Essays on the economics of family [electronic resource]

This dissertation has three chapters. Chapter 1, entitled "Sex Ratio and Urban Chinese Dating Preferences: Evidence from a Chinese Dating Website", estimates contemporary urban Chinese dating preferences and studies the consequences of an unbalanced sex ratio in the marriage market. First, I estimate contemporary urban Chinese dating preferences by using a unique dataset from the largest Chinese dating website Jiayuan. I compare and contrast my results with similarly estimated preferences in the United States, India and Korea. Second, I use the estimated preferences in China to conduct a simulation exercise of varying the sex ratio in the local marriage market. Third, I supplement the partial equilibrium results from the simulation exercise by outlining a simple model of relative performance and deriving several predications on the general equilibrium effects. My simulation results show that the Gale Shapley algorithm can predict outcomes that are very close to the observed matching outcomes. As the sex ratio increases, the proportion of couples where men have more education and income than women steadily rises while couples where women have more education and income declines. There is also an increase in proportion of couples where only men have housing or car. These results suggest an increase in gender inequality within matched couples. Moreover, in the marriage market where matching outcomes depend on relative performance rather than absolute performance, men will increase pre-marital investments in characteristics in which women have a vertical preference, such as education and income, as the sex ratio in the marriage market increases. This general equilibrium result suggests even greater gender inequality among couples. Chapter 2, entitled "Does Working From Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment", studies the impact of a randomized experiment of allowing employees to work from home. We report the results of a WFH experiment at CTrip, a 16,000- employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency. Call center employees who volunteered to WFH were randomly assigned to work from home or in the office for 9 months. Home working led to a 13% performance increase, of which about 9% was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick-days) and 4% from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter working environment). Home workers also reported improved work satisfaction and experienced less turnover, but their promotion rate conditional on performance fell. Due to the success of the experiment, CTrip rolled-out the option to WFH to the whole firm and allowed the experimental employees to re-select between the home or office. Interestingly, over half of them switched, which led to the gains from WFH almost doubling to 22%. This highlights the benefits of learning and selection effects when adopting modern management practices like WFH. Chapter 3, entitled "Impact of Spousal Health Shocks on the Health of the Other Spouse", examines the causal impact of a major spousal health shock on the physical and mental health of the other spouse. Major health shocks such as heart attacks, strokes and onset of cancer represent a large source of risk to the near-elderly and elderly population. Taking advantage of the panel structure and the high frequency of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), I examine the change in an individual's health within a narrow time window from when the spouse experiences a negative health shock. I identify a significant change in an individual's health around a spousal health shock beyond what is observed in other periods and among other similar individuals as the causal impact of a spousal health shock. I find that near-elderly and elderly individuals report worse physical health and feeling more depressed within two years of a spouse being diagnosed with a chronic illness. The impact is concentrated among women whose husbands need more help with daily activities The death of a spouse is associated with a significant spike in depression. However, the negative impact of a spousal health shock does not persist in the long run.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Hoxby Caroline Minter primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Bloom Nick
Shoven John B. advisor. Thesis advisor