the demographic transition and the position of women a marriage market perspective we present international evidence on the marriage market implications of cohort size growth and set out a theoretical model of how marriage markets adjust to imbalances since men marry younger women secular growth in cohort size in the second phase of the demographic transition worsens the position of women this e ect has been substantial in many asian countries earlier and continues to be true in sub saharan africa with fertility decline cohort are now shrinking in east asia improves the position of women these demographic trends can explain the increase and spread in dowries in south asia and the persistence of polygyny in sub saharan africa we show that the age gap at marriage will not adjust in order to equilibrate the marriage market in response to persistent imbalances even though it accommodates transitory shocks jel categories j12 j13 j16

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

do men with higher wages marry earlier or later using data from taiwan this paper shows that marriage age is negatively positively related to the wage rate in the sample with nonworking working wives the results reconcile the two contrasting hypotheses on the relation between wages and marriage age for men

the value of youth equalizing age differentials in marriages the objective of this paper is to present a model of constrained utility maximizing behaviour which is able to explain serveral features of marriage the model predicts that individuals meet in the

would higher salaries keep teachers in high poverty schools evidence from a policy intervention in north carolina abstract for a three year time period beginning in 2001 north carolina awarded an annual bonus of 1800 to certified math science and special education teachers working in public secondary schools with either high poverty rates or low test scores using longitudinal data on teachers we estimate hazard models that identify the impact of this differential pay by comparing turnover patterns before and after the program s implementation across eligible and ineligible categories of teachers and across eligible and barely ineligible schools results suggest that this bonus payment was sufficient to reduce mean turnover rates of the targeted teachers by 17 experienced teachers exhibited the strongest response to the program finally the effect of the program may have been at least partly undermined by the state s failure to fully educate teachers regarding the eligibility criteria our estimates most likely underpredict the potential outcome of a program of permanent salary differentials operating under complete information

fertility shocks and equilibrium marriage rate dynamics why did the marriage probability of single females in france after world war 1 rise 50 above its pre war average despite a 33 drop in the male female singles ratio we conjecture that war time disruption of the marriage market generated an abnormal abundance of men with relatively high marriage propensities our model of matching over the lifecycle when calibrated to pre war data and two war time shocks succeeds in matching the french time path under the additional assumption of a pro natalist post war preference shock we conclude that endogeneity issues make the sex ratio a potentially unreliable indicator of female marriage prospects

a theory of prostitution prostitution is low skill labor intensive female and well paid this paper proposes a marriage market explanation to this puzzle if a prostitute compromises her marriage market prospects she will have to be compensated for forgone marriage market opportunities we discuss the link between poverty and prostitution and show that prostitution may decrease with male income if wives and prostitutes are drawn from the same pool of women we point to the role of male sex ratios and males in transit in sustaining high levels of prostitution and we discuss possible reasons for its low reputation and implications for marriage patterns

differential fecundity and child custody abstract despite u s child custody laws favoring joint custody since the mid 1970s mother sole custody is still the main custody arrangement this paper proposes that differences in fecundity between men and women play a role in accounting for this fact men are more likely to have more children after a divorce because they are fertile for more years than women this acts as an incentive for couples to agree on mothers sole custody i build a general equilibrium model of endogenous marriage divorce and remarriage with differential fecundity between women and men where couples choose custody allocation custody depends on the fecundity differential and father s time spent with children i calibrate my model to be consistent with observed u s child custody arrangements and marriage statistics and using changes over time in assisted reproductive technology art and father s time spent with children i quantify the effect of the fecundity differential on child custody results show that if assisted reproductive technology was not available the current share of couples with joint custody would be 15 67 lower considering that fathers time with children has also changed over time i find that a reduction in the fecundity differential accounts for an increase in the share of couples with joint custody of 4

on the emergence of toyboys the timing of marriage with aging and uncertain careers we explore how gender bias in career opportunities affects matching in a marriage market with search frictions and where an individual s fitness decays with age we document a being left on the shelf effect where young singles who find the marriage market rapidly thins with age rush into early partnership singles with stronger career opportunities however have a greater option value to defer marriage more equal career opportunities for women captured by greater schooling and better occupations potentially explain the recent emergence of toyboy unions in which the woman is at least 5 years older than her partner 2011 by the economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

in the name of the son and the daughter intergenerational mobility in the united states 1850 1940 this paper estimates historical intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes in the united states using a novel empirical strategy the key insight of our approach is that the information about socioeconomic status conveyed by first names can be used to create pseudo links across generations we find that both father son and father daughter elasticities were flat during the nineteenth century increased sharply between 1900 and 1920 and declined slightly thereafter we discuss the role of regional disparities in economic development trends in inequality and returns to human capital and the marriage market in explaining these patterns jel d63 j12 j16 j24 j62 n31 n32 the degree to which economic status is passed along generations is key to under standing differences across societies and over time in the extent of inequality a low degree of intergenerational mobility can undermine the notion of equality of opportunity and may lead to persistent inequality recent research reveals that today intergenerational mobility in the united states is lower than in most other developed countries corak 2013 this finding stands in contrast with the national ethos of the united states as the land of unlimited opportunity was this view ever justified in this paper we provide a new perspective on the evolution of intergenerational mobility in the united states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries we extend the existing literature by looking at the intergenerational elasticity in economic status between fathers and children of both sexes focusing only on father son cor relations may miss part of the picture daughters should be included if we want to know how the average well being of a generation correlates with that of their parents

land allocation under uncertainty for alternative specifications of return distributions using the expected utility moment generating function approach a land allocation rule is derived which is both independent of the nature of the underlying distribution of each element in the choice set and accounts for all moments of that distribution this decision rule is applied to the choice between cotton and corn in the mississippi delta to demonstrate that consideration of just the first two moments of the distribution can often be unjustified and damaging empirically theoretically and in terms of the utility of the decision maker

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

will you marry me a perspective on the gender gap abstract this paper develops a general equilibrium model of the gender wage gap the difference in earnings is a consequence of a demographic regularity that men tend to marry younger women which may limit women s labor mobility and hence their average earnings however couples are always free not to marry and do so only if it is in each s self interest the intrafamily allocation of resources is determined via non cooperative bargaining this leads to interesting interactions between the game played by husband and wife on the one hand and the competitive environment in which they are immersed on the other the predictions resulting from this model s interplay between locational choice and family bargaining are consistent with the observation that the increasing stress put by women on their careers over the past 30 years has been contemporaneous with reductions in both marriage rates and the gender gap the model provides insight into the consequences of this for the relative welfare of men and women as well as exploring its wider economic implications

how does the marriage market clear an empirical framework the paper surveys the choo and siow 2006a cs marriage matching model and its extensions cs derives a behavioural marriage matching function the collective model of intra household allocations can be integrated into this framework spousal labour supplies respond to changing marriage market conditions marriage market tightness the ratio of unmarried type i men to unmarried type j women is a sufficient statistic for marriage market conditions for those types of individuals the hypothesis that spousal labour supplies vary to equilibrate the marriage market has overidentifying restrictions the framework extends to a dynamic marriage matching environment empirically this paper shows how the famine caused by the great leap forward in sichuan affected the marital behaviour of famine born cohorts marriage market tightness is shown to be a useful statistic for summarizing marriage market conditions in the united states marriage market conditions in the contemporary united states primarily affect spousal labour force participation rather than hours of work ce texte examine le modele de choo et siow et ses extensions ce modele derive une fonction comportemental d arrimage sur le marche du mariage le modele d allocation intra menage des t ches peut s integrer a ce cadre d analyse les offres de travail des epoux repondent aux conditions changeantes du marche du mariage un marche du mariage serre un ratio d hommes celibataires de type i par rapport a un nombre de femmes celibataires de type j constitue une statistique suffisante pour etablir les conditions de marche de ces types d individus l hypothese que les offres de travail des epoux varient pour equilibrer le marche du mariage engendre des restrictions de sur identification le cadre d analyse couvre le cas d un environnement dynamique d arrimage empiriquement ce memoire montre comment la famine causee par le grand saut en avant de sichuan a affecte le comportement de mariage des cohortes qui en sort sorties on montre aussi que le caractere serre du marche du mariage aux etats unis fournit une statistique utile pour prendre le pouls des conditions du marche du mariage ces conditions dans le monde contemporain aux etats unis ont un impact sur la participation des epoux au marche du travail plutot que sur les heures travaillees

canadian contributions to family economics canadian scholars have made substantial contributions to the relatively new field of family economics these include new models of how men and women match in marriage markets and of how decisions are made in multi person households several were early contributors to the literature on married women s labour supply and labour supply in a family context and helped to develop empirical methods in this area a particular focus has been on the impacts of policy relevant parameters such childcare costs on family labour supply and child well being new work on child development the impact of early life conditions and the processes of intergenerational transmission also highlight the importance of family context in determining economic well being

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

differntial fecundity markets and gender roles women are fecund for a shorter period of their lives than men this paper investigates how differential fecundity interacts with marriage labor and financial markets to affect gender roles the main findings of the paper are as follows i fecund women are relatively scarce men will behave differently than women in response to this scarcity in the most fundamental way demand and supply conditions in the marriage market affect gender roles ii differential fecundity does not have any market invariant gender effect gender roles depend on the way in which marriage labor and financial markets interact iii gender differences in the labor market can occur without corresponding differences in labor market opportunities productivities in child rearing or social norms iv with uncertainty in human capital accumulation and no insurance against this uncertainty the model s predictions are consistent with observed gender roles

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

implicit contracts a survey 7mplicit contracts resolve the distribution of uncertainty and utilization of specific human capital between risk averse workers and less risk averse firms incomplete contracts are required to yield involuntary layoffs in contract markets otherwise contracts are efficient and pareto optimal by construction there is a close relation between contract theory and neoclassical labor market theory contracts smooth consumption but increase the volatility of labor supply and labor utilization to demand disturbances because contractural insurance eliminates the income effects of socially diversifiable risks this result is similar to the intertemporal substitution hypothesis however the price mechanism in a contract is substantially different contracts embody a nonlinear two part pricing scheme the lump sum part allocates the income consumption consequences of risks and the marginal pricing part allocates production and labor utilization this implicit pricing mechanism is in all respects flexible though the observed average hourly wage combines both parts and may give the outward appearanceof rigidity furthermore the observed average wage rate in a contract does not reflect marginal conditions necessary for structural econometric estimation indivisibilities appear necessary to account for the split between work sharing and layoffs contracts with private information are also considered in the nonlinear pricing context this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

polygyny fertility and savings sub saharan africa has a high incidence of polygyny it is also the poorest region of the world in this paper i ask whether banning polygyny could play any role for development using a quantitative model of polygyny i find that enforcing monogamy lowers fertility shrinks the spousal age gap and reverses the direction of marriage payments polygyny leads to high bride prices to ration women which makes buying wives and selling daughters a good investment thus crowding out investment in physical assets for reasonable parameter values i find that banning polygyny decreases fertility by 40 percent increases savings by 70 percent and increases output per capita by 170 percent