what determines female autonomy evidence from bangladesh abstract this paper examines the determinants of female autonomy within households in a developing country in particular we investigate the relative contributions of earned versus unearned income in enhancing women s autonomy and the role of employment outside of their husband s farm in a simple theoretical model it is demonstrated that earned income could be more important than unearned income in empowering women using data from rural bangladesh empirical estimations confirm this prediction and also reveal the surprising fact that it is not employment per se but employment outside their husbands farms that contributes to women s autonomy the data also point to the importance of choosing the correct threat point in theoretical analyses of female autonomy

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

out of the wallet and into the purse using micro data to test income pooling this paper uses an exogenous change in the intrahousehold distribution of income provided by a change in united kingdom family allowance policy to test the income pooling hypothesis implied by unitary household models expenditure shares are estimated for a wide range of goods using household level data shifts in expenditure shares suggest that children and mothers benefited at the expense of fathers when this policy change shifted income within households from men to women similar shifts are not found among married couple households with no children this paper refutes income pooling and confirms and extends results in lundberg pollak and wales 1997

the effect of gender targeted conditional cash transfers on household expenditures evidence from a randomized experiment this paper studies the differential effect of targeting cash transfers to men or women on the structure of household expenditures on non durables we study a policy intervention in the republic of macedonia offering cash transfers to poor households conditional on having their children attending secondary school the recipient of the transfer is randomized across municipalities to be either the household head or the mother using data collected to evaluate the conditional cash transfer program we show that the gender of the recipient has an effect on the structure of expenditure shares targeting transfers to women increases the expenditure share on food by about 4 to 5 to study the allocation of expenditures within the food basket we estimate a demand system for food and we find that targeting payments to mothers induces for different food categories not only a significant intercept shift but also a change in the slope of the engel curve

marriage market divorce legislation and household labor supply this paper provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the impact of the marriage market and divorce legislation on household labor supply in our approach the sex ratio in the marriage market and the rules governing divorce are examples of distribution factors these factors are defined as variables that affect the household members bargaining position but not preferences or the joint budget set we extend the collective labor supply model developed by chiappori to allow for distribution factors we show that our model imposes new restrictions on the labor supply functions and eases the identification of individual preferences and the intrahousehold decision process the model is estimated using psid data for the year 1988 our results do not reject the restrictions imposed by the model also the sex ratio and divorce laws deemed favorable to women are found to affect labor supply behavior and the decision process in the directions predicted by the theory and to have sizable effects

grandmothers and granddaughters this article evaluates the impact of a large cash transfer program in south africa on children s nutritional status and investigates whether the gender of the recipient affects that impact in the early 1990s the benefits and coverage of the south african social pension program were expanded for the black population in 1993 the benefits were about twice the median per capita income in rural areas more than a quarter of black south african children under age five live with a pension recipient estimates suggest that pensions received by women had a large impact on the anthropometric status weight for height and height for age of girls but little effect on that of boys no similar effect is found for pensions received by men this suggests that the efficiency of public transfer programs may depend on the gender of the recipient

the ant or the grasshopper the long term consequences of unilateral divorce laws on savings of european households abstract unilateral divorce laws udls allow people to obtain divorce without the consent of their spouse using the staggered introduction of udls across european countries we show that households exposed to udls for a longer period of time accumulate more savings this effect holds for both financial and total wealth and is stronger at higher quantiles of the wealth distribution consistent with a precautionary motive for savings we also find that exposure to udls increases female labour supply numeracy trust in others and dispositional optimism

zero expenditures and the estimation of engel curves over the brief interview periods typical of budget surveys such as the u k family expenditure survey households recorded expenditures are liable to be misleading indicators of their underlying consumption most starkly a household may not be observed to purchase commodities that it nevertheless consumes this paper considers the implications of such measurement errors for the estimation of demand systems and derives a consistent estimator for the special case of linear engel curves

charitable giving by married couples who decides and why does it matter we examine how charitable giving is influenced by who in the household is primarily responsible for giving decisions looking first at single person households we find men and women to have significantly different tastes for giving setting up a potential conflict for married couples we find that with respect to total giving married households tend to resolve these conflicts largely in favor of the husband s preferences bargaining over charitable giving rather than letting one spouse take charge reduces giving by about six percent when the woman is the decision maker she will still make a significantly different allocation of those charity dollars preferring to give to more charities but to give less to each our results give new insights into both the demographics of charitable giving and the costliness of household bargaining

unilateral divorce versus child custody and child support in the u s this paper explores the response of the divorce rate to law reforms introducing unilateral divorce after controlling for law reforms concerning the aftermath of divorce which are omitted from most previous studies we introduce two main policy changes that have swept the us since the late 1970s the approval of the joint custody regime and the child support enforcement program because those reforms affect divorce decisions by counteracting the reallocation of property rights generated by the unilateral divorce procedure and by increasing the expected financial costs of divorce it is arguable that their omissions might obscure the impact of unilateral divorce reforms on divorce rates after allowing for changes in laws concerning the aftermath of divorce we find that the positive impact of unilateral divorce reforms on divorce rates does not vanish over time suggesting that the coase theorem may not apply to changes in divorce laws supplemental analysis developed to examine the frequency of permanent shocks in us divorce rates indicates that the positive permanent changes in divorce rates can be associated with the implementation of unilateral divorce reforms and that the negative permanent changes can be related to the law reforms concerning living arrangements in the aftermath of divorce this seems to confirm the important role of these policies in the evolution of divorce rates

productive investment and growth testing the validity of the ak model from a panel perspective in this article we analyse the relationship between productive physical investment and economic growth from a panel perspective for a sample of 61 countries spanning the period 1950 to 1992 the analysis can be thought of as two fold first we test the empirical validity of ak models following the logic by jones 1995 for that purpose we determine the degree of persistence of physical investment rates and growth by employing recently developed panel unit root tests that enable us to make more reliable inferences about the existence of stochastic trends in the series second we estimate the long run effect of physical investment on growth by using panel data techniques rather than cross section regressions overall our findings cast doubts on the rejection of the empirical validity of the ak model as suggested by jones analysis

labor market opportunities and women s decision making power within households abstract despite the perceived importance of labor market opportunities in shaping married women s outside option and their bargaining power within households as a result this link has received very little empirical attention using longitudinal data on who makes the decision on a wide range of issues within mexican households and data from the administrative records of the mexican social security institute this paper identifies the effects of relative changes in labor market opportunities for men and women on both working and non working women s decision making power i find that increases in labor market opportunities improve women s decision making power as well as children s health using differential labor demand shocks across mexican industries caused by china s admission to the wto gives similar results

until death do you part the effects of unilateral divorce on spousal homicides this study examines how the widespread adoption of unilateral divorce influenced the prevalence of lethal spousal violence in the united states these evaluations are based on fixed effects specifications for spousal homicide counts from an annual panel of u s states from 1968 to 1978 the results indicate that unrestricted unilateral divorce laws had small and statistically insignificant effects on the amount of lethal spousal violence directed against wives however the easy access to divorce created by such laws increased spousal homicides of husbands by approximately 21 these increases were concentrated in states where the division of marital property favored husbands

reconsidering the labeling effect for child benefits evidence from a transition economy i consider expenditure on food alcohol and tobacco and clothing in households with children in slovenia at the start of its transition to a market economy i exploit the unique structure of its child benefit program in order to look for evidence that labeling a cash transfer a child benefit influences how that cash transfer is spent contrary to much of the recent literature on the non fungibility of income i do not find evidence supporting a labeling effect

no fault divorce laws and the labor supply of women with and without children we use a difference in difference in difference estimator to compare changes in labor force participation weeks and hours of work associated with no fault divorce laws allowing for differential responses for married women with and without children although other research has found that the labor supply of women in general does not respond to no fault divorce laws we find that no fault divorce laws are associated with increases in the labor supply of married mothers relative to married nonmothers even after controlling for changes in female labor supply in states without no fault divorce laws and for property division rules associated with the laws

marriage divorce and legal change new evidence from england and wales in this article we explain the evolution of divorce rates in england and wales over the post war period following the approach of the predominantly north american literature in this area we focus on the liberalization of divorce law and socioeconomic factors as determinants of the divorce rate in line with the development of the literature we find that the introduction of liberalized no fault divorce law had a significant effect on the divorce rate in england and wales the finding that the law affects the divorce rate is consistent with the view that marriage is characterized by indivisibilities that inhibit coasian bargaining

what can we learn from the grand policy experiment lessons from so2 allowance trading stable url http links jstor org sici sici 0895 3309 28199822 2912 3a3 3c69 3awcwlft 3e2 0 co 3b2 tthe journal of economic perspectives is currently published by american economic association your use of the jstor archive indicates your acceptance of jstor s terms and conditions of use available athttp www jstor org about terms html jstor s terms and conditions of use provides in part that unless you have obtainedprior permission you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles and you may use content inthe jstor archive only for your personal non commercial use please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work publisher contact information may be obtained athttp www jstor org journals aea html each copy of any part of a jstor transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission the jstor archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world the archive is supported by libraries scholarly societies publishers and foundations it is an initiative of jstor a not for profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology for more information regarding jstor please contact support jstor org http www jstor orgtue jun 26 16 25 17 2007

estimating consumption from expenditure data abstract most studies of distributional issues have focused on the distribution of income but the income information usually available suffers from well known deficiencies this paper explores an alternative approach to distributional analysis based instead on expenditure data in many countries including the united kingdom available household budget data provides information on expenditures only over a short period the problems that consequently arise in interpreting data of this sort are emphasised a general specification for the stochastic structure of expenditure data is presented and a procedure for estimating participant households underlying consumption from their observed expenditures developed and discussed

transfers among divorced couples evidence and interpretation we analyze divorce settlements made by a cohort of whites who graduated from high school in 1972 the effects of spouses incomes on the divorce transfer are estimated and used to simulate the welfare effects of divorce on husbands wives and children under alternative assumptions about marriage contracts and the ability of a couple to continue coordinating resources in the aftermath of divorce we find a positive negative relationship between divorce transfers and the growth of husband s wife s earnings during marriage the estimated expenditure on children in the divorce state is only half the accustomed level during marriage

the retirement consumption puzzle a marital bargaining approach abstract evidence from several countries reveals a substantial drop in household consumption around the age of retirement that is difficult to explain with life cycle models using food consumption data from more than 550 households from the panel study of income dynamics for the years 1979 1986 and 1989 1992 we find that married couple households decrease their expenditures on both food consumed at home and away from home by about 9 following the retirement of the male household head no significant decrease in consumption is found for single households either in a sample of males or a pooled sample of single males and females these results are consistent with a model of marital bargaining in which wives prefer to save more than their husbands do to support an expected longer retirement period and relative control over household decisions is affected by control over market income the pattern of the consumption decline which is increasing in the age gap between husband and wife lends further support to this interpretation

bargaining and distribution in marriage the standard economic model of the family is a common preference model that assumes that a family maximizes a single utility function and implies that family behavior is independent of which individuals receive income or control resources in recent years this model has been challenged by game theoretic models of marriage that do not impose pooling and are therefore consistent with empirical evidence that income controlled by husbands and wives does have different effects on family behavior in this paper the authors review a number of simple bargaining models and relevant empirical evidence and discuss their implications for distribution within marriage

the impact of divorce laws on marriage specific capital this article considers how divorce law alters the incentives for couples to invest in their marriage focusing on the impact of unilateral divorce laws on investments in new marriages differences across states between 1970 and 1980 provide useful quasi experimental variation with which to consider incentives to invest in several types of marriagespecific capital spouse s education children household specialization and home ownership i find that adoption of unilateral divorce regardless of the prevailing property division laws reduces investment in all types of marriage specific capital considered except home ownership in contrast results for home ownership depend on the underlying property division laws

do husbands and wives pool their resources further evidence this paper replicates results of an article showing that families with children increased expenditures on women s clothing relative to men s after implementation of a policy that shifted a child subsidy payment from the father to the mother these results were interpreted as evidence that families do not pool their income but allocate consumption based on income source however the current paper also finds an increase in relative spending on women s clothing among childless couples a sample the policy change did not impact alternative explanations are explored for observing these patterns but none can rule out either bargaining or income pooling

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

cleaning in the shadow of the law bargaining marital investment and the impact of divorce law on husbands intrahousehold work abstractprevious literature has established that unilateral divorce laws may reduce women s household work and overall marital investment if unilateral divorce has differential costs by gender it may impact household work by gender through bargaining channels however little research has examined how divorce laws affect men s levels and share of household production to examine this i use data on matched couples from the panel study of income dynamics and exploit time variation in state divorce laws i find that unilateral divorce laws lead to a decrease in marital investment as measured by mens and women s household work the evidence also supports a bargaining response to divorce laws as fathers in states without joint custody laws engage in a significantly higher share of household work under unilateral divorce than those in states with joint custody laws consistent with a higher cost of marital dissolution among fathers who stand to lose custody of their children

do husbands and wives pool their resources evidence from the united kingdom child benefit common preference models of family behavior imply income pooling a restriction on family demand functions such that only the sum of husband s income and wife s income affects the allocation of goods and time testing the pooling hypothesis is difficult because most family income sources are not exogenous to the allocations being analyzed in this paper we present an alternative test based on a natural experiment a policy change in the united kingdom that transferred a substantial child allowance to wives in the late 1970s using family expenditure survey data we find strong evidence that a shift toward greater expenditures on women s clothing and children s clothing relative to men s clothing coincided with this income redistribution

changes in labor force participation in the united states the labor force participation rate in the united states increased almost continuously for two and a half decades after the mid 1960s pausing only briefly during economic downturns the pace of growth slowed considerably during the 1990s however and after reaching a record high of 67 3 percent in the first quarter of 2000 participation had declined by 1 5 percentage points by 2005 this paper reviews the social and demographic trends that contributed to the movements in the labor force participation rate in the second half of the twentieth century it also examines the manner in which developments in the 2000s reflect a break from past trends and considers implications for the future

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

noncooperative bargaining models of marriage in this paper we discuss some simple noncooperative models of distribution within marriage in which the equilibria are not necessarily pareto optimal in which history and culture can affect which equilibrium is realized and in which distribution may depend on whether resources are controlled by the husband or by the wife recent moves away from single decision maker models of the family have permitted economists to address distribution within marriage and cooperative bargaining models have played the central role in these moves the next step is to permit strategic interaction between family members by modeling distribution within marriage as a noncooperative game noncooperative game theory allows great flexibility in specifying the rules of the game and unlike cooperative game theory imposes few a priori restrictions on the nature of equilibrium outcomes in particular noncooperative models neither assume nor imply that all equilibria are pareto optimal

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

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

who benefits from child benefit governments over much of the developed world make significant financial transfers to parents with dependent children for example in the united states the recently introduced child tax credit ctc which goes to almost all children costs almost 1 billion each week or about 0 4 of gnp the united kingdom has even more generous transfers and spends an average of about 30 a week on each of about 8 million children about 1 of gnp the typical rationale given for these transfers is that they are good for our children and here we investigate the effect of such transfers on household spending patterns in the united kingdom such transfers known as child benefit cb have been simple lump sum universal payments for a continuous period of more than 20 years we do indeed find that cb is spent differently from other income paradoxically it appears to be spent disproportionately on adult assignable goods in fact we estimate that as much as half of a marginal dollar of cb is spent on alcohol we resolve this puzzle by showing that the effect is confined to unanticipated variation in cb so we infer that parents are sufficiently altruistic toward their children that they completely insure them against shocks

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

capital accumulation and growth a new look at the empirical evidence using annual data for 75 countries in the period 1960 2000 we present evidence of a positive relationship between investment as a share of gross domestic product gdp and the long run growth rate of gdp per worker this result is robust for our full sample and for the subsample of non oecd countries but not for the subsample of oecd countries our analysis controls for time invariant country specific heterogeneity in growth rates and for a range of time varying control variables we also address endogeneity issues and allow for heterogeneity across countries in model parameters and for cross section dependence

female labor supply and divorce new evidence from ireland if participation in the labor market helps to secure women s outside options in the case of divorce separation an increase in the perceived risk of marital dissolution may accelerate the increase in female labor supply this simple prediction has been tested in the literature using time and or spatial variation in divorce legislation e g across us states leading to mixed results in this paper we suggest testing this hypothesis by exploiting a more radical policy change i e the legalization of divorce in ireland the right to divorce was introduced in 1996 followed by an acceleration of marriage breakdown rates we use this fundamental change in the irish society as a natural experiment we follow a difference in difference approach using families for whom the dissolution risk is small as a control group our results suggest that the legalization of divorce contributed to a significant increase in female labor supply mostly at the extensive margin results are not driven by selection and are robust to several specification checks including the introduction of household fixed effects and an improved match between control and treatment groups using propensity score reweighting

divorce law reforms and divorce rates in the usa an interactive fixed effects approach this paper estimates the eects of unilateral divorce laws on divorce rates from a panel of state level divorce rates we use the interactive xed eects model to address the issue of endogeneity due to the association between cross state unobserved heterogeneity and divorce law reforms we document that earlier studies in the literature do not fully control for unobserved heterogeneity and result in mixed empirical evidence on the eects of divorce law reforms our results while reconciling these conicting results suggest that divorce law reforms have positive eects on divorce rates but the magnitude and duration of the eects

collective labor supply and welfare the paper develops a general collective model of household labor supply in which agents are characterized by their own possibly altruistic preferences and household decisions are only assumed to be pareto efficient an alternative interpretation is that there are two stages in the internal decision process agents first share nonlabor income according to some given sharing rule then each one optimally chooses his or her own labor supply and consumption this setting is shown to generate testable restrictions on labor supplies moreover the observation of labor supply behavior is sufficient for recovering individual preferences and the sharing rule up to a constant finally the traditional tools of welfare analysis can be adapted to the new setting

parental wealth and adult children s welfare in marriage abstract many studies find that parental resources importantly determine children s human capital schooling returns and earnings the collective household approach suggests that in addition parental resources of marital partners may importantly affect resource distributions within marriage this paper presents empirical results consistent with this framework they suggest that parental wealth continues to play roles in augmenting welfare of children into adulthood beyond provision of human capital in early life cycle stages or direct financial aid during adulthood and that actual transfers from parents to adult children do not fully measure influences of parental wealth on behaviors and welfare of adult children

women wealth and mobility using estate tax returns data we observe that the share of women among the very wealthy in the united states peaked in the late 1960s at nearly one half and then declined to one third we argue that this pattern reflects changes in the importance of dynastic wealth with the share of women proxying for inher ited wealth if so wealth mobility decreased until the 1970s and rose thereafter such an interpretation is consistent with technological change driving long term trends in mobility and inequality as well as the recent divergence between top wealth and top income shares documented elsewhere jel d31 j16 j62 033 the extent of and changes in intergenerational mobility of wealth are central to understanding dynamics of wealth inequality but are hard to measure in this paper we argue that the share of women among the wealthiest americans can be used as a proxy for the importance of inherited rela tive to self made wealth this approach assumes that women tend to inherit rather than make great fortunes if so a higher share of women among the wealthy would reflect a rise in inherited wealth at the top and thus lower wealth mobility conversely higher wealth mobility where self made wealth replaces inherited wealth would result in more men at the top of the wealth distribution judged by this proxy and corroborated by various data sources wealth mobility decreased in the period 1925 1969 and increased thereafter such a pattern is consistent with an important role for technological change in shaping the wealth distribution and can provide an explanation for why wealth concentra tion has remained stable despite increasing income concentration in the last three decades over the past century the share of women among the very wealthy followed an inverse u pattern peaking in the late 1960s according to estate tax returns in 1925 one quarter of the wealthiest 0 01 percent were women this fraction rose rapidly through world war ii wwii and then more slowly to peak in 1969 when women neared parity with men since then the decline has been marked by 2000 women s share had fallen to one third its prewar level while the rise was evident among all wealth groups in the top 1 percent of the wealth distribution the decline was confined to the very top figure ia graphs the share of women for four different groups in the top 1 percent among decedents by year figure ib does the same for the living population with the help of estate multipliers a method that treats death as a random sampling device and uses mortality rates by age and gender to infer the distribution of wealth among the living as described in the data appendix while the rise in the share of women among the wealthy until the 1960s could reflect improve ments in women s economic status labor market gains work against the recent decline for instance since the 1970s the share of women among top earners top 0 1 percent has risen by

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

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

intra household resource allocation an inferential approach if household income is pooled and then allocated to maximize welfare then income under the control of mothers and fathers should have the same impact on demand with survey data on family health and nutrition in brazil the equality of parental income effects is rejected unearned income in the hands of a mother has a bigger effect on her family s health than income under the control of a father for child survival probabilities the effect is almost twenty times bigger the common preference or neoclassical model of the household is rejected if unearned income is measured with error and income is pooled then the ratio of maternal to paternal income effects should be the same equality of the ratios cannot be rejected there is also evidence for gender preference mothers prefer to devote resources to improving the nutritional status of their daughters fathers to sons

cross border marriage costs and marriage behavior theory and evidence this article analyzes cross border marriages between mainland china and hong kong hk we examine the effects of a reduction in cross border marriage costs following an increase in marriage migration quotas and the handover of hk to china we find that cross border marriages mainly involve men from the low tail of the hk attribute distribution we also find that hk women s position in the marriage market and within households deteriorated following the reduction in cross border marriage costs and that their disadvantaged position exerts an incentive effect on their labor market behavior these outcomes are consistent with our matching model

testing the neoclassical model of family labor supply and fertility the mcelroy horney nash bargaining model of family demand behavior relaxes the restriction that nonearned income of husband and wife has the identical effect on family labor supply and commodity demands this restriction of the neoclassical model offamily behavior is tested for the determination of husband and wife labor supply andfertility based on the 1981 socioeconomic survey of thailand the neoclassical restriction is rejected for female labor supply andfertility another unexplored limitation offamily demand studies due to the sample self selection of intact marriages is empirically treated through alternative estimation strategies in this case a more sharply focused theory of marital behavior is needed to identify family demand models

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

unilateral divorce and the labor force participation rate of married women revisited two recent articles in this review by h elizabeth peters 1986 and william r johnson and jonathan skinner 1986 address an anomaly recently observed by labor economists james p smith and michael p ward 1985 have noted that real wage growth explains most of the increase in the female labor supply between 1950 and 1980 however in the period after 1970 the female labor supply growth rate rose while the real wage growth rate fell robert t michael 1985 provides a partial explanation by identifying the effect of divorce on the labor market decision of married women in that article a lagged relationship is observed between increases in the divorce rate and increases in the labor force participation rate lfpr of married women with young children during the post world war ii period since the divorce rate rose in the period after 1960 it could explain part of the increase in the growth rate of the lfpr of married women observed after 1970 the articles by peters and by johnson and skinner provide additional insights into this anomaly they recognize that the introduction of no fault grounds for divorce after 1970 may have contributed to the increase in the labor supply of married women after that date the no fault grounds for divorce created what has been called unilateral divorce the shift in female labor supply also could explain the slower real wage growth using 1979 data peters concludes that residence in a unilateral divorce state had a statistically significant positive influence on whether a married woman was in the labor force johnson and skinner use 1972 data to conclude that being in a unilateral divorce state in that year had a negative effect on the labor supply of married women unilateral divorce was introduced in the united states in 1970 when california adopted its no fault divorce statute therefore peters s data are probably more useful for testing the impact of unilateral divorce laws on married women s labor force participation in her article the lack of compensation for marriage specific investment at divorce creates an incentive for married women to increase their more general market capital during marriage by entering the labor force 2 a lack of compensation for marriage specific investment implies that women are not being compensated for being good housewives and mothers given the range of commodities produced by housewives and mothers marriage specific investment should not necessarily vary with characteristics of women such as age race or education if the impact of unilateral divorce on the lfpr of married women is due to the lack of compensation for mar regents professor of management robert 0 anderson schools of management university of new mexico albuquerque nm 87131 i thank michele blazek steve cauley dwight grant ron johnson rod lievano sam peltzman john schatzberg david weeks nelson woodard douglas young and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments the anderson schools of management provided research funding for this project ibefore 1970 most states had grounds for divorce that were based on fault such as adultery or mental cruelty between 1970 and 1985 all the american jurisdictions enacted some form of no fault divorce the no fault divorce statutes generally make either irretrievable breakdown or incompatibility the sole ground for divorce or add one of them to the fault grounds while no fault divorce is often called unilateral divorce that is not technically correct since some states require mutual consent to the no fault grounds see doris j freed and timothy b walker 1990 2while it was recognized by peters p 443 that women who invest in marriage may face lower wages in the future based on gary s becker 1981 p 15 marriage specific investment has value based on its ahilitv to increase houiehold nrodiution

the labeling effect of a child benefit system child benefit systems exist in many countries while they show a lot of differences in terms of eligibility rules amounts involved and implementation tax deduction tax credit or direct benefit the common motivation for their existence is to increase children s welfare in the dutch child benefit system the case i focus on in this paperone of the parents usually the mother is entitled to an untaxed child benefit amount which only depends on the child s age and the number of children in the household thus child support does not depend on household income marital status or labor market status as a result child benefit is exogenous to the household given the presence of children this is in contrast with the situation in many other countries including germany france the united kingdom and the united states where government provided child support is partly means tested see jonathan bradshaw et al 1993 in the netherlands child benefit is generally a nonnegligible addition to the household income the median share of child benefit in the total net income of households with children is 8 percent on the national level expenditures on child benefits amount to 1 2 percent of gnp the use of the child benefit is completely at the discretion of the parent there are no legal requirements that a certain amount be spent on particular goods or services nor does the government provide any guidelines regarding expenditure on children a policy question that arises is to what extent children benefit from child benefits standard microeconomic demand theory allows no role for effects of the composition of income given the fungibility of income sources it is only the sum of income components that is relevant in explaining expenditure patterns thus within that framework the answer would be that the marginal propensity to consume child goods from one guilder of child benefits is no different than from one guilder of any other income source in the more general class of gametheoretic models of household behavior however the composition of household income will generally affect expenditure patterns see e g shelly j lundberg and robert a pollak 1993 and martin browning et al 1994 if fathers and mothers have different preferences and mothers have control over child benefits the effect of child benefits on expenditures will differ from the effect of other income sources lundberg et al 1997 provide empirical evidence showing that a transfer of control over child benefits from fathers to mothers in the united kingdom due to a change in legislation resulted in a significant increase in expenditures on child clothing daniela del boca and christopher j flinn 1994 have analyzed the effect of income composition on expenditure decisions of divorced mothers they find that the coefficients associated with child support and alimony income differ from those for other income in engel curves for expenditures on childspecific goods their results can be explained in terms of a noncooperative nash model in which the child support transfer decisions of the noncustodial father and the expenditure decisions of the mother are determined simultaneously in contrast to del boca and flinn s analysis in which child support is a decision variable the present paper focuses on the possible differential effect of government provided child support which is truly exogenous in this paper i analyze the effects of child benefits on expenditures by running regressions in which child benefit enters as a separate explanatory variable the enipirical analysis is based on a time series of 17 cross section consumer expenditure surveys in the netherlands covering the period 1978 through 1994 it is important to note that in a single cross section it department of economics university of groningen p o b 800 9700 av groningen the netherlands e mail p kooreman eco rug nl i am indebted to two anonymous referees for constructive comments helpful comments were also provided by rob alessie maarten allers chris bojke werner de bondt bert schoonbeek and tom wansbeek i thank vincent linderhof for organizing the data financial support was provided by the dutch organization for scientific research nwo homes project grant

technology adoption under time differentiated market based instruments for pollution control abstract peak concentrations of ground level ozone pose health risks to millions of u s citizens across the u s in order to reduce peak ozone concentrations nitrogen oxide nox emissions from the power sector among others have been regulated with technology based standards or more commonly in recent years market based instruments such as cap and trade programs however the lack of temporal flexibility in current designs of these market based instruments limits their cost effectiveness on days forecasted to have the highest levels of pollution including ozone precursors such as nox and as further emission reductions are sought the marginal cost of these approaches increases dramatically in this paper we compare three regulatory schemes for reducing nox emissions on high ozone days time differentiated pricing which prices nox emissions only on days with high ozone concentrations undifferentiated pricing which represents current nox emission regulations and technology based standards we develop a novel model that captures for the first time both the short and long term response of generators through redispatching and control technology adoption to a dynamic pricing scheme such as time differentiated pricing unlike prior studies on time differentiated pricing the heart of our model a unit commitment model accounts for inter temporal constraints on power generation that may be crucial to accurately capturing the response of generators to a transient price signal we apply this model to the texas power system and find that while control technology adoption specifically selective catalytic reduction does occur at very high time differentiated prices time differentiated pricing mainly affects emissions and costs through redispatching of gas for coal fired generation furthermore we show that time differentiated pricing due to its targeted pricing mechanism provides a more cost effective approach than undifferentiated pricing or technology based standards for reducing nox emissions on high ozone days but is not cost effective at reducing summer wide nox emissions our results illustrate the trade offs between these regulatory approaches and suggest that states should consider dynamic pricing schemes such as time differentiated pricing for achieving further reductions in peak ozone concentrations

what s mine is yours the influence of male and female incomes on patterns of household expenditure this paper uses microdata from the 1992 statistics canada family expenditure survey to provide evidence that male and female incomes do not always exert identical influences on household expenditures the novelty of the paper lies in its demonstration that while incomes may be pooled for some categories of consumption e g housing the income pooling hypothesis must be rejected for others we also go beyond simply rejecting the pooling hypothesis to ask how male versus female income is used our results stress the on going importance of traditional gender roles for example we find that expenditures on child care increase only with women s incomes higher male income is not associated with higher expenditure on child care even when both spouses are full time full year paid workers

efficient pollution regulation getting the prices right this paper argues for efficient environmental regulations that equate the mar ginal damage of pollution to marginal abatement costs across space the paper estimates the source specific marginal damages of air pollution and calculates the welfare gain from making the current sulfur dioxide allowance trading pro gram for power plants more efficient the savings from using trading ratios based on marginal damages are between 310 and 940 million per year the potential savings from setting aggregate emissions efficiently and from includ ing more sources of air pollution are many times higher jel h23 q53 q58

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

should we write prenuptial contracts abstract a successful marriage requires for both parties to make investments in their relationship and marital assets how such assets would be divided if and when the parties divorce is an important factor determining each party s ex ante investment incentives using the incomplete contracting approach we characterize the optimal asset division rule one that provides the parties with the best investment incentives we then discuss the circumstances under which the spouses would agree in equilibrium to contract out state imposed rules governing the allocation of marital assets upon divorce we conclude by exploring the implications of our results in the context of various asset division rules currently discussed by policy makers

the economics of the marriage contract theories and evidence abstract we analyze the role of the marriage contract we first formalize three prominent hypotheses on why people marry marriage provides an exogenous payoff to married partners it serves as a commitment device and it serves as a signaling device for each theory we analyze how a reduction in the costs of divorce affects the propensity to divorce for couples at any given duration of marriage we then use individual marriage and divorce certificate data from the united states to bring these alternative views of the marriage contract to bear on the data we exploit variations in the timing of the adoption of unilateral divorce laws across states to proxy a one off and permanent reduction in divorce costs the results suggest that the dominant reason that couples enter into a marriage contract is that it serves as a commitment device

tradeable permits for pollution control when emission location matters what have we learned our knowledge about tradeable permit approaches to pollution control has grown rapidly in the two decades in which they have received serious analytical attention not only have the theoretical models become more focused and the empirical work more detailed but we have now had over a decade of experience with them in the u s this article draws upon economic theory empirical studies and actual experience with implementation to summarize what we have learned about applying tradeable permits to air pollution control in the special circumstance where the spatial aspects of the problem are a prime consideration

unitary or noncooperative intrahousehold model evidence from couples in uganda we present an overview of the evidence regarding the unitary collective and non cooperative models of household decision making and discuss how they can affect individual and household welfare we then discuss the results of an artefactual experiment conducted in uganda with spouses in order to test whether household members maximize common preferences or instead are willing to pay a significant cost to hide money from their spouse we find that both the unitary and non cooperative models exist in the intra household decision making process and that a one size fits all model of household decision making is unlikely to be satisfactory

quadratic engel curves and consumer demand this paper presents a model of consumer demand that is consistent with the observed expenditure patterns of individual consumers in a long time series of expenditure surveys and is also able to provide a detailed welfare analysis of shifts in relative prices a nonparametric analysis of consumer expenditure patterns suggests that engel curves require quadratic terms in the logarithm of expenditure while popular models of demand such as the translog or the almost ideal demand systems do allow flexible price responses within a theoretically coherent structure they have expenditure share engel curves that are linear in the logarithm of total expenditure we derive the complete class of integrable quadratic logarithmic expenditure share systems a specification from this class is estimated on a large pooled data set of u k households models that fail to account for engel curvature are found ro generate important distortions in the patterns of welfare losses associated with a tax increase

the impact of family income on child achievement evidence from the earned income tax credit using an instrumental variables strategy we estimate the causal effect of income on children s math and reading achievement our identification derives from the large nonlinear changes in the earned income tax credit the largest of these changes increased family income by as much as 20 percent or approximately 2 100 between 1993 and 1997 our baseline estimates imply that a 1 000 increase in income raises combined math and reading test scores by 6 percent of a standard deviation in the short run test gains are larger for children from disadvantaged families and robust to a variety of alternative specifications jel h24 h31 i21 i38 j13

is there a retirement savings puzzle in this paper we ask whether households are saving enough for their retirement we use data on income expenditure and expenditure components to analyse patterns of behaviour at and around the time of retirement for successive date of birth cohorts we compare periods of unemployment to periods of retirement and separate expenditures into categories reflecting work related expenditures basic necessities and other goods we find that income typically falls by more at unemployment than retirement but the reverse is true for expenditure we observe falls in expenditure at retirement for all expenditure categories using a stochastic life cycle model including mortality rates we assess the anticipated impact of retirement on consumption against that of unemployment the inter relationship between goods and leisure explains a large part of the persistent fall in expenditure at retirement we argue that the only way in which the life cycle hypothesis could be reconciled with the remaining unanticipated dip in consumption would be with the systematic arrival of unexpected adverse information at the time of retirement