be rather a domestic engineer than a domestic labourer with the greatest of all handmaidens electricity at her service this and other mechanical forces will so revolutionize the woman s world that a large portion of the aggregate of woman s energy will be conserved for use in broader more constructive fields thomas alva edison as interviewed in good housekeeping magazine lv no 4 october 1912 p 436

child care choices and children s cognitive achievement the case of single mothers we evaluate the effect of child care versus maternal time inputs on child cognitive development using single mothers from the nlsy79 to deal with nonrandom selection of children into child care we exploit the exogenous variation in welfare policy rules facing single mothers in particular the 1996 welfare reform and earlier state level policy changes generated substantial increases in their work child care use we construct a comprehensive set of welfare policy variables and use them as instruments to estimate child cognitive ability production functions in our baseline specification we estimate that a year of child care reduces child test scores by 2 1

child support and partnership dissolution this article studies the determinants of partnership dissolution and focuses on the role of child support we exploit the variation in child support liabilities and entitlements driven in part by the introduction of a new set of complex rules that determined child support liability in the uk and by their interaction with welfare rules our panel has the virtue that the post 1993 variation in child support liability for all couples in partnerships formed prior to 1993 is unanticipated we find strong evidence that the resulting large child support liabilities significantly reduced dissolution risks

human development and economic sustainability abstract this paper attempts to integrate the concern for human development in the present with that in the future in arguing for sustainable human development it appeals to the notion of ethical universalism an elementary demand for impartiality of claims applied within and between generations economic sustainability is often seen as a matter of intergenerational equity but the specification of what is to be sustained is not always straightforward the addendum explores the relationship between distributional equity sustainable development optimal growth and pure time preference

is consumption growth consistent with intertemporal optimization evidence from the consumer expenditure survey in this paper we show that some of the predictions of models of consumer intertemporal optimization are in line with the patterns of nondurable expenditure observed in u s household level data we propose a flexible specification of preferences that allows multiple commodities and yields empirically tractable equations we estimate preference parameters using the only u s micro data set with complete consumption information we show that previous rejections can be explained by the simplifying assumptions made in previous studies we also show that results obtained using good consumption or aggregate data can be misleading

static and intertemporal household decisions we discuss the most popular static and dynamic models of household behavior our main objective is to explain which aspects of household decisions different models can account for using this insight we describe testable implications identification results and estimation findings obtained in the literature particular attention is given to the ability of different models to answer various types of policy questions

the rate of return regulated version of shephard s lemma abstract in this paper the rate of return regulated version of shephard s lemma is proved

behavior of the firm under regulatory constraint a recent article by akira takayama discusses an earlier paper by harvey averch and leland l johnson on fair rate of return regulation of public utilities although takayama p 255 agrees with averch and johnson s general conclusions that a firm will tend to increase its investment with the introduction of an active constraint on its rate of return he criticizes the a j argument as being confusing ambiguous and in error takayama then attempts a clarification and presents a new formulation which leads to the a j result quoted above this comment will discuss several of takayama s criticisms in addition to showing that the so called a j effect cannot be derived from the basic assumptions made by both averch and johnson and takayama 1 we will show that the very assumptions used to prove the a j effect by defining the region of x require an assumption that the a j effect exists in the first place

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

welfare child support and strategic behavior do high orders and low disregards discourage child support awards qualitative research has documented strategic behavior in response to child support policy parents of children on welfare have an incentive to avoid formal child support since most states limit the amount of formal child support that women on welfare can receive the disregard and have relatively high child support orders for low income fathers this pa per develops a simple model to make several predictions about how the disregard and order might interact to influence formal child support or ders using data from the cps css merged with state child support vari ables i find some evidence that higher orders and lower disregards are associated with fewer child support orders

housing decision with divorce risk we build a realistically calibrated life cycle model of housing decisions under divorce risk as observed in the data our model predicts the recent increase in divorce rates leads to reduced homeownership rates the event of a divorce negatively affects homeownership and this effect is long lasting the risk of a divorce triggers a precautionary savings motive however this motive is weaker when individuals can invest in owner occupied homes because homeowners higher savings partially substitute for precautionary savings when young the larger asset accumulation due to divorce risk induced precautionary savings enables households to buy homes earlier whereas the presence of transaction costs leads to reduced homeownership for middle aged and older households when divorce risk goes up

estimating a dynamic adverse selection model labour force experience and the changing gender earnings gap 1968 1997 this paper addresses two questions what accounts for the gender gap in labour market outcomes what are the driving forces behind the changes in the gender labour market outcomes over the period 1968 1997 it formulates a dynamic general equilibrium model of labour supply occupational sorting and human capital accumulation in which gender discrimination and an earnings gap arise endogenously it uses this model to quantify the driving forces behind the decline in the gender earnings gap and the increase in female labour force participation the proportion of women working in professional occupations and hours worked it finds that labour market experience is the most important factor explaining the gender earnings gap in addition statistical discrimination accounts for a large fraction of the observed gender earnings gap and its decline it also finds that a large increase in aggregate productivity in professional occupations plays a major role in the increase in female labourforce participation number of hours worked and the proportion of females working in professional occupations although of less importance demographic changes account for a substantial part of the increase in female labour force participation and hours worked whereas home production technology shocks do not

dynamic female labor supply the increase in female employment and participation rates is one of the most dramatic changes to have taken place in the economy during the last century however while the employment rate of married women more than doubled during the last 50 years that of unmarried women remained almost constant to empirically analyze these trends we estimate a female dynamic labor supply model using an extended version of eckstein and wolpin 1989 to compare the various explanations in the literature for the observed trends this dynamic model provides a much better fit to the life cycle employment pattern than a static version of the model and a standard static reduced form model heckman 1979 the main finding using the dynamic model is that the rise in education levels accounts for about 33 percent of the increase in female employment and the rise in wages and narrowing of the gender wage gap account for another 20 percent while about 40 percent remains unexplained by observed household characteristics we show that this unexplained portion can be empirically attributed to cohort specific changes in preferences or the costs of child rearing and household maintenance finally the decline in fertility and the increase in divorce rates account for only a small share of the increase in female employment rates

unemployment marriage and divorce in this paper we examine whether the business cycle plays a role in marriage and divorce we use data on spain since the differences between recession and expansion periods across regions are quite pronounced in that country we find that the unemployment rate is negatively associated with the marriage rate pointing to a pro cyclical evolution of marriage however the response of the divorce rate to the business cycle is mixed results show the existence of different patterns depending on geography divorce rates in coastal regions are pro cyclical while in inland regions divorces react to unemployment in a counter cyclical way

the macroeconomic implications of rising wage inequality in the united states in recent decades american workers have faced a rising college premium a narrowing gender gap and increasing wage volatility this paper explores the quantitative and welfare implications of these changes the framework is an incomplete markets life cycle model in which individuals choose education intrafamily time allocation and savings given the observed history of the u s wage structure the model replicates key trends in cross sectional inequality in hours worked earnings and consumption recent cohorts enjoy welfare gains on average as higher relative wages for college graduates and for women translate into higher educational attainment and a more even division of labor within the household

unilateral divorce the decreasing gender gap and married women s labor force participation married women s labor force participation lfp increased dramatically in the united states between the 1940 and 1960 cohort the two cohorts lived under different divorce regimes unilateral divorce rather than mutual consent the 1960 cohort also had a lower gender wage gap we use a quantitative dynamic life cycle model of endogenous marital status calibrated to key statistics for the 1940 cohort to study the effects of these two changes we find that both drivers combined are able to account for over 50 percent of the increase in married women s lfp and also generate large movements in marriage and divorce rates

testing among models of intrahousehold resource allocation households are the locus for much economic decision making households function as producers investors in human and physical capital managers of risk and as consumers many resources are allocated within households and the effects of many policies depend on the dynamics of household decision making for example household decisions about allocating food among individual household members may determine who benefits from programs to improve health nutrition or welfare in many microeconomic studies the household is treated as an individual for analytical purposes in other words it is assumed that a household acts as a single entity with a single set of preferences recently however a number of economists have recognized that households are sites of conflict as well as cooperation and have begun to use new classes of models to explain how resources are allocated among household members this literature has especially improved our understanding of households in which income is not completely pooled in such a setting standard household models may offer misleading conclusions about the effects of policies on individual household members i this paper goes beyond recent surveys of intrahousehold issue by explicitly examining the assumptions predictions and empirical implications of different intrahousehold models in particular it analyzes empirical tests that distinguish among competing models by clarifying the similarities and differences among alternative models this paper also clarifies what has actually been demonstrated and what has not been demonstrated by previous empirical studies in so doing the paper points to specific topics in need of further research this paper is organized as follows section 2 analyzes the assumptions and predictions of each of the five main classes of intrahousehold resource allocation models section 3 describes empirical tests of these assumptions along with an analysis of empirical work that has been generated sections 4 and 5 discuss the questions that remain unanswered and directions for future research

can adequate child support be legislated responses to guidelines and enforcement i introduction in response to the high levels of poverty faced by children of divorced parents federal and state governments adopted a number of policies during the 1980s aimed at increasing child support awards and payments these laws required all states to have numerical child support guidelines to be used by parents who could not agree on their own and to increase state enforcement of delinquent child support awards implicit in much of the policy discussion about divorce is the assumption that within marriage parents will jointly act in the best interest of their children but that after divorce children may not be adequately provided for and legislative action is required in the extreme this view is represented by the stereotype of the deadbeat dad a term that describes a father who doesn t care enough about his children to continue any involvement with them either in terms of time or money similarly economic models often assume a noncooperative outcome in which the non custodial father will not provide what he did during marriage e g weiss and willis 1985 our article makes several contributions to the literature on the determinants of child support by absent fathers in contrast to almost all of the work on this topic that has been based on noncooperative models we develop a theoretical model in which some families may be able to achieve a cooperative outcome which increases the total resources available to children in particular our model identifies three different types of outcomes 1 cooperative and self enforcing 2 noncooperative and self enforcing and 3 noncooperative and state enforced each of these outcomes has different implications for the well being of children and for the level of government involvement in divorce settlements we then derive the conditions under which families can achieve each of these outcomes and we specifically model how policy variables affect whether or not a particular outcome is achieved the levels of payments and levels of compliance conditional on the type of outcome our empirical work provides reduced fo rm evidence that is consistent with a model that distinguishes these different types of outcomes and we find that policies can affect the type of outcome as well as the level of child support awards and payments section ii of this article provides background and motivations for our topic we develop a general theoretical framework in section iii and compare outcomes under assumptions of symmetric versus asymmetric information section iv incorporates the legal environment by modeling the impact of guidelines and state enforcement efforts on the probability the custodial parent cp will impose the guidelines the level of child support awards and the noncustodial parent s ncp s compliance in section v we interpret comparative statics section vi examines the determinants of reduced form models of the probability of a court ordered child support award and shows that the predictions of the model are consistent with data on the characteristics of divorce settlements and parental behavior for those with voluntary versus court ordered settlements a summary of the findings and policy implications concludes ii background and motivation in contrast to the marriage literature which predominately uses cooperative bargaining models the literature on divorce generally assumes that divorcing parents are unable to reach cooperative agreements for example weiss and willis 1985 model parental expenditures on children after divorce as a principal agent problem in which the absent father cannot verify the child expenditures made by the mother this problem of asymmetric information leads to an inefficient noncooperative outcome del boca and flinn 1995 also use a noncooperative model to examine the government s choice of compliance outcomes others have analyzed compliance with child support awards using an economics of crime framework beron 1988 beller and graham 1991 chambers 1979

macroeconomic narratives in a world of crises an analysis of stories about solving the system crisis since the financial crisis in 2008 a series of publications on macroeconomic responses to the compound crises of the economy and the environment have emerged under labels such as green new deal green growth and the great transition attempts at offering coherent responses to the crises have been made these responses have in common that they all present a large number of policy proposals for ways in which to solve the current crises and achieve a sustainable economy this article provides a mapping of a selection of such responses and an analysis of their content the analysis combines discourse theory and narrative analysis and investigates discourses by studying the narratives they produce the study thus contributes to the long line of analyses on discourses on sustainable economy empirically by investigating and analysing a number of macroeconomic proposals for solving the system crisis and theoretically by elaborating on the concept of narrative dynamics in relation to persuasive strength in political decision making

divorce and the cognitive achievement of children children of divorced parents exhibit lower test scores and educational attainment have these correlations a causal interpretation parents who divorce may be less likely to invest in their children while together or they may divorce to shield their children from the effects of marital conflict i study the relationship between children s achievement and the marital status of their parents within a dynamic framework in which partners decide on whether to remain married how to interact with or without conflict and child investments i then assess whether a child whose parents divorced would have been better off had divorce not occurred

mothers and sons preference formation and female labor force dynamics this paper argues that the growing presence of a new type of man one brought up in a family in which the mother worked has been a significant factor in the increase in female labor force participation over time we present cross sectional evidence showing that the wives of men whose mothers worked are themselves significantly more likely to work we use variation in the importance of world war ii as a shock to women s labor force participation as proxied by variation in the male draft rate across u s states to provide evidence in support of the intergenerational consequences of our propagation mechanism

why are married men working so much an aggregate analysis of intra household bargaining and labour supply are macro economists mistaken in ignoring bargaining between spouses this paper argues that models of intra household allocation could be useful for understanding aggregate labor supply trends in the us since the 1970s a simple calculation suggests that the standard model without bargaining predicts a 19 decline in married male labor supply in response to the narrowing of the gender gap in wages since the 1970s however married men s paid labor remained stationary over the period from the mid 1970s to the recession of 2001 this paper develops and calibrates to us time use survey data a model of marital bargaining in which time allocations are determined jointly with equilibrium marriage and divorce rates the results suggest that bargaining effects raised married men s labor supply by about 2 1 weekly hours over the period and reduced that of married women by 2 7 hours bargaining therefore has a relatively small impact on aggregate labor supply but is critical for trends in female labor supply also the narrowing of the gender wage gap is found to account for a weekly 1 5 hour increase in aggregate labor supply

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

women s college decisions how much does marriage matter this article investigates the sequential college attendance decision of young women and quantifies the effect of marriage expectations on their decision to attend and graduate from college a dynamic choice model of college attendance labor supply and marriage is formulated and structurally estimated using panel data from the nlsy79 the model is used to simulate the effects of no marriage benefits and finds that the predicted college enrollment rate will drop from 58 0 to 50 5 using the estimated model the college attendance behavior for a younger cohort from the nlsy97 is predicted and used to validate the behavioral model

families as shocks in this paper we show the quantitative importance of the process that determines changes in family composition to determine the main macroeconomic magnitudes we do so by modelling family type as a stochastic process that affects households in a way similar to shocks to earnings agents respond to these process by optimally choosing savings we show that the size of savings differs dramatically depending on the details of the stochastic process the model is quantitative its fundamental parameters are estimated using u s data

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

a stackelberg model of child support and welfare this article models the child support and welfare decisions of never married parents on welfare as a stackelberg game the mother chooses whether to exit welfare report paternity and to obtain a formal child support order if a child support order is obtained the father chooses whether to comply with the order simulation results from the structural parameters indicate that increasing the child support disregard increases paternal compliance slightly and affects maternal paternity reporting more significantly effects are limited however by low paternal incomes results also indicate that high award amounts can decrease expected child support payments to women on welfare

child support welfare dependency and poverty female headed families have among the highest poverty rates of any major demographic group in the united states the purpose of this paperis to investigate empirically the effectiveness of current child support enforcement policies and to determine their role in reducing poverty and welfare dependency a special supplement to the april 1982 current population survey provides the data for the analysis the results indicate that child support enforce ment may represent an effective means for re ducing welfare program costs but isunlikely to have a dramatic effect on either welfare de pendency or poverty copyright 1986 by american economic association

transfers to households with children and child development in this paper we utilize a model of household investments in the development of children to explore the impact of various transfer policies on the distribution of child outcomes we develop a cost criterion that can be used to compare the cost effectiveness of unrestricted restricted and conditional cash transfer systems and find that an optimally chosen conditional cash transfer program is the most cost efficient way to attain any given gain in average child quality we explore several design elements for the conditional cash transfer system and discuss the role of production function uncertainty and measurement error

child support payments evidence from repeated cross sections single parent female headed families are a large and growing proportion of all families and comprise a disproportionately large share of the poverty population however among these father absent families those who receive child support payments have higher incomes and lower poverty rates unfortunately many eligible women have no child support awards and many with awards do not receive full payment with low earnings in the labor market and difficulty finding inexpensive quality child care many mothers have no choice but to rely on the welfare system the incidence of poverty is far greater among single parent families headed by women than among other types of families of the 8 8 million women with children present and father absent in 1985 2 8 million had incomes below the poverty level the absence of child support is a significant contributory factor the poverty rate in 1985 for women not having child support awards was 49 percent for those who did it was 21 percent among those women awarded child support the poverty rate was 18 percent if they received payments and 27 percent if no payments were received as these figures suggest securing more child support from absent fathers should help to alleviate poverty among single parent families and may help to reduce the welfare rolls recent interest in improving the nation s child support enforcement system was sparked by the 1980 census bureau s release of alarming statistics on nonpayment rates these statistics showed that in 1979 only 59 percent of mothers with children from absent fathers had child support awards among those with an award and due payment in 1978 only about half received full paymentapproximately one quarter received partial payment while one quarter received no payment at all moreover payments that were made were often irregular the average amount of child support conditional upon receiving support was only 1800 for an average of nearly two children the situation was considerably worse than average for black mothers and never married mothers only about one third of black mothers had child support awards and among those that did the award amount was about 18 percent lower than for nonblacks see our 1986 article only 11 percent of never married mothers had awards award amounts were less than half as much as for divorced mothers

labor supply and marital separation panel data are used to estimate the effect of marital separation on labor supply female labor supply increases substantially and male labor supply declines marginally lending support to the theory of specialization within the household the most interesting finding is that women began to increase their labor supply well before the actualsplit occurs suggesting either that shocks to labor supply change divorce probabilities or that women with a higher likelihood of divorcework more this argument is pursued by constructing and estimating a simultaneous model of labor supply and divorce risk copyright 1986 by american economic association

environmental sustainability as the first principle of distributive justice towards an ecological communitarian normative foundation for ecological economics abstract the ecological economic concern with environmental sustainability embodies the normative orientations of the field this concern is foremost a matter of distributive justice the definition of which determines the relevance of the appropriate scale and efficient allocation criteria yet it would appear that the discipline lacks a shared internally consistent set of ethical premises by which this concern might be legitimized various authors have embraced a rawlsian conception of liberal justice as the appropriate banner for ecological economics in place of the consequentialist libertarian foundations of neoclassical economics including environmental economics it is argued here that this is insufficient in so far as it is premised on a vision of a discrete self sufficient economic actor instead it is posited that an ecological economic ethic must proceed from an understanding of the economic actor as community member a recognition implicit in recent ecological economic contributions focused on discourse ethics and deliberative democracy an ecological communitarian conception of distributive justice which views the well being of the individual as inseparable from the integrity of its implicate mutually constituting human and non human natural communities is advanced as the appropriate basis for the ecological economic world view in this light the thermodynamic foundations of ecological economics are seen to provide the necessary departure point for normative decision making oriented towards ensuring sustainability in economic organization

the deaton paradox in a long memory context with structural breaks this article contributes to the permanent income hypothesis pih and excess consumption smoothness debate in the context of fractional integration we show that the excess consumption smoothness result is a consequence of the quarterly data frequency commonly employed in the empirical work in fact the i 1 hypothesis is rejected for the income process with monthly data in favour of a fractional integration order lower than 1 moreover if a structural break is taken into account we observe a substantial reduction in the degree of consumption smoothness especially after the break found in 1975

green economy and related concepts an overview for the last ten years the notion of a green economy has become increasingly attractive to policy makers however green economy covers a lot of diverse concepts and its links with sustainability are not always clear in this article we focus on definitions of green economy and related concepts and an evaluation of these concepts against the criterion of strong and weak sustainability the article serves three purposes firstly we identify and describe diverse theories concepts approaches and tools related to a green economy among these are the theories of environmental economics and ecological economics the concepts and approaches of cleaner production waste hierarchy bio economy industrial ecology circular economy nature based solutions and dematerialization through product servicizing and tools like life cycle assessment and cost benefit analysis secondly we develop a framework that shows the capacity of the green economy concepts approaches and tools to support the transition towards sustainability such a framework can serve as a heuristic to embed diverse concepts and approaches into a green economy framework thirdly we briefly discuss green economy concepts with respect to their impact on strong and weak sustainability depending on the different concepts approaches and tools identified in the green economy framework different degrees of substitutability and trade offs between environmental and economic benefits are allowed and more or less structural changes of our modes of living are required by discussing the notion of green economy and related concepts approaches and tools we seek to make a contribution to their definitions and relationships as a prerequisite for operationalizing green economy

the effects of in work benefit reform in britain on couples theory and evidence this paper examines the effects of the working families tax credit wftc on couples in britain we develop a simple model of household decisions which explicitly accounts for the role played by the tax and benefit system its main implications are then tested using panel data from the british household panel survey collected between 1991 and 2002 overall the financial incentives of the reform had negligible effects on a wide range of married mothers decisions such as eligible working at least 16 hours per week and full time employment working at least 30 hours per week employment transitions childcare use and divorce rates women s responses however were highly heterogeneous depending on their partners labour supply and earnings mothers married to low income men showed larger responses in employment especially if they had younger children they were more likely to remain in the labour force and had higher rates at which they entered it while more likely to receive the tax credit they also experienced a greater risk of divorce we find virtually no effect for women with higher income husbands likewise there are no statistically significant responses among married men