home is where the hurt is an econometric analysis of injuries caused by spousal assault using data on injuries presenting at the emergency departments of participating hospitals in the australian state of queensland we examine the nature of injuries resulting from spousal assault and compare them to injuries from non spousal assault and accidental injuries we ask who are the persons most vulnerable to spousal assault are spousal assault injuries more or less severe than injuries from non spousal assault and accidental injuries do the recorded figures for assault injuries on women understate the true number of assault injuries and if so by how much

estimating willingness to pay for housing characteristics an application of the ellickson bid rent model abstract the purpose of this paper is to estimate willingness to pay for housing characteristics using the discrete choice bid rent framework developed by b ellickson j urban econom 9 56 79 1981 and modified by s r lerman and c r kern j urban econom 13 358 363 1983 the paper provides an initial empirical test of the lerman and kern modifications using household level data from bogota colombia the results of the model are evaluated by comparing forecasted bid rents to actual rents and forecasted dwelling occupants to actual occupants by examining the demand prices which emerge from the analysis and by comparing the results to previous housing demand research which uses a hedonic type approach to analyze identical data the findings of the study show that the bid rent model works reasonably well in its predictions and in its estimates of the demand for attributes and in some ways it may perform better than a hedonic type model in forecasting the demand for housing attributes

domestic violence a nonrandom affair in this paper we develop and estimate a model of domestic violence we extend a noncooperative model of the family to include violence as a source of gratification and an instrument for controlling behavior we estimate the model by robust methods since the violence process appears to have a heavy tailed nonnormal error distribution we find that the properties of the equilibria depend on family income for low middle income families our results indicate an equilibrium in which one person s reservation utility constraint is binding whereas for higher income families both individuals may gain from the relationship

policy watch the marriage penalty many government programs have implicit penalties or subsidies for marriage for example many couples pay higher income taxes when married than their combined tax liabilities as single filers while many other couples receive a marriage subsidy because their joint taxes fall with marriage likewise most low income couples are eligible for higher welfare benefits if they are separated rather than married this article discusses the marriage penalty with a particular focus on tax and transfer programs why does it exist who faces it to what extent does it affect marriage and labor market behavior what tradeoffs are involved in reducing it

widows waiting to wed re marriage and economic incentives in social security widow benefits in this paper we focus on an age restriction for remarriage in the social security system to determine if individuals respond to economic incentives for marriage aged widow er benefits are paid by the federal government to persons whose deceased spouses worked in social security covered employment a widow er is eligible to receive benefits if she or he is at least age 60 if a widow er remarries before age 60 he or she forfeits the benefit and therefore faces a marriage penalty under current law there is no penalty if the remarriage occurs at 60 years of age or later we investigate whether this rule affects the marriage behavior of widows specifically we examine the rates of remarriage of women around age 60 under current as well as past social security eligibility rules using data from the vital statistics our results provide compelling evidence that this group of women respond to economic incentives when considering the decision to remarry first the 1979 law change that eliminated the marriage penalty for those at least age 60 resulted in a large increase in the marriage rate for widows at

women s access to labor market opportunities control of household resources and domestic violence evidence from bangladesh summary while there are many positive societal implications of increased female labor force participation working may increase a woman s risk of domestic violence using data i collected from bangladesh i document a positive correlation between work and domestic violence but only among women with low education or young age at marriage these results suggest that women with low bargaining power face increased risk of domestic violence upon entering the labor force as their husbands seek to counteract their increased bargaining power consequently policies that increase women s baseline bargaining power will decrease the risk that they face domestic violence upon beginning work

terror as a bargaining instrument a case study of dowry violence in rural india this ethnographic study examined the sociocultural context of domestic violence and dowry in india and describes a theoretical model and econometric methodology the model was tested with survey data collected from a sub caste of 149 potter families from 3 villages in karnataka state in south india interviews were conducted among 139 adult married women and 130 married men the case studies demonstrate that violence can be used as a way to redistribute resources bargaining over dowry amounts occurs twice once before the marriage and renegotiations after the wife had moved to the husbands family domestic violence may be a weapon in order to obtain higher transfers at the renegotiation stage the model assumes that the level of dowry and the occurrence of violence are determined simultaneously hypotheses tested whether increases in husbands family wealth in the dowry paid and husbands cost of violent behavior reduces the incidence of violence tests determined whether increases in wifes familys wealth and increases in wifes human capital husbands human capital or wifes cost of violence increase violence 23 reported wife beating at some time a 10000 rupee increase in the wifes parents income increased the risk of violence by 4 a 10000 rupee increase in the husbands parents income reduced the risk of violence by 10 a 10000 rupee increase in dowry reduced the risk by 5 an additional male child reduced the risk by 11 female sterilization increased the risk by 16 findings suggest that husbands beat wives when the wifes family is rich and when dowries are small

bidding models of housing markets abstract the bid rent model which is the standard bidding model of housing markets fails to take account of three important characteristics of the bidding process that operates in these markets the prices of houses are established through sequential bidding so that sellers do not necessarily accept the highest bids that might be made for their houses ignorance of the market may lead potential buyers to make bids that are either higher or lower than the ones they would make if they had complete information and the distribution of bids for a house is truncated at the seller s asking price this paper describes a bidding model that incorporates these characteristics of housing markets the new model and the standard model are estimated econometrically and tested against one another using data from the baltimore maryland area the test results indicate strong rejection of the standard model it is concluded that the new model provides a better description of the operation of housing markets than does the standard model

hedonic theory bid rents and willingness to pay some extensions of ellickson s results abstract an alternative to ellickson s multinomial logit model of household bids for dwelling units is derived by making use of observable information on the price paid by the winning bidder the alternative specification makes it possible to estimate willingness to pay for housing attributes which cannot be obtained from ellickson s model some methodological issues arising from ellickson s method of grouping households are also examined

estimation of the bid rent function with the usage decision model abstract this paper examines whether the bid rent function model is a valid description of a mechanism of the urban land market we estimate the function that decides land usage and price using the full information maximum likelihood fiml it finds that land usage on average follows the rule that is consistent with the bid rent function model whichever usage outbids the others occupies the land however the evidence also suggests that there is a systematic departure from the model namely the distance from the second city center may directly affect land usage even though it is not reflected in land prices

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

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

measuring permanent responses to capital gains tax changes in panel data the authors use panel data and information about differences in state tax rates to separate the effects of transitory and permanent tax rate changes on capital gains realizations behavior the estimated effect of permanent change is substantially smaller than the effect of transitory change the difference is even larger than differences between estimates from past micro data studies which have primarily measured the transitory effect and time series studies which have primarily measured the permanent effect the authors results resolve a long standing conflict between micro data and time series studies of how marginal tax rates affect capital gains realizations behavior copyright 1994 by american economic association

for love or money the impact of income taxes on marriage higher sometimes lower than their combined single income tax obligations in this paper we explore the impact of the federal individual income tax as well as other economic and demograplhic variables on the marriage decisionis of individuals using longitudinal data from the panel study on income dynamics for the period 1968 92 we estimate a discrete time hazard model of the time to first marriage we find that the probability of marriage is significantly affected by a range of economic and demographic variables importantly we find that an increase in total income taxes paid by married versus single women has a negative effect on the likelihood of marriage and that the change in the marginal tax rate is also a significant determinant of marriage in some cases in contrast the tax effects are rarely significant in determining marriage probabilities among men although there are some differential responses by race in general the impacts of the income tax variables even when statistically significant are small

german income taxation and the timing of marriage i investigate how the german income tax code affects the timing of marriages the german income tax code allows married couples to benefit from full income splitting relative to unmarried couples

taxes and marriage a two sided search analysis this article analyzes the effects of differential tax treatment of married and single individuals in the united states on marriage formation and composition divorce and labor supply we develop a marriage market model with search frictions and heterogeneous agents that is sufficiently rich to capture key elements of the problem under consideration we then calibrate the model and use it to evaluate the quantitative effects of several tax reforms aimed at making the tax law neutral with respect to marital status we find that these reforms i systematically increase the labor supply of married females with changes ranging from 0 3 to 10 1 percent ii have substantial effects on the correlation of spouses incomes which changes from 0 2 to values between 0 185 and 0 334 iii can lead to either an increase or decrease in the fraction of people married with changes that range from 0 6 to 2 4 percent

employment and the risk of domestic violence does the breadwinner s gender matter abstractthis article studies the effect on the risk of female victimization of the employment status of the woman and her partner we use individual level data from the violence against women surveys for spain which also provide information on income and a rich set of sociodemographic characteristics to address the potential endogeneity of the binary employment indicators we exploit exogenous geographical information on the employment and unemployment rates by gender and age within a multivariate probit framework our estimation results show that male partner employment plays a major role in the risk of physical violence while female employment only lowers it when her partner is employed too the lowest risk appears for more egalitarian couples in which both partners are employed

an alternative test of the hedonic theory of housing markets abstract in this paper the hedonic theory of housing markets is used to generate a multinomial logit model of household behavior in an urban housing market application of hedonic theory to housing markets is by now fairly familiar and a link to multinomial logit has also been established however by emphasizing more heavily the bid price interpretation of hedonic theory this paper develops a new connection to econometric estimation that essentially involves running the usual logit equations in reverse one advantage of this approach is that the link between the logit equations and hedonic theory involves bid price rather than utility functions and this in turn permits the empirical results to be given an extremely clear interpretation furthermore in contrast to the standard logit model the extreme value distribution required to justify the estimation technique emerges endogenously as part of the analysis

taxes and the timing of births because the tax savings of having a child are a realized only if the birth takes place before midnight january 1 the incentives for the marginal birth are substantial using a sample of children from the national longitudinal survey of youth we find that the probability that a child is born in the last week of december rather than the first week of january is positively correlated with tax benefits we estimate that increasing the tax benefit of having a child by 500 raises the probability of having the child in the last week of december by 26 9 percent

taxes and transfers their effects on the decision to end a marriage abstract the transfer system typically has large marriage disincentives while the income tax system is likely to subsidize marriage for many low income families in other words the tax system may offset an increase in transfer benefits associated with marital separation the interaction of the transfer system with the income tax system has largely been overlooked the income tax system has become more relevant for low income families with the recent expansion of the earned income tax credit which filers may be eligible for even if their tax liability is zero this paper uses family level measures of the change in transfer benefits and tax liability associated with a change in family structure to consider the effect of these financial incentives on separation decisions

do taxes matter lessons from the 1980 s the response of the economy to two major although in important respects offsetting tax reforms has been much smaller than ardent supply side revolutionaries expected thus suggesting that a reassessment of the grounds for revolt is in order this paper offers such a reassessment by first discussing how the evidence from the tax reforms of 1981 and 1986 reflects on our understanding of the response to taxation with particular reference to savings and capital gains realizations i then reconstruct a 1992 view about how taxes affect behavior a unifying theme is that the tax system does much more than alter the relative prices of real variables it also provides incentives to misreport income restructure financial claims time transactions change the legal form of organization and so on for this reason observed low tax elasticities of real variables may be due to either low elasticities of substitution or the fact that tax policy changes opportunity sets in complex ways disentangling these explanations requires an emphasis on the transaction based nature of the tax system and the administration and enforcement of tax laws this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

will you civil union me although the tax system is not marriage neutral in many countries it has been found to be only slightly significant in determining marriage decisions buffeteau and echevin 2003 alm and whittington 1995 this paper tests whether the tax system can alter the decision to contract a civil union which is less binding than a marital contract in 1999 france introduced civil union pacs as an alternative legal union to marriage i assess the impact of taxation on the decision to contract a pacs using a difference in differences evaluation of the 2005 income tax reform for newly pacsed couples as the control group is contaminated by the reform i propose an original estimation method based on a difference in differences in differences setting to estimate bounds to the impact of the reform my results find a positive and increasing impact of taxation on pacs rates but also a change in the timing of pacs unions suggesting that taxation alters the decision to contract a pacs in addition i find a slightly significant impact of taxation on the decision to terminate a pacs

selection bias and land development in the monocentric city model the land development process implied by the monocentric city model is extremely simple the model as set forth by muth 13 and mills 12 contains no error terms and the city lies on a featureless plain land is converted to urban use whenever urban land values rise relative to agricutural land values the assumptions of the model assure that land development in any period takes place in a ring at the edge of the city in this paper we relax the assumption that the city is a featureless plain by introducing error terms to the urban and non urban land value functions this simple addition a necessity for empirical work produces a much richer land development process than is imbedded in the simple muth mills model the error terms in the land value functions which represent the effects of missing variables such as the fertility of the soil influence the selection of land for urban and non urban use this selection process in turn causes a bias in ols estimates of land value functions the form of the selection bias implies three possible land development patterns first if traits that produce high urban land values cause low non urban values relatively low value non urban land is developed first and has above average value in urban use however if unusually productive agricultural land is also highly valued in urban use then the development process depends on the relative magnitudes of the variances of the two land value distributions for example if the variance of the urban distribution is the larger then relatively high value non urban land is developed first and has above average land value in urban use the greater variance in the urban distribution implies that unusually good farmland can earn more in urban use thus the expanded muth mills model incorporates urban expansion at the expense of high quality agriculture and a more benign land market in which only comparatively low quality agricultural land is taken by cities the expanded muth mills model implies the existence of selection bias in land value equations selection bias has only recently been recognized

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

multiple regime bid rent function estimation abstract this paper reviews estimators for multiple regime selection models which include the standard urban bid rent model as a special case 4 probabilistic bid rent model imposes a restrictive selection process while existing two stage multiple regime estimators assume an error structure that is inconsistent with bid rent theory monte carlo experiments demonstrate that two stage estimators are accurate and robust to distributional misspecification the practical usefulness of the estimators is illustrated using data on 1920s chicago land values

the panel study of income dynamics after fourteen years an evaluation this article considers the representativeness of the panel study of income dynamics psid over its 14 year history from 1968 to 1981 given the dynamics of entry and exit from the panel by 1981 40 of the original members had left the sample and were replaced by new entrants who joined either existing households or new households being formed by members of the original sample we consider the distribution of demographic characteristics and earnings equations over time and we compare the psid with the current population survey cps by either approach we find little evidence that the psid has become unrepresentative

evidence from mexico on social status and violence against women this study investigates the impact of relative social status on violence against women in mexico using state level panel data relatively higher female social status measured by educational economic and political standings is associated with lower homicide rates for women and lower intimate partner violence rates more importantly different status variables affect violence against women through different channels depending on the victim offender relationship the results are robust to different specifications and different control variables this study may provide helpful guidelines to policy makers attempting to identify more effective means for deterring violence against women

til death or taxes do us part the effect of income taxation on divorce there is now much empirical evidence that economic incentives affect the divorce decision via their impact on the flow of benefits of divorced vs married individuals however the effect of the individual income tax on divorce has been neglected in this work the income tax in the us is structured so that tax liability often changes with marriage some couples incur a marriage penalty in the form of higher taxes when they marry while others receive a marriage subsidy because their tax burden falls with marriage in this paper the authors examine the impact of the individual income tax on the likelihood of divorce in the us using data from the panel study on income dynamics they estimate a discrete time hazard model of the probability of divorce from the first marriage to test the hypothesis that the probability of divorce rises with the marriage penalty they also examine the role of other economic factors in the divorce decision the authors find that individuals respond to tax incentives in their decision to divorce although these responses are typically small and differ for men and women authors

income taxes and the timing of marital decisions abstract in this paper we estimate the impact of the federal individual income tax on the timing of marital decisions anecdotal evidence suggests that the tax penalty often associated with marriage contributes to the decision of when to marry using household data from the panel study on income dynamics we estimate various models of the probability of delaying marriage as a function of the change in tax burden caused by marriage as well as several other variables we find that there is a significant positive relationship between the marriage penalty in a year and the probability of delaying marriage until the following year the magnitude of the effect however is small

the timing of welfare payments and intimate partner violence i examine transfer schedules for the temporary assistance for needy families tanf program and find a causal relationship between the time directly after welfare payments and intimate partner violence against women this study supports the hypothesis that the husband uses threats of violence as an instrument to gain control over the allocation of household resources and suggests that the increased incidence in physical violence after welfare payments is associated with alcohol use additionally i find that states that pay tanf recipients twice a month do not have this effect on threats of violence this suggests that smaller more frequent payments may reduce the husband s incentive to use verbal violence as a bargaining tool jel i38 j18 j12

saying i don t the effect of the affordable care act young adult provision on marriage this paper investigates the effect of the affordable care act young adult provision on the propensity to marry the young adult provision expanded options for obtaining insurance coverage outside of marriage young adults affected by the provision might have less incentive to marry since one avenue for obtaining health insurance coverage is through marriage this paper examines this question by applying difference in differences type methods using the 2008 2013 american community survey results suggest that the provision is associated with decreases in the likelihood of marrying cohabitation and spousal health insurance coverage and an increase in the probability of divorce

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

income taxes and the marriage decision economic incentives have been found to play an important role in the marriage decision in developed and developing countries however the way in which the income tax treatment of the family affects these incentives has been routinely ignored this paper uses time series data for the united states from 1947 to 1988 to estimate the impact of economic factors including for the first time the tax consequences of marriage on the aggregate marriage rate the estimation results indicate that economic factors like income female wages and education play an important and statistically significant role in the marriage decision in particular the tax consequences of marriage clearly affect the marriage decision when income taxes increase with marriage the aggregate marriage rate declines however the magnitude of this impact is quite small this result suggests that some individuals respond to tax incentives in their marriage choices but that for many individuals taxes do not affect these decisions

the married widow marriage penalties matter marriage penalties are a controversial feature of many government policies empirical evidence of their behavioral effects is quite mixed which is surprising because economic theory predicts that they should have an impact on the headship decision we investigate the removal of marriage penalties from the surviving spouse pensions of the canadian public pension system in the 1980s these reforms provide a simple and transparent source of identification our results indicate that marriage penalties can have large and persistent effects on marriage decisions we also present evidence suggesting that it is individuals with characteristics correlated with greater wealth who respond to the penalties jel j1 h2