spousal bargaining over care for elderly parents in china imbalances in sex ratios influence the allocation of support abstractusing a unique chinese survey of parents and adult children this paper examines how married children negotiate with their spouses for time devoted to caring for their own parents applying a collective bargaining framework i show that the sex ratio at marriage shifts household bargaining in favour of the husband s parents when women are less scarce or against his parents when women are scarcer such changing dynamics in the family may potentially reverse the current preference for sons in china implying that those with sons rather than daughters may be increasingly in need of state support

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

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

generalized travel cost model and water quality benefits a reconsideration with federal agencies required to conduct benefit cost analyses for each new major regulation analyses of water quality changes are likely to be an increasingly important part of the policymaking process a revised version of the travel cost demand model and illustrations show the importance of these revisions for the model s estimates although the magnitude of the difference in benefit estimates between the original and new versions of the model varies with the specific recreation site selected the findings indicate that the original model generally implied estimated benefits from three to over 30 times as large as the revised model this implies that judgment can play an important role in the definition and use of economic models as well as the need for better information on households recreation decisions and more complete description of recreation site characteristics 15 references 4 tables

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

measuring values for environmental resources under uncertainty abstract the relationship between conventional hicksian measures of the benefits from changes in environmental amenities under certainty and corresponding measures of valuation when the conditions of access to an uncertain environmental resource are changed is considered the analysis utilizes a contingent commodity framework with the assumption of state dependent preferences the findings suggest that the valuation of these changes will depend upon the availability of fair markets for diversifying risk moreover conventional measures of compensating or equivalent surplus will not necessarily bound the individual s valuation of a change in access to an uncertain environmental resource

how do sex ratios affect marriage and labor markets evidence from america s second generation sex ratios i e relative numbers of men and women can affect marriage prospects labor force participation and other social and economic variables but the observed association between sex ratios and social and economic conditions may be confounded by omitted variables and reverse causality this paper uses variation in immigrant flows as a natural experiment to study the effect of sex ratios on the children and grandchildren of immigrants the flow of immigrants affected the second generation marriage market because second generation marriages were mostly endogamous i e to members of the same ethnic group the empirical results suggest that high sex ratios had a large positive effect on the likelihood of female marriage and a large negative effect on female labor force participation perhaps surprisingly the marriage rates of second generation men appear to be a slightly increasing function of immigrant sex ratios higher sex ratios also appear to have raised male earnings and the incomes of parents with young children the empirical results are broadly consistent with theories where higher sex ratios increase female bargaining power in the marriage market

estimating recreation demand using the properties of the implied consumer surplus consumer surplus estimates are random variables while they are generally recognized as stochastic little attention was given to their properties prior to bockstael and strand s 1987 evaluation of conventional practices for using recreation demand models in benefit measurement their paper as well as all the research it stimulated adopted a similar strategy namely to judge the methods for estimating demand or random utility models based on the properties of their respective consumer surplus estimates this paper proposes a different strategy to define estimators based on the properties of their implied consumer surplus estimates this type of argument is not new and usually is associated with the rationale offered for bayesian estimators 2 however the motivation for the estimator proposed here can be based on minimizing the mean squared error of the consumer surplus estimates moreover it can be constructed from the statistics usually reported with ordinary least squares ols estimates

the strategic bequest motive although recent research suggests that intergenerational transfers play an important role in aggregate capital accumulation our understanding of bequest motives remains incomplete we develop a simple model of strategic bequests in which a testator influences the decisions of his beneficiaries by holding wealth in bequeathable forms and by conditioning the division of bequests on the beneficiaries actions the model generates falsifiable empirical predictions that are inconsistent with other theories of intergenerational transfers we present econometric and other evidence that strongly suggests that bequests are often used as compensation for services rendered by beneficiaries

effect of distance on the preservation value of water quality in the past dozen years an extensive body of literature has developed on the willingness to pay for water quality in particular its recreation use and nonuse preservation values this paper illustrates a procedure for estimating the effect of distance on the preservation value of environmental quality using the contingent valuation approach the case considered is the potential degradation of water quality due to coal mining activity in the flathead river drainage system montana the analysis supports a negative association for this particular study area the effect of distance on preservation value was considered both directly and indirectly through its effect on visits 36 references 2 tables

a simple repackaging model of recreational choices the traditional travel cost model uses trips or visits as its measure of quantity and travel cost per trip or visit as its price however because many estimated demand curves do not hold visit length constant they cannot be used to value increments of use the simple repackaging model of muellbauer and fisher and shell is used to derive demand curves exhibiting constant visit length from demand curves exhibiting variable visit length the former allow the marginal quantity valuations that are necessary for management decisions involving capacity or use the travel cost method for measuring recreation demand was originally developed to assist in determining the value of a given resource used for recreational purposes comparison of the recreation value with values in other uses is important for the planning process resource allocation however often requires estimates of the marginal values of additional quantities of the resource i e additional recreation capacity and or increases in the use of the resource or improvements in resource quality marginal valuations of quality improvements involve shifts in the travel cost demand

measuring the cost of time in recreation demand analysis reply we appreciate the comments of johnson and ward on our note measuring the value of time we would like to emphasize that the purpose of our note was to offer an empirical approach to measuring value of time which permitted the value to vary across individuals but which inferred this variation from individuals in the sample we realize that empirical approaches to measuring the value of time are currently evolving the comments by johnson and ward help elucidate some basic issues in valuing time we respond first to johnson and then to ward

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

the opportunity cost of travel time as a noisy wage fraction few issues are more important to welfare estimation with recreation demand models than the specification of the opportunity cost of travel time the two most common approaches to specifying this cost treat it as a fixed fraction of the recreationist s wage and either estimate the fraction done infrequently or assume it takes some value done commonly with references to results from the commute time literature used to justify the latter however these approaches lack firm conceptual rationales and the consequences of using them are not fully understood recognizing that information limitations often preclude more general approaches we use a joint recreation travel labor supply model to show that under relatively modest assumptions the opportunity cost of travel time can be expressed as a wage fraction with noise this formulation is straightforward to implement as part of random parameters based recreation demand models we then evaluate the welfare consequences of using the two approaches noted above which are special cases of the noisy wage fraction specification our results suggest that the more critical restriction to relax in opportunity cost of travel time specifications is the absence of noise rather than the specific level of the wage fraction

the determinants of bargaining power in an empirical model of transfers between adult children parents and in laws for south korea abstract we derive a bargaining model of transfers between adult children and their parents and then estimate the model using data from south korea our analysis extends the literature on family bargaining by i arguing that transfers from the couple represent semiprivate consumption e g it is plausible that the wife cares more about her parents than about the husband s parents and vice versa and ii using results from laboratory experiments to help identify the model we find that women have slightly more bargaining power than men in the couple s decision making we also find that when an adult child receives an extra dollar of income she transfers half of it to her parents this result is consistent with previous work finally we reject the null hypothesis that bargaining power within the family depends only on the potential wage of each spouse

limiting environmental program contradictions a demand systems application to fishery management economically efficient natural resource policy requires the comprehensive management of environmental improvements over a system of sites use of multisite demand and benefit models can reduce the number and cost of environmental program contradictions in this paper we present a multisite demand model that incorporates several quality dimensions for a system of new mexico fishing sites use of the model permits managers to improve total welfare at lower cost by simultaneously distributing opportunity across all elements in resource users choice sets model results show that errors that result from independently adding values of interdependent program elements approach 50

household intertemporal behaviour a collective characterization and a test of commitment in this paper a formal test of intra household commitment is derived and performed to that end two models of household intertemporal behaviour are developed in both models household members are characterized by individual preferences in the first formulation household decisions are always on the ex ante pareto frontier in the second model the assumption of intra household commitment required by ex ante efficiency is relaxed it is shown that the full efficiency household euler equations are nested in the no commitment euler equations using this result the hypothesis that household members can commit to future allocations of resources is tested using the consumer expenditure survey i strongly reject this hypothesis it is also shown that the standard unitary framework is a special case of the full efficiency model however if household members are not able to commit household intertemporal behaviour cannot be characterized using the standard life cycle model these findings have two main implications first policy makers can change household behaviour by modifying the decision power of individual household members second to evaluate programmes designed to improve the welfare of household members it would be beneficial to replace the standard unitary model with a characterization of household behaviour that allows for lack of commitment

dowry and intrahousehold bargaining evidence from china this paper analyzes the relationship between a woman s intrahousehold bargaining position and her welfare within marriage using household data from rural china simultaneity problems are overcome by using dowry to proxy for bargaining position omitted variable bias is addressed by using grain shocks in the year preceding marriage as an instrument for dowry instrumented dowry positively impacts numerous measures of a wife s welfare including household purchases the time allocation of household members and the woman s satisfaction with life offering strong evidence in support of collective models of the household

private monetary transfers in rural china are families altruistic monetary transfers between relatives may be motivated by altruism or they may represent payments for services rendered data from a large 1988 household survey are used to test these hypotheses and to study the size and direction of transfers in rural china the analysis suggests that altruism alone cannot explain the observed transfers and that exchange may be involved most of the money flows appear to be transfers from adult children to elderly parents and remittances from migrants child care is likely to be one of the main services that parents render to adult children in exchange for money

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

the reliability of estimates of environmental benefits from recreation demand models recreation demand models are commonly employed tools of economists interested in valuing improvements in environmental amenities despite their importance little comparative work has been undertaken to examine the ability of the models to accurately estimate welfare changes a simulation study designed to compare the reliability of estimated welfare measures compensating variation and consumer surplus from several commonly employed recreation demand models is presented results of the study indicate that choice of functional form and model specification are important determinants of the resulting estimates of benefits

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

comparing welfare estimates of environmental quality changes from recreation demand models abstract this paper presents a procedure for examining the reliability of welfare estimates resulting from the estimation of multiple site recreation demand models a simulation approach is suggested where a utility function is combined with observations on individual and site characteristics to generate simulated data sets welfare measures associated with an improvement in site quality are calculated recreation demand models are estimated using the simulated data sets estimated welfare measures resulting from the recreation demand models are then compared to the true welfare measures calculated from the simulated data the procedure is demonstrated using two commonly employed recreation demand models

household bargaining over fertility theory and evidence from malaysia we develop and test a model of household bargaining over fertility when transfers between spouses are possible the model makes precise how the fertility preferences of each spouse translate into fertility outcomes we show this depends on whether or not spouses can commit to their future actions within marriage if couples bargain with commitment fertility outcomes take account of both spouses fertility preferences and do not depend on the threat point in marital bargaining if couples bargain without commitment the influence of each spouse s fertility preference on fertility outcomes depends on the relevant threat point in marital bargaining and the distribution of bargaining power we test the models using household data from the malaysia family life survey this data set contains information on each spouse s desired fertility level as well as fertility outcomes we exploit differences in threat points in marital bargaining across ethnic groups to help identify the underlying bargaining model the evidence suggests couples bargain without commitment

motives for private income transfers private income transfers are becoming increasingly recognized as a key aspect of the u s economy the majority of private income transfers occur inter vivos i e between living persons but very little is known about this type of transfer behavior this paper tests alternative hypotheses concerning motivation for inter vivos transfers two motives are considered altruism and exchange evidence presented here casts doubt on the altruistic model of transfer behavior observed patterns for inter vivos transfers are more consistent with exchange related motives this finding has important implications for the effects of public transfer programs on the distribution of economic well being

valuing a fishing day an application of a systematic varying parameter model deciding how to allocate forage among animals is a fundamentally important process in range management the wisdom of these decisions can be enhanced by estimating the marginal value of forage needed by competing species we present a method for

dowry and wife s welfare a theotrical and empirical analysis becker attributes the existence of marital transfers to inflexibility in the division of joint product within the marriage if that were the only reason we would not have observed the coexistence of dowries and bride prices this paper offers an alternative analysis while becker s interpretation is retained for bride prices a dowry is now represented as a premortem bequest by altruistic parents for a daughter it not only increases the wealth of the new conjugal household but also enhances the bargaining power of the bride in the allocation of the output within the household thereby safeguarding here welfare using micro data from taiwan we found that a dowry improves the bride s welfare whereas a bride price has no effect these empirical results support the theoretical predictions of the model

collective labour supply with children we extend the collective model of household behavior to allow for the existence of public consumption we show how this model allows the analysis of welfare consequences of policies aimed at changing the distribution of power within the household our setting provides a conceptual framework for addressing issues linked to the targeting of specific benefits or taxes we also show that the observation of the labor supplies and the household demand for the public good allow one to identify individual welfare and the decision process this requires either a separability assumption or the presence of a distribution factor

mass tourism and the demand for protected natural areas a travel cost approach abstract this paper presents the argument that when environmental protection projects favor tourist activities the travel cost method can be used to measure the value tourists give to the recreational services these areas provide with this idea we describe a model of tourist behavior that allows us to predict whether a tourist will participate in the reactional activities the frequency of participation according to the areas attributes and the costs of producing alternatives to illustrate the model s application we consider tourist demand for and benefits from a set of protected natural areas in mallorca

a comparison of user benefits and costs of nature conservation at three nature reserves willis k g and benson j f 1988 a comparison of user benefits and costs of nature conservation at three nature reserves reg studies 22 417 228 benefits from conserving wildlife at three sites of special scientific interest are estimated using a travel cost method recording demand in terms of actual site visits these benefits are compared to the costs of nature conservation both the financial cost which is or could be incurred under the wildlife and countryside act 1981 and also the social costs of the agricultural output forgone after protective tariffs and subsidies of the common agricultural policy have been removed willis k g et benson j f 1988 une comparaison des avantages et des couts de la defense de l environnement aux usagers a trois reserves naturelles reg studies 22 417 228 on estime les avantages de la protection de la faune a trois sites d inter t scientifique special a partir d une methode qui calcule les frais de trajet enregistrant la demande en fonction des visi

estimating the benefits of low flow alleviation in rivers the case of the ticino river in switzerland 60 of electricity is produced by hydropower plants the construction and operation of these plants determine some negative environmental externalities such as diminishing groundwater levels and spring flows and a reduction in river flow which can severely curtail recreational and fishing activities this study concentrates on an ex ante appraisal of the monetary benefits resulting from an enhancement of river flow for recreational fishing purposes a comparison of estimates of these benefits to the corresponding costs in terms of loss of electricity production incurred by hydropower plants to alleviate low flows may be useful for policy makers for this analysis as suggested by layman et al land economics 72 pp 113 128 1996 the travel cost method tcm is extended to estimate the economic value of recreational fishing in the ticino river the most important river of the canton ticino under existing and hypothetical river flow conditions anglers were asked to state how the nu

the backing of government bonds and monetarism abstract this paper examines the implications of the fiscal backing of government bonds for the effects of conventional macroeconomic policies and in particular for certain monetarist propositions it shows that the validity of some basic monetarist hypotheses requires a considerable degree of accommodation by the fiscal authority relative to the central bank otherwise government bonds may matter in a manner as described in the traditional literature e g mundell 1971 patinkin 1965 though some differences arise of perhaps independent interest the framework developed in the analysis is an intertemporal general equilibrium model with all the descriptive features of the conventional flexible price is lm model

individual travel cost method estimation and benefit assessment with a discrete and possibly grouped dependent variable the trip visit variable in the individual travel cost method is often regarded as discrete furthermore it is often reported in surveys as a grouped variable the number of visits reported falling into one of several classes this paper develops a travel cost model which takes account of discreteness and grouping in both demand and benefit estimation a case study and associated simulations are then reported which indicate the potential extent of bias that may arise from ignoring discreteness grouping in demand and benefit estimation the information loss involved in varying the size of visit classes is also examined

marriage the sharing rule and pocket money the case of south korea abstract using longitudinal data on private consumption from south korea this article examines the marital balance of power between spouses in a dynamic setting by allowing for unobserved heterogeneity at the household level and spouses time constant unobserved bargaining power i find that unobserved power plays a significant role in intrahousehold resource allocation the income pooling hypothesis is no longer rejected after accounting for unobserved power relative spousal earnings may be a good proxy for the long term balance of power to an extent that cross sectional variation in relative earnings across households reflects the pattern of spousal matching however within marriage changes in relative earnings do not induce any significant resource transfer between spouses the balance of bargaining power is stable within marriage

geography of the family we study the residential choice of siblings who are altruistic towards their parents the firstborn child s location choice influences the behavior of the second born child and can shift some of the burden of providing care for the parents from one child to the other these strategic considerations lead to an equilibrium location pattern with firstborn children locating further away from their parents than second born children we also analyze the location choices empirically using german data these data confirm our theoretical predictions jel h41 j10

hedonic price analysis and selectivity bias hedonic valuation of quality attributes can be misleading when theassumption that these attributes are exogenous to sample selection isviolated this paper considers the simultaneity between hedonic valuationand sample selection in the context of a model of producer behavior andinvestigates empirically the case where land is demanded for use as an inputeither in agricultural production or in touristic development the empiricalanalysis suggests that failing to correct for sample selection results in abiased valuation of the effect of water salinity on agricultural land