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We examine the relationship between unemployment insurance generosity and reported intimate partner violence in the U.S. by leveraging the staggered adoption of the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation program, which increased unemployment insurance payments by $600 per week in 2020. Using detailed nationwide police report data, we find that states that implemented this program reported 9% more cases of intimate partner violence (IPV) than states which had not yet implemented the program, driven primarily by increases in aggravated assault, intimidation, and sexual assault. This is consistent with prior evidence on changes in government transfers and IPV. These results are not explained by local differences in unemployment, sheltering in place, economic impact payments, COVID-19 case rates, or temperature. We also find a decrease in total reported IPV against men, but more serious offenses increase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women are more likely than men to report physical and emotional exhaustion related to paid work. While this gender gap in job burnout is common in the literature, the mechanism is yet to be thoroughly understood. Our study offers a novel, and admittedly provocative, explanation for the difference in burnout between men and women. We leverage a US survey rich in job and personal information to test whether theoretically relevant factors explain the gender gap in job burnout. Our results suggest that they may not. Instead we find that workers' perspectives regarding women's role in society drive a large gender gap in job burnout. Specifically, "traditional" women are significantly more likely than men to report job burnout. Thus, providing support and resources to transform perceptions and attitudes regarding gender roles may help to reduce job-related burnout resulting from a mismatch between expectations and paid work experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sharing information concerning expenditure choices between a migrant and the recipient affects the migrant's allocation patterns. In a lab-in-the-field experiment, Filipino migrants are asked to earmark an in-kind budget to be delivered to their most closely connected household (MCCH). When the MCCH is fully aware of the migrant's decisions (i.e., symmetric information), we observe that the migrant raises the portion for consumption goods in the range of 10.0–10.5% with respect to the case when the migrant's choices are not disclosed (i.e., asymmetric information). Moreover, when sharing information, the migrant relies on more involvement of the recipient household and lowers by 7–9% the allocation to expenses she could monitor ex-post more strictly. The former result is consistent with the signaling motive, whereas the latter supports the presence of strategic behavior by the migrant remitter. Education allocations are significantly higher in intra- rather than inter-household transfers and this provides insights for conditional cash transfer policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze how staying at home during the COVID-19 pandemic affects the rates of domestic violence in the U.S. Using police dispatch and crime data from 36 police and sheriff's departments and mobile device tracking data, we find that reported incidents of domestic violence increase as more people stay at home. Specifically, we estimate that staying at home due to COVID-19 increased domestic violence by over 5% on average from March 13 to May 24, 2020. This is consistent with a theory of exposure reduction, where victims and abusers stuck at home are more likely to fight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a dearth of studies on cooperation within the extended inter-generational family, a common living arrangement in Africa. This study employs a communication treatment and a 10-item Family Communication Scale (FCS) of the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scales (FACES IV) to explain cooperation in a Voluntary Contribution Mechanism (VCM) beyond the laboratory. The study applies the Random Effect regression analysis. The results show that inter-generational cooperation is heterogeneous, limited and subject to decay, with stronger cooperation up the generational hierarchy. The framed field experiment presents evidence of the positive impact on cooperation of face-to-face communication and of positive perceptions of family communication. More specifically, communication mitigates contribution decay and enhances cooperation, especially between parents and grandparents and their children and grandchildren. Inter-generational transfers and the associated investment in family-type public goods can be augmented by social developmental policies such as parenting skills training that enhance family communication and in turn, intra-household cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we show that in rural Burundi the characteristics of the female’s kinship are highly correlated with her decision-making power. First, a female whose own immediate family is at least as rich as her husband’s counterpart enjoys a greater say over children- and asset-related decision-making. Second, the size, relative wealth and proximity of the extended family also matter. Third, kinship characteristics prove to be more important than (standard) individual and household characteristics. Finally, we also show that the female’s say over asset-related decision-making is positively associated with males’ education, more than with female’s education per se. All these correlation patterns can inform policies aiming at empowering women or targeting children through women’s empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How large are the economies of scale of living together? And how do partners share their resources? The first question is usually answered by equivalence scales which assume equal sharing of resources within the household. Recent evidence based on collective household models rejects this equal sharing assumption. This paper uses data on financial satisfaction to simultaneously estimate the sharing rule and the economies of scale in a collective household model. The estimates indicate substantial scale economies of living together. Furthermore, wives receive on average almost 50 % of household resources, but the estimated shares vary between 30 and 60 %. Female resource shares increase with the ratio of female to male wages. Consumption inequality is underestimated by 16 % if unequal sharing is ignored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Divorce trend in Iran has become a serious social concern that is suspected of being influenced by rising housing costs in an oil-based economy. Iran has the highest growth rate of divorce among Islamic countries in the Middle East and North Africa region. Using data from 30 provinces of Iran from 2002 to 2010, this paper examines the relationship between housing costs (house prices and rents) and divorce rate, controlling for other macroeconomic variables such as unemployment, inflation, and education in addition to regional, cultural, traditional, and conventional attitudes toward divorce. By applying panel fixed-effects and dynamic generalized methods of moments methods, our results suggest that increases in housing costs erode marital stability in Iran. Our main results are also supported when we focus on the shocks in housing costs, using the Vector autoregressive based impulse response and variance decomposition analyses of divorce rates at the national level from 1982 to 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The schooling repayment hypothesis for private transfers predicts a positive relationship between the amount of parental investment in children's education and the amount that adult children transfer to their parents. We provide evidence on the repayment motive using data from the Mexican conditional cash transfer program PROGRESA/Oportunidades (PO). PO pays a transfer to parents for sending their children to school. Thus, if private transfers from adult children to parents are in part repayment for parental schooling investments made in the past, then PO should decrease these transfers-parents were already exogenously compensated by the government for sending their kids to school and not to work. Exploiting the exogenous variation in the amount of cash transfers a household receives from PO for sending its children to school, we compare the private transfers received in 2007 by parental households who had children 0-16 in 1997 and started receiving the programs' benefits in 1998 with the transfers received by similar parental households who started receiving benefits in 1999. Results suggest a repayment motive exists. That is, PO is causing adult children to transfer less resources to their parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]