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

sons daughters and parental behaviour the prevalence of son preference and its implications for family behaviour in developing countries have received a great deal of scholarly attention but child gender bias is believed to be empirically unimportant in wealthy non traditional societies studies by sociologists and psychologists during the past 30 years however have documented consistent discrepancies between the behaviour of parents of sons and parents of daughters boys tend to increase marital stability and marital satisfaction relative to girls and fathers spend more time with and are more involved with sons than daughters in recent years economists have begun to contribute to the child gender literature re examining the effects of sons and daughters on family structure and parental involvement with larger samples and greater concern for possible sources of selection bias other economic outcomes such as market work and earnings have also been studied and some investigators have exploited the randomness of child gender as a source of exogenous variation in parental behaviour in general recent results suggest that child gender does affect family stability and the time allocation of parents but it is not clear whether these responses reflect parental preferences for boys rather than girls or differences in the constraints parents face copyright 2005 oxford university press

labor supply of husbands and wives a simultaneous equations approach labor supply functions for married men and women are formulated as a dynamic simultaneous equations system which is estimated using panel data controlling for fixed individual effects allows marginal labor supply responses to be disentangled from permanent patterns in hours worked due to assortative mating the results suggest that the labor supply of husbands and wives without pre school children is not jointly determined in the short run while families with young children exhibit strong interactions in work hours and negative cross earnings effects neither the joint utility model of family labor supply nor an ad hoc traditional family model is supported by these results the data are for the united states and concern 381 couples from the denver income maintenance experiment excerpt

the added worker effect the term added worker effect usually refers to a temporary increase in the labor supply of married women whose husbands have become unemployed this paper presents a new approach to the empirical study of the added worker effect which emphasizes the role of employment uncertainty and credit constraints in generating short run participation and employment patterns the estimates are based on employment transition probabilities rather than static measures of labor supply and are used in a dynamic simulation of changes in the employment and participation rates of wives following an exogenous increase in unemployment among their husbands the results show a small but significant added worker effect at least for white families and suggest that the apparent disagreement among previous studies may stem from different approaches to measuring responses to a transitory event such as an unemployment spell

labor supply and fertility of married women an analysis with grouped and individual data from the 1970 u s census 1970 us census data were used to examine how much studies with grouped data can be reconciled with models that apply to individual families in contrast to its 1960 predecessor the 1970 census public use sample pbus identifies households in standard metropolitan statistical areas smsa and offers the opportunity to estimate a model of labor supply and fertility using both individual and grouped data from a common sample 3 data sets from the 1970 census are available the 5 sample smsa averages published by the us bureau of the census which are similar to the data used in previous studies grouped by smsa observations from the 1 100 pbus which are superior to the published averages in several respects and which are detailed here and individual observations from the 1 1000 pbus if these 1970 estimates are found to be stable with regard to aggregation and similar to those found with non census data confidence in the grouped data results from the 3 previous censuses would be strengthened estimates derived from the individual pbus observations generally agreed with findings from alternative and arguably superior microdata sets the labor force participation and hours of white wives were sensitive to wage and income variations both wages and hours of work among workers appeared to be subject to selection bias economic factors had little impact on the hours of black workers but wage offers influenced the participation decision wage selectivity was particularly strong among black women the samples for both black and white women indicated that the wifes wage played a major role in determining the number of children ever born the published smsa data provided labor supply estimates similar to those found with individual observations wage elasticities for both black and white women and the white income elasticities were similar in sign and magnitude to the total marginal effects of these variables upon hours of work among individuals wages effects upon fertility persisted only among blacks grouping of the pbus data by smsa led to very different labor supply results labor force participation rates showed little association with mean hourly wages and income effects were weak fertility responses resembled those found with the published data realizing theoretical expectations only in the case of the black sample further analysis showed that a probable source of the dissimilar labor supply estimates was the positive bias induced by the unavoidable inclusion of unmarried women in the sample used to calculate mean weekly wages from the published data in sum it has been shown that estimates such as those made are highly sensitive to the level of aggregation and that grouped data results may be seriously misleading

why are power couples increasingly concentrated in large metropolitan areas using the panel study of income dynamics psid we test costa and kahn s colocation hypothesis which predicts that power couples couples in which both spouses have college degrees are more likely to migrate to the largest cities than part power couples or power singles we find no support for this hypothesis instead regression analyses suggest that only the education of the husband and not the joint education profile of the couple affects the propensity to migrate to large metropolitan areas the observed location trends are better explained by higher rates of power couple formation in larger metropolitan areas

market power in a gis based hedonic price model of local farmland markets buyers of farmland are usually interested in parcels for sale that are close to their own farms with a limited number of parcels for sale this may lead to market power in local farmland markets the objective of this paper is to investigate whether market power affects farmland prices hedonic price models are adapted to allow for local market power of either sellers or buyers a distinction is made between rural and urban farmland markets the results provide evidence of market power effects in rural farmland markets however for farmland in urban areas market prices are dominated by speculation effects

income splitting specialization and intra family distribution income splitting for tax purposes results in more specialization of wives but does this in turn generate more gender inequality in my dynamic bargaining model with a divorce threatpoint i find that who controls the couple s labour supply plays a crucial role in establishing this link if spouses choose their labour supply non cooperatively only the husband s increase but not her own decrease in labour supply introduces a negative term in the wife s change in welfare if the wife does not control her own labour supply a decrease in her own labour supply introduces an additional negative term la fragmentation du revenu aux fins d impot resulte en une plus grande specialisation des epouses mais est ce que cela engendre davantage d inegalite entre genres dans un modele de marchandage dynamique avec menace de divorce a la cle on decouvre que la personne qui controle l offre de travail du couple joue un role crucial dans la reponse a cette question si les epoux choisissent leurs offres de travail de maniere non cooperative seul l accroissement de l offre de travail de l epoux et non le declin de l offre de travail de l epouse introduit un terme negatif dans le changement de niveau de bien etre de l epouse si l epouse ne controle pas sa propre offre de travail un declin dans son offre de travail introduit un element negatif additionnel

who loses when prices are negotiated an analysis of the new car market we establish that there are large and persistent differences in final transaction prices for identical new cars and that demographic characteristics explain at least 20 of the observed variation older consumers perform progressively worse in negotiations and the age premium is greater for women than for men our results suggest that the complex nature of vehicle transactions leads to price dispersion in this market and that the worst performing groups older women have the lowest rates of market participation we conjecture that the results are driven by the sharp increases in women s education and labor force participation in recent decades

the pearl model gaining competitive advantage through sustainable development this article formulates institutional virtues according to sustainable development sd criteria to come up with a paradigmatic set of corporate principles it aims to answer how a corporation might obtain competitive advantage by combining going ethical with going green on the one hand it brings out facts that indicate a forthcoming trend inclined to force relevant actors to comply with sd requirements on the other hand it suggests that sd may be implemented as a strategy to gain competitive advantage by the help of the pearl model through its five fundaments 1 perception friendliness 2 environment friendliness 3 action 4 relationship and 5 locality this article finally shows that although a number of companies e g bosch bp and ge implement sd as a tool of differentiation they lack a holistic model that is fully responsive to current dynamics the pearl may be implemented as a proactive positioning to gain competitive advantage because transformation of this model into corporate strategy does not only respond to stakeholder claims but also meets the changing characteristic of societal demands

asymmetric buyer information influence on price in a homogeneous housing market buyers often pay different prices for almost identical houses one possible explanation is that there are information asymmetries in housing markets perhaps buyers from outside the area have higher search costs and know less about the local market relative to that of current residents in addition an out of town buyer s price expectations could be anchored to market prices in their town of origin this study examines the effect of buyer heterogeneity in the form of geographic location on house prices we use a new data set to examine the non local buyer information asymmetry and anchoring hypothesis using transaction data from a large development in chengdu china our empirical models are estimated with relatively homogeneous units sold over a short period of time by one seller to minimise possible bias resulting from omitted variables our results support the hypotheses that non local buyers pay higher prices and that high price anchoring occurs

maternal labour supply and childhood obesity in canada evidence from the nlscy this paper investigates the socioeconomic factors affecting childhood overweight and obesity in canada using data from the national longitudinal survey of children and youth in particular i attempt to address the issue of whether an increase in the mother s work intensity is associated with an increase in the risk of the child s becoming overweight or obese i also attempt to evaluate the causality of this relationship and the mechanisms that might facilitate this link the results suggest that an increase in the mother s work intensity when she first returned to work in the period after the child s birth and before the child started school is associated with an increase in the risk of the child s becoming overweight or obese later in childhood conditional on the mother returning to work in the period between the child s birth and the start of school for the child a 10 hour increase in the number of hours worked per week when the mother first returned to work is associated with an increase in the probability that the child later becomes overweight or obese that is in the range of 2 5 to 4 percentage points ce memoire analyse les facteurs socio economiques qui affectent l exces de poids et l obesite des enfants au canada a l aide des donnees de l elnej en particulier on se demande si un accroissement de l intensite de travail de la mere est associea l accroissement de poids et a l obesite de l enfant on etudie le lien de causalite et les mecanismes qui sous tendent ce lien les resultats montrent qu un accroissement de l intensite de travail de la mere quand elle retourne au travail dans la periode apres la naissance de l enfant et avant qu il ne commence ses classes est associea la probabilite d exces de poids et d obesite plus tard un accroissement de 10 heures dans le nombre d heures travaillees par semaine est associea une probabilite de 2 5 a 4 points de pourcentage que l enfant va avoir des problemes de poids ou d obesite

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

production externalities and the efficiency of parental childcare choices the economics of producing and consuming children is an immensely impor tant but largely neglected area we model the allocation of parents time between market production and childcare a choice driven by both consumption and investment motives we identify two externalities in the provision of parental childcare an intergenerational externality stems from the effect of today s parents childcare choices on the productivity of the next generation of workers an intragenerational externality arises when time spent away from productive labour affects the productivity of co workers the interaction of these externalities determines the efficiency properties of the equilibrium

intergenerational income mobility in the united states social scientists and policy analysts have long expressed concern about the extent of intergenerational income mobility in the united states but remarkably little empirical evidence is available the few existing estimates of the intergenerational correlation in income have been biased downward by measurement error unrepresentative samples or both new estimates based on intergenerational data from the panel study of income dynamics imply that the intergenerational correlation in long run income is at least 0 4 indicating dramatically less mobility than suggested by earlier research copyright 1992 by american economic association

inequality at birth some causes and consequences recent research shows that health at birth is affected by many factors including maternal education behaviors and participation in social programs in turn endowments at birth are predictive of adult outcomes and of the outcomes of future generations exposure to environmental pollution is one potential determinant of health at birth that has received increasing attention a large literature outside of economics advocates for environmental justice and argues that poor and minority families are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards i provide new evidence on this question showing that children born to less educated and minority mothers are more likely to be exposed to pollution in utero and that white college educated mothers are particularly responsive to changes in environmental amenities i estimate that differences in exposure to toxic releases may explain 6 of the gap in incidence of low birth weight between infants of white college educated mothers and infants of black high school dropout mothers this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

determinants of bargaining outcome in single family housing transactions an empirical examination using a hedonic regression model this paper examines determinants of bargaining outcome in single family housing transactions it divides potential factors into three broad categories dwelling attributes site amenities and seller s and buyer s characteristics results with use of 1990 data for the reno sparks area in nevada show that bargaining outcome is determined by seller s asking price buyer s household income and some of the dwelling attributes and site amenities this paper concludes that factors affecting housing price do not necessarily affect bargaining outcome and first time home buyers do not statistically bargain less than repeat home buyers

lifting the burden state care of the elderly and labor supply of adult children we use a reform in the federal funding of care for the elderly in norway to examine the effects of formal care expansion on the labor supply decisions of middle aged children we find a consistent and significant negative impact of formal care expansion on insured work absences for the adult daughters of single elderly parents this effect is particularly strong for daughters with no siblings who are also more likely to exceed earnings thresholds after the reform we find no impacts of the reform on daughters mobility or parental health and no effects on adult sons

market potential for smart growth neighbourhoods in the usa a latent class analysis on heterogeneous preference and choice with data from a 2011 national association of realtors community preference survey we examined individuals preferences and the resulting market potential for smart growth neighbourhoods in the usa using a latent class choice model we discovered four classes of individuals that reveal distinctive behaviours when choosing smart growth neighbourhoods based on the interplay between aspects of community design socioeconomic characteristics and personal attitudes based on these results we estimated the demand for smart growth neighbourhoods given the way they are planned and built by linking the results of the latent class choice to a market diffusion model we were able to evaluate the effectiveness of a proposed smart growth neighbourhood design in inducing less sprawling development

sharing within families implications for the measurement of poverty among individuals in canada one major objection to neoclassical economic theory raised by feminist economists is that traditional theory neglects what goes on within families this paper examines the policy relevance of this feminist critique by asking whether our understanding of the poverty experiences of individual canadians is significantly affected by the assumptions we make about how financial resources are shared within families using microdata from the 1982 1986 and 1992 family expenditure surveys the authors simulate the consequences of alternative sharing rules from equal sharing to minimal sharing their conclusion is that it matters a great deal what we assume about how financial resources are shared within families

who marries whom and why this paper proposes and estimates a static transferable utility model of the marriage market the model generates a nonparametric marriage matching function with spillover effects it rationalizes the standard interpretation of marriage rate regressions and points out its limitations the model was used to estimate u s marital behavior in 1971 72 and 1981 82 the marriage matching function estimates show that the gains to marriage for young adults fell substantially over the decade unlike contradictory marriage rate regression results the marriage matching function estimates showed that the legalization of abortion had a significant quantitative impact on the fall in the gains to marriage for young men and women

children s resources in collective households identification estimation and an application to child poverty in malawi children s resources matter but they are hard to identify because consumption is typically mea sured at the household level modern collective household models permit some identication of indi vidual household member resources but these models typically either ignore children or treat them as attributes of adults we propose a collective household model in which children are people with their own utility functions possibly assigned to them by parents extending the frameworks of browning chiappori and lewbel 2007 and lewbel and pendakur 2008 we show identication of children s resource shares within households we invoke semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences and use data on the household level consumption of assignable private goods to achieve identication of each individual s resource share within the household we show this without being able to observe consumption by individual household members of goods that are partly or wholly shared goods within the household further we obtain identication using only engel curves and so do not require ob served price variation in the data we estimate our model using data from malawi andnd that as the number of children in a household grows women s resource shares fall and children s resource shares rise and men s resource shares are basically unchanged we alsond evidence of gender bias against girls and observe that the resource shares of mothers and children are increasing in the education level of the mother finally we use our estimates to construct poverty indices at the person level andnd that per capita poverty indices understate the incidence of child poverty in malawi

does the labour supply of wives respond to husbands wages canadian evidence from micro data and grouped data using micro data and grouped data we assess the extent to which canadian wives adjusted their labour supply in response to changes in husbands wages during the period 1980 2000 grouped data parameters based on weighted least squares and the unbiased error in variables estimator developed by devereux 2004 2007a b yield cross wage elasticities that are substantially higher in absolute value than those derived from ols regressions run on micro data both grouping estimators indicate that the labour supply of canadian wives responded strongly to changes in husbands wages during the 1980s for the 1990s our estimates of wives cross wage elasticity display greater dispersion a l aide de micro donnees et de donnees groupees on etablit jusqu a quel point les epouses canadiennes ont ajuste leur offre de travail en reponse aux changements dans les salaires de leurs epoux au cours de la periode 1980 2000 les parametres pour les donnees groupees derives par la methode des moindres carres ponderes et de l estimateur developpe par devereux 2004 2007a b engendrent des elasticites croisees qui sont substantiellement plus grandes en termes absolus que ceux derives par la methode des moindres carres ordinaires en utilisant des micro donnees les deux estimations montrent que l offre de travail des epouses canadiennes a repondu fortement aux changements dans les salaires des epoux au cours des annees 80 pour les annees 90 les evaluations des elasticites croisees des salaires montrent une plus grande dispersion

racial and ethnic price differentials in the housing market do minorities pay more than whites for similar housing we revisit this important question using a rich new dataset that covers two million repeat sales housing transactions drawn from four major metropolitan areas our analysis applies a repeat sales framework including house and neighborhood by time fixed effects to control for unobserved differences in the quality of homes and their associated neighborhoods in contrast to most of the recent literature we find that black and hispanic homebuyers pay premia of around 2 on average across the four cities differences not explained by variation in buyer income or access to credit we also show black and hispanic buyers pay more for housing regardless of the race or ethnicity of the seller suggesting that the estimated premia are unlikely to be driven by a very direct form of racial prejudice our estimates have implications for the levels and persistence of racial differences in home ownership the segregation of neighborhoods and the dynamics of wealth accumulation

the long run impact of cash transfers to poor families lleras muney we estimate the long run impact of cash transfers to poor families on children s longevity educational attainment nutritional status and income in adulthood to do so we collected individual level administrative records of applicants to the mothers pension program the first government sponsored welfare program in the united states 1911 1935 and matched them to census wwii and death records male children of accepted applicants lived one year longer than those of rejected mothers they also obtained onethird more years of schooling were less likely to be underweight and had higher income in adulthood than children of rejected mothers jel i12 i14 i18 i32 i38 j16 n32

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

bargaining power in apartment sales in corsica a latent class approach this paper extends the bargaining model of harding et al harding j rosenthal s and sirmans cf 2003 estimating bargaining power in the market for existing homes review of economics and statist

estimating bargaining power in the market for existing homes although bargaining is common in markets for heterogeneous goods it has largely been ignored in the hedonic literature in a break from that tradition we establish sufficient conditions that permit one to identify the effect of buyer and seller bargaining on hedonic models our model is estimated using a previously overlooked feature of the american housing survey that permits us to observe characteristics of both buyers and sellers results suggest that household wealth gender and other demographic traits influence bargaining power in addition variation in bargaining power arising from the presence of school age children accounts for anomalous seasonal patterns reported in various widely cited indices of quality adjusted house prices

predicting female labor supply this study examines the empirical associations between female labor supply and child status and marital status using 1970 and 1980 u s census data and 1971 and 1981 canadian census data when the data are used in a purely cross sectional manner without controlling for previous labor supply we find as others have that female labor supply is negatively related to the number of children a woman has had however this relationship changes when we condition on weeks of work in the previous year this study makes use of longitudinal information in the canadian and u s census data that has been largely ignored the paper also explores certain econometric issues raised by the nature of the empirical results

family labour supply and fertility a two regime model the central hypothesis of the new micro economics of fertility was examined i e because children are female time intensive fertility is inversely related to the mothers wage a theoretical model of lifetime family labor supply and completed fertility which forms the basis for the subsequent empirical investigation is presented empirical estimates of the model are provided using 1971 canadian census data the 1 period model of completed family size and lifetime labor supply indicates that fertility and labor supply behavior of families where the wife participates in the labor market will differ from that of families with never participating wives the systematic differences arise because families with nonworking wives face the additional binding constraint of an inflexible supply of wifes time to the home a comparison of these 2 regimes allows inferences concerning the female time intensity of children and the substitutability of husbands and wifes time in the context of the 1 period model the relevant criterion for separating families into the 2 regimes is the lifetime rather than current participation status the evidence suggests that when this procedure is followed much doubt is cast on the conventional wisdom that children are female time intensive the usual inverse relation found between wifes wage or education and completed family size appears to be the result of a complex interaction between wage rates lifetime labor force participation and fertility some support is found for complementarity between the home time of the husband and wife but the evidence is not totally consistent results of the female participation equation strongly suggest complementarity proxies for the husbands lifetime labor supply suggest weak or zero complementarity when the sample is split by current participation of the wife rather than lifetime participation then the results support conventional wisdom concerning the female time intensity of children and replicate kneisners finding of complementarity between husband and wifes time reconciling these differences within the framework of the 1 period model is difficult since it yields no predictions concerning current variables yet since the wifes lifetime participation is the correct criterion for allocating families to the 2 regimes under the 1 period model doubt must remain concerning the female time intensity of children until the current lifetime results are reconciled

a comparison of the labor force behavior of married women in the united states and canada with special attention to the impact of income taxes estimation results are presented for the probability of working the hourly wage rate and the annual hours of work for wives in seven different age groups in both the u s and canada federal and state or provincial taxes are incorporated into the analysis an iterative estimation method is employed to circumvent the statistical problems resulting from the dependence of the hours of work on the tax rate and the dependence of the tax rate on the hours of work authors

aggregation in matching markets this article develops aggregate relations for a matching market of heterogeneous suppliers and demanders under particular assumptions about the distribution of preferences and the matching game asymptotic aggregate relations for the number of realized matches of different types in the presence of flexible contracts such as a price are derived simulation experiments demonstrate that the model also provides excellent predictions in small populations the potential for applications within demographic labor market and welfare analyses is discussed

a test of the unitary and collective models of household labour supply this paper tests the unitary and the collective household labour supply models within a structural framework a nonlinear unrestricted household labour supply system is postulated and the set of parametric restrictions imposed by each model is derived our results generally reject the income pooling restrictions embodied in the unitary model also the symmetry of cross wage effects is rejected however the collective model is not rejected for groups with no pre school children

finite mixture estimation of multiproduct cost functions this paper presents a technique of cost function estimation based on the theory of finite mixture distributions which allows for the simultaneous existence of multiple technologies of production when the researcher does not know which observations correspond to which technologies the finite mixture technique provides estimates of the proportions of firms using the various technologies facilitates comparisons between technologies and preserves the traditional interpretations of cost estimation after describing the mixture procedure the technique is illustrated on a large sample of savings and loan associations and it is concluded that this industry exhibits multiple technologies of production copyright 1991 by mit press

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

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

child care costs and the employment decision of women canadian evidence the authors estimate the joint decision for women with preschool children to engage in paid employment and to purchase market forms of child care the results confirm those found in most u s studies indicating that child care costs exert a significant negative effect on the labor supply of women with children and on their decision to purchase child care as well the expected wage of the mother exerts a significant positive impact on both the decision to purchase market forms of child care and the decision to engage in paid unemployment

more power to the pill the impact of contraceptive freedom on women s life cycle labor supply the release of enovid in 1960 the first birth control pill afforded u s women unprecedented freedom to plan childbearing and their careers this paper uses plausibly exogenous variation in state consent laws to evaluate the causal impact of the pill on the timing of first births and extent and intensity of women s labor force participation the results suggest that legal access to the pill before age 21 significantly reduced the likelihood of a first birth before age 22 increased the number of women in the paid labor force and raised the number of annual hours worked

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

family income and child outcomes in canada a positive relationship between income and child outcomes has been observed in data from numerous countries a key question concerns the extent to which this association represents a causal relationship as opposed to unobserved heterogeneity we use data from the national longitudinal survey of children and youth to implement a series of empirical strategies for estimating the existence and size of the effect of income on three measures of cognition our results indicate that the effect of income on these outcomes may well be positive but that it is likely to be smaller than conventional estimates jel classification i10 revenu des familles et comportement des enfants au canada il existe une relation positive entre le revenu des familles et les comportements des enfants dans les releves statistiques de nombreux pays une question centrale demeure jusqu a quel point est ce que cette correlation represente une relation causale par opposition a du bruit les auteurs utilisent l enquete longitudinale nationale sur les enfants et les jeunes elnej pour mettre en place une serie de strategies empiriques pour calibrer l existence et la taille de l effet de revenu sur trois mesures de cognition les resultats montrent que l effet de revenu sur ces comportements peut fort bien etre positif mais qu il est vraisemblablement plus faible que ce que suggerent les evaluations conventionnelles

do seller disclosures affect property values buyer information and the hedonic model the hedonic method is widely used to infer the value of environmental amenities that are bundled with real property the interpretation of hedonic prices as marginal values requires that households are fully informed yet there is evidence that buyers are often less informed than sellers a graphical illustration in this study suggests that asymmetric information between buyers and sellers can affect hedonic prices this intuition is confirmed by a quasi random experiment that exploits spatial and information discontinuities stemming from a seller disclosure for flood zones results suggest a 4 decline in housing prices in flood zones after disclosures commenced

more on the labour supply of canadian women the traditional consensus on female labour supply is that the wage elasticity is large and positive in contrast to a small and generally negative elasticity for males this consensus has recently been challenged in a series of important papers by alice and masao nakamura who find a backward bending supply curve for females similar to that for males this result has been challenged on a variety of grounds the present paper tests the hypothesis advanced by the nakamuras on data that have several advantages over the census type in their papers the results offer strong support for the nakamuras conclusions

large demographic shocks and small changes in the marriage market between 1958 and 1961 china experienced one of the worse famines in her history birth rates fell during these years and recovered immediately afterwards the famine also adversely affected the health of these cohorts this paper provides non parametric estimates of the total effects of the famine on the marital behaviour of famine affected cohorts in the rural areas of sichuan and anhui these reduced from estimates incorporate general equilibrium and heterogeneous treatment effects two important components of equilibrium marital behaviour next the paper uses a structural model of the marriage market the choo siow model to decompose observed marital outcomes into quantity and quality effects of the famine the structural estimates show that the famine substantially reduced the marital attractiveness of the famine born cohort the conclusion is that the small observed changes in marriage rates of the famine born cohorts are due to a substantial decline in their marital attractiveness controlling for changes in educational attainment does not change the conclusion

the effect of universal child benefits on labour supply using a difference in differences estimator i find the canadian universal child care benefit has significant negative income effects on the labour supply of married individuals the likelihood of lower educated mothers to participate in the labour force is reduced 3 2 percentage points when receiving the benefit median hours worked per week among lower educated mothers is reduced by 1 9 hours the effects on higher educated mothers are substantial with median hours worked among higher educated mothers reduced by nearly one hour per week for men the evidence suggests small but significant income effects on labour supply consistent with the literature on labour supply elasticities