Search

The thesis consists of three self-contained chapters. The chapters can be read independent of each other and each chapter is followed by a bibliography and an appendix. They each cast light on a different aspect of how we, as a society, manage the responsibility of helping children who do not thrive in their own home, and to what extent we succeed in helping these children find their way in life. Thank you for your interest.

The extent to which like-with like marry is particularly important for inequality as well as for the outcomes of children that result from the union. In this paper we discuss approaches to the measurement of changes in assortative mating. We derive two key conditions that a well-defined measure should satisfy. We argue that changes in assortativeness should be interpreted through a structural model of the marriage market; in particular, a crucial issue is how they relate to variations in the economic surplus generated by marriage. We propose a very general criterion of increase in assortativeness, and show that almost all indices used in the literature are implied by our criterion - with one notable exception, that moreover violates one of our conditions. Finally, we use our approach to evaluate the evolution of assortative matching in the US over the last decades, and conclude that assortative matching has increased, particularly at the top of the education distribution.

We investigate the importance of subjective expectations of returns to and effort costs of the two main investments that mothers make in newborns: breastfeeding and stimulation. We find heterogeneity across mothers in expected effort costs and expected returns for outcomes in the cognitive, socio-emotional and health domains, and we show that this contributes to explaining heterogeneity in investments. We find no significant heterogeneity in preferences for child developmental outcomes. We simulate the impact of various policies on investments. Our findings highlight the relevance of interventions designed to reduce perinatal fatigue alongside interventions that increase perceived returns to investments.

It is frequently assumed that money in the hands of women leads to better out-comes for their children than money in the hands of men. However, empirical and theoretical evidence are mixed. We conduct a novel between-subject lab-in-the-field experiment to study whether increasing the wife's control over resources causes a couple to allocate more to their child. The paper provides two main insights. First, increasing the wife's bargaining power does not increase the share allocated to the child, but leads to more gender-equal allocations to children. Second, time preferences are important in explaining household decision-making; it is better for the child that the most patient spouse has more relative bargaining power. Our results highlight the importance of taking a broader set of preferences into account when studying household decision-making, and suggest that policy aimed to increase spending on children should target the spouse with preferences most aligned with such spending.

Empirical evidence suggests that money in the hands of mothers (as opposed to fathers) increases expenditures on children. From this, should we infer that targeting transfers to women is good economic policy? In this paper, we develop a non-cooperative model of household decision making to answer this question. We show that when women have lower wages than men, they may spend more on children, even when they have exactly the same preferences as their husbands. However, this does not necessarily mean that giving money to women is a good development policy. We show that depending on the nature of the production function, targeting transfers to women may be beneficial or harmful to growth. In particular, such transfers are more likely to be beneficial when human capital, rather than physical capital or land, is the most important factor of production.

In this paper we examine the link between wage inequality and consumption inequality using a life cycle model that incorporates household consumption and family labour supply decisions. We derive analytical expressions based on approximations for the dynamics of consumption, hours, and earnings of two earners in the presence of correlated wage shocks, non-separability and asset accumulation decisions. We show how the model can be estimated and identified using panel data for hours, earnings, assets and consumption. We focus on the importance of family labour supply as an insurance mechanism to wage shocks and find strong evidence of smoothing of male’s and female’s permanent shocks to wages. Once family labour supply, assets and taxes are properly accounted for there is little evidence of additional insurance.

Has there been an increase in positive assortative mating? Does assortative mating contribute to household income inequality? Data from the United States Census Bureau suggests there has been a rise in assortative mating. Additionally, assortative mating affects household income inequality. In particular, if matching in 2005 between husbands and wives had been random, instead of the pattern observed in the data, then the Gini coefficient would have fallen from the observed 0.43 to 0.34, so that income inequality would be smaller. Thus, assortative mating is important for income inequality. The high level of married female labor-force participation in 2005 is important for this result.

In 2007, Germany introduced a new parental leave benefit scheme, the so-called “Elterngeld”. The new benefit is an income-related transfer and is granted for a maximum period of 14 months. The more generous, but shorter Elterngeld replaced the former means-tested flat rate benefit that could be drawn for up to 24 months. One of the aims of the reform was to smooth household income in the year after childbirth and another to increase the incentives to return quickly to the labour market. In this study, we analyse empirically the change in income in the first year after birth and the effect of increasing incentives for mothers to return to the labour market in the second year after childbirth. We find that the average increase of net household income of families with a child in the first year after birth amounts to 480 euro per month. With respect to labour supply, we show that in the first year after childbirh, mothers’ labour supply decreases. In the second year labour supply of mothers in East Germany and low-income mothers in both parts of Germany increases. Zusammenfassung Mit der Einführung des Elterngeldes im Jahr 2007 beabsichtigte die Bundesregierung die Bedingungen für Familien mit jungen Kindern zu verbessern. Die neue familienpolitische Leistung hatte mehrere Ziele, von denen in diesem Beitrag drei zentrale untersucht werden: Zum Ersten sollte für Eltern in der Frühphase der Elternschaft ein Schonraum geschaffen werden. Zum Zweiten ist es ein erklärtes Ziel des Elterngeldes, es beiden Elternteilen zu ermöglichen, ihre wirtschaftliche Existenz eigenständig zu sichern, und drittens soll die Erwerbstätigkeit von Müttern gefördert werden. In diesem Beitrag wird anhand einer empirischen Wirkungsstudie überprüft, ob diese Ziele erreicht wurden. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Familien im ersten Jahr nach der Geburt durch das Elterngeld durchschnittlich etwa 480 Euro im Monat mehr haben als vor seiner Einführung. Außerdem zeigt sich, dass die Erwerbstätigkeit von Müttern in diesem Zeitraum zurückgegangen ist. Mütter mit Kindern im zweiten Lebensjahr haben aufgrund der Einführung des Elterngeldes eine höhere Wahrscheinlichkeit, in den Beruf zurückzukehren., Journal of Family Research, Vol 25 No 2 (2013): Elterngeld und Elternzeit in Deutschland: Ziele, Diskurse und Wirkungen

We examine the effect of joint custody on marriage, divorce, fertility and female employment in Austria using individual-level administrative data, covering the entire population. We also use unique data obtained from court records to analyze the effect on post-divorce outcomes. Our estimates show that joint custody significantly reduces divorce and female employment rates, significantly increases marriage and marital birth rates, and leads to a substantial increase in the total money transfer received by mothers after divorce. We interpret these results as evidence against Becker-Coase bargains and in support of a mechanism driven by a resource redistribution that favors men giving them greater incentives to invest in marriage specific capital., Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

I examine if employment protection affects parental childcare. I find that a softer employment protection has a substantial effect on how parents use and divide paid childcare between them. The identification relies on a reform that made it easier for employers in Sweden to dismiss workers in small firms. I estimate that a softer employment protection reduces the total days of parental childcare in targeted firms, measured as total days of parental leave or temporary parental leave. Both a sorting effect and a behavioral effect can explain the reduced childcare. I also find evidence of a redistribution effect of paid parental childcare within households if only one partner was affected by the reform. I interpret the redistribution effect as a way of evading an external cost on the child.

In recent years, a large number of studies have investigated the relationship between social security benefits and male retirement decisions in developed countries. However, women's and couples' labour supply decisions and the patterns of withdrawal from the labour force in emerging economies are much less studied. This paper uses Brazilian data from 1998 to 2008 to examine how social security financial incentives and personal characteristics affects one's own and spouses' retirement decisions. Our results suggested that couples synchronize retirement and that they respond similarly to their own characteristics. We also find that wives are more responsive to husbands' incentives than vice-versa.

We formulate and estimate a dynamic model of marriage, divorce, and remarriage using 27 years of panel data for the entire Danish cohort born in 1960. The marital surplus is identified from the probability of divorce, and the surplus shares of husbands and wives from their willingness to enter marriage. Education and marriage order are complements in generating gains from marriage. Educated men and women receive a larger share of the marital gains but this effect is mitigated when their proportion rises. Education stabilizes marriage and second marriages are less stable. As the cohort ages, uneducated men are the most likely to be single.

This paper studies how the risk of divorce affects the human capital decisions of a young couple. We consider a setting where complete specialization (one of the spouses uses up all the education resources) is optimal with no divorce risk. Symmetry in education (both spouses receive an equal amount of education) then acts like an insurance device in case of divorce particularly when the institutions do not compensate for differences in earnings. But, at the same time symmetry in education is less efficient than the extreme specialization. This is the basic tradeoff underlying our analysis. We show that the symmetric allocation will become more attractive as the probability of divorce increases, if risk aversion is high and/or labor supply elasticity is low. However, it is only a second-best solution as the insurance protection is achieved at the expense of an efficiency loss. Efficiency can be restored through suitably designed marriage contracts because they can provide the appropriate insurance against divorce to a couple who opts for specialization. Finally, we study how the (economic) use of marriage is affected by the possibility of divorce.

We empirically study the determinants of intra-household decision power with respect to economic and financial choices using a suitable direct measure provided in the 1989-2010 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth. Focusing on a sample of couples, we evaluate the effect of each spouse's characteristics, household characteristics, and background variables. We find that the probability that the wife is in charge is affected by household characteristics such as family size and total income and wealth, but more importantly that it increases with the difference between hers and her husband's characteristics in terms of age, education, and income. The main conclusion is that decision-making power over family economics is not only determined by strictly economic differences, as suggested by previous studies, but also by differences in human capital and experience. Finally, exploiting the time dimension of our dataset, we show that this pattern is increasing over time.

This paper studies the effect of child care provision on family structure. We present a model of a marriage market with positive assortative matching, where in equilibrium the poorest women stay single. Couples have to decide on the number of children and spousal specialization in home production of public goods and child care. We then study how child care provision affects the equilibrium. Due to specialization in home production, the incentive to use child care is smaller for married mothers than for single mothers. We show that this increases the number of single mothers and the divorce rate. Using survey data from Germany, we also present empirical evidence which is consistent with this finding.

Since the seminal work of Becker, the analysis of endogenous fertility has been based on the trade-off faced by parents between the quantity and the quality of their children. In order to have an interior solution, the model assumes that in case children work, still they get positive income from their parents. However, in some developing countries, child labor is necessary as a source of income. The purpose of this paper is to adapt the quantity-quality trade-off of the Beckerian model for the cases where net transfers are in fact from children to parents. The paper shows that by adding a sibship size effect, we restore the possibility of the trade-off.

Microsimulation methods and models of labor market decisions have attracted a lot of attention as an approach to the assessment of consequences of family related policies in the area of labor market and fertility. We set these models in the context of relevant demographic theories and present them from the point of view of their potential as tool to guide effective policy making with the aim to reconcile the objectives of increasing female participation and fertility and reducing poverty levels among families with children.

In this paper we examine how children affect happiness and relationships within a family by analyzing two unique questions in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth's 1997 cohort. We find that (a) presence of children is associated with a loss of spousal love; (b) loss of spousal love is associated with loss of overall happiness; but (c) presence of children is not associated with significant loss of overall happiness. If children reduce feelings of being loved by the spouse but do not reduce reported happiness even though spousal love induces happiness, then it must be the case that children contribute to parental happiness by providing other benefits. After ruling out some competing compensation mechanisms we infer that loss of spousal love is compensated with altruistic feelings towards children.

Son preference is widespread in a number of developing countries. Anecdotal evidence suggests that women may contribute to the persistence of this phenomenon because they derive substantial long-run non-monetary benefits from giving birth to a son in the form of an improvement in their intra-household position. This paper tests this hypothesis in the Indian context. The results suggest that for the most part there is little evidence of substantial female benefits, and any positive impacts of having a son disappear after six months. This implies that the female-specific self-interest in a son is probably much lower than commonly assumed.

The present thesis tries to obtain a better understanding how economic and marriage-related decisions are linked to each other. The first part deals with cross-spouse effects on economic decisions, in this case on health behavior and on labor force participation at older age. The second part examines the impact of various economic factors on the risk of marital dissolution. In summary, all chapters show that there are strong interrelationships between the two most important aspects in life, namely family and career. However, we also see that men and women react and behave differently. For instance, the wife has an effect on the husband’s probability to see the doctor but not vice versa. Moreover, a female breadwinner increases the risk of divorce substantially which we cannot find for couples with a male main earner. Thus, the results suggest that economic theory and empirical analyses do not only have to consider the family background but also to distinguish between men and women. Needless to say that there are still many open questions. For instance, except in Chapter 2, we restrict the analysis to married couples since cohabitation is less common among older people and moreover, separation has usually less severe consequences if the couple is not married. Nevertheless, given the growing acceptance and equal treatment under law, it becomes increasingly interesting to extend the analyses to cohabiting couples. Moreover, not only family structure has changed, work life is also changing. More and more jobs, in particular for high-educated, require high flexibility and mobility by both, men and women. Consequently, for a larger section of the population, the success of a relationship is challenged by commuting and living apart together. It is not fully known yet to what extent these factors alter the risk of separation. Another interesting aspect is the new parental-leave regulation. The new law provides financial incentives for fathers to take a share of the legal parental-leave. However, given our result that female and male breadwinners do not seem to be perfect substitutes, the question is whether maternity and paternity leave have a different effect on marital stability. Thus, there are still many aspects we do not know but, to conclude with Tina Turner, “some people gotta stay whatever and give one another shelter on a rainy day”.

Numerous contributions in the literature show that household outcomes are influenced by the distribution of intra-household decision power expressed by bargaining indicators such as relative income of the spouses. Since women can expect a longer retirement period, increased female bargaining power could lead to higher savings and wealth accumulation. In contrast, a household could consume more in the current period (e.g., to the benefit of the children) if gender differences in saving preferences had other rationales. Using two German datasets and different measures of bargaining power, my analysis gives evidence that female bargaining power has no or a negative influence on saving and wealth even when controlling for expectations of future support by public pension schemes of the spouses. In some specifications, I also find positive associations between the wife's bargaining power and attitudes towards current consumption proxied by repayments of consumer loans. Different results for subsamples of couples with and without dependent children support the validity of the 'kids-do-better hypothesis' which indicates that mothers use their bargaining power to enforce higher current consumption in favor of the children. Zahlreiche Studien zeigen, dass die Ergebnisse von Haushaltsentscheidungen von der Verteilung intra-fämiliärer Verhandlungsmacht abhängen. Ein typischer Indikator von Verhandlungsmacht ist beispielsweise das relative Einkommen der Partner. Da Frauen eine längere Ruhestandsphase erwarten können, könnte ein Anstieg weiblicher Verhandlungsmacht einerseits zu höherer Ersparnis und verstärktem Vermögensaufbau führen. Andererseits könnten Geschlechtsunterschiede im Sparverhalten auf anderen Überlegungen beruhen, so dass der Haushalt seinen Gegenwartskonsum, etwa zum Wohle der Kinder, erhöhen könnte. In meiner Analyse nutze ich zwei deutsche Datensätze und verwende verschiedene Maße für Verhandlungsmacht. Dabei kann ich zeigen, dass weibliche Verhandlungsmacht keinen oder einen negativen Einfluss auf Sparen und Vermögen hat, selbst wenn man die Erwartungen der Partner über ihre zukünftige Alterssicherung (etwa durch Leistungen der gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung) einbezieht. In einigen Modellspezifikationen finden ich zudem einen positiven Zusammenhang zwischen der Verhandlungsmacht der Frau und der Konsumneigung des Haushalts (angenähert durch Rückzahlungen für Konsumentenkredite). Dass sich die Ergebnisse für Haushalte mit Kindern von den Ergebnissen für Haushalte ohne Kinder unterscheiden, lässt sich so interpretieren, dass Frauen ihre Verhandlungsmacht nutzen, um höhere Ausgaben zum Wohle der Kinder durchzusetzen.

We examine the relationship of child gender with family and economic outcomes using a large dataset from the Polish Household Budgets' Survey (PHBS) for years 2003-2009. Apart from studying the effects of gender on family stability, fertility and mothers' labor market outcomes, we take advantage of the PHBS' detailed expenditure module to examine effects of gender on consumption patterns. We find that a first born daughter is significantly less likely to be living with her father compared to a first born son and that the probability of having the second child is negatively correlated with a first born daughter. Using the context of the collective model we provide interpretation of these results from the perspective of individual parental gender preferences. We also examine the potential effects of sample selection bias which may affect the results and may be important for other findings in the literature. Labor supply of mothers and overall child-related consumption is not affected by gender of the first child, but the pattern of expenditure significantly varies between those with first born sons and first born daughters. One possible interpretation of the findings is that Polish fathers have preferences for sons and Polish mothers have preferences for daughters. Expenditure patterns suggest potential early determination of gender roles - mommies' girls get dresses and daddies' boys get toys.

Since World War II, mortality has declined in the developing world. This paper examines the effects of this mortality decline on demographic and economic growth by a family-optimization model, in which fertility is endogenous and wealth yields utility through its status. The decline in mortality stimulates investment and generates an income stream which promotes population growth, but the desire of status hampers fertility and prevents capital-diluting demographic expansion. If status-seeking is strong, then the decline of mortality decreases population growth below its original level.

We develop a collective household model with spousal matching in which there exists marital gains to assortative matching and marriage quality for each couple is revealed ex post. Changes in alimony laws are shown to affect existing couples and couples-to-be differently. For existing couples, legislative changes that favor (wo)men benefit them especially if the marriage match quality is low, while, for couples not yet formed, they generate offsetting intra-household transfers and lower intra-marital allocations for the spouses who are the intended beneficiary. We then estimate the effect of granting alimony rights to cohabiting couples in Canada using a triple-difference framework since each province extended these rights in different years and requiring different cohabitation length. We find that obtaining the right to petition for alimony led women to lower their labor force participation. These results, however, do not hold - and, in some cases, are reversed - for newly formed cohabiting couples.

This paper studies the effect of cultural attitudes on childcare provision, fertility, female labour supply and the gender wage gap. Cross-country data show that fertility, female labour force participation and childcare are positively correlated with each other, while the gender wage gap seems to be negatively correlated with these variables. The paper presents a model with endogenous fertility, female labour supply and childcare choices which fits these facts. There may exist multiple equilibria: one with zero childcare provision, low fertility and female labour supply and high wage gap, and one with high childcare provision, high fertility and female labour supply and low wage gap.

The paper characterizes the optimal tax policy and the optimal quality of day care services in a OLG model with warm-glow altruism where parental choices over child care arrangements affect the probability that the child becomes a high-skilled adult in a type-specific way. With respect to previous contributions, optimal tax formulas include type-specific Pigouvian terms which correct for the intergenerational externality in human capital accumulation. Our numerical simulations suggest that a public policy that disregards the effects of parental time on children's human capital entails a welfare loss that ranges from 0:2% to 5:7% of aggregate consumption.

The present paper develops a general equilibrium model with overlapping generations and endogenous fertility in order to analyze the interaction between public policy and household labor supply and fertility decisions. The model's benchmark equilibrium reflects the current family policy consisting of joint taxation of married couples, monetary transfers and in-kind benefits which reduce the time cost of children. Then we simulate alternative reforms of the tax and the child benefit system and analyze the long-run impact on fertility and female labor supply. Our simulations indicate three central results: First, policies which simply increase the family budget either via higher transfers (direct or in-kind) or via family splitting increase fertility but reduce female employment. Second, increasing tax revenues due to the introduction of individual taxation would increase female employment but reduce fertility. Third, revenue neutral policies such as a reform of the benefit structure or a move towards individual taxation combined with an increase in in-kind benefits may achieve both goals and therefore yield significant welfare gains.

We show that in the US, the UK, Italy and Sweden women whose first child is a boy are less likely to work in a typical week and work fewer hours than women with first-born girls. The puzzle is why women in these countries react in this way to the sex of their first child, which is chosen randomly by nature. We consider two explanations. As Dahl and Moretti (2008) we show that first-born boys positively affect the probability that a marriage survives, but differently from them and from the literature on developing countries, we show that after a first-born boy the probability that women have more children increases. In these advanced economies the negative impact on fertility deriving from the fact that fewer pregnancies are needed to get a boy is more than compensated by the positive effect on fertility deriving from the greater stability of marriages, which is neglected by studies that focus on married women only.

Altruism among family members can, in some cases, inhibit cooperation by increasing the utility that players expect to receive in a non-cooperative equilibrium. To test this, we examine agricultural productivity in polygynous households in West Africa. We find that cooperation is greater - production is more efficient - among co-wives than among husbands and wives because co-wives are less altruistic towards each other. The results are not driven by scale effects or self-selection into polygyny. Nor can they be explained by greater propensity for cooperation among women generally or by the household head acting as an enforcement mechanism for others' cooperative agreements.

In this paper the hypothesis that partnerships between immigrants and natives are less specialized in the sense that spouses provide similar working hours per weekday than those between immigrants is tested. The empirical analysis relies on panel data using a two-limit random effects tobit framework to identify determinants of a gender-neutral specialization index. Results indicate that for immigrants intermarriage is indeed related to less specialization as is better education and smaller diversion in education between spouses. In contrast, children living in the household, as well as being Muslim or Islamic, lead to greater specialization. Intermarried immigrants specialize less presumably due to smaller comparative advantages resulting from positive assortative mating by education and different bargaining positions within the household. Natives, on the other hand, show different patterns: for them the likelihood to specialize increases with intermarriage. This might also results from differences in bargaining strength or be due to adaptation to immigrants' expected behavior.

We investigate spillovers in spousal labour supply exploiting independent variation in hours worked generated by the introduction of the shorter workweek in France in the late 1990s. We find that female and male employees treated by the shorter legal workweek reduce their weekly labour supply by about 2 hours, and do not experience any reduction in their monthly earnings. While wives of treated men do not seem to adjust their working time at either the intensive or extensive margins, husbands of treated wives respond by cutting their workweek by about half an hour to one hour, according to specifications and samples. In particular, managers and professionals respond much more strongly to the shorter legal workweek in their wives' firms than men in lower occupations. These effects are consistent with the presence of significant cross-hour effects on labour supply for husbands, though not for wives.

This study examines if couples time their work hours and how this work timing influences child care demand and the time that spouses jointly spend on leisure, household chores and child care. By using a innovative matching strategy, this studies identifies the timing of work hours that cannot be explained by factors other than the partners' potential to communicate on the timing of their work. The main findings are that couples with children create less overlap in their work times and this effect is more pronounced the younger the children. We find evidence for a togetherness preference of spouses, but only for childless couples. Work timing also influences the joint time that is spent on household chores, but the effect is small. Finally, work timing behavior affects the demand for informal child care, but not the demand for formal child care.

In this paper, I suggest an empirical framework for the analysis of mothers' labor supply and child care choices, explicitly taking into account access restrictions to subsidized child care. This is particularly important for countries such as Germany, where subsidized child care is rationed and private child care is only available at considerably higher cost. I use a discrete choice panel data model controlling for unobserved heterogeneity to simultaneously estimate labor supply and the demand for child care of German mothers with at least one child under the age of seven years. The model can be used to evaluate different kinds of policy reforms, such as changes in the availability or costs of child care. Results from the illustrating policy simulations show that targeting public expenditures at an extension of child care slots has greater effects on the demand for child care as well as on maternal employment than a reduction of parents' fees to existing slots.

In this paper, we focus on network- and gender-specific determinants of remittances, which are often explained theoretically by way of intra-family contracts. We develop a basic formal concept that includes aspects of the transnational network and derive hypotheses from it. For our empirical investigation, we use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for the years 2001-2006. Our findings show: first, the fact that foreign women remit less money than foreign men can be explained by the underlying transnational network contract. Second, remittances sent by foreigners and naturalized immigrants have at least partly different determinants. Acquiring German citizenship increases the probability of family reunification in the destination country and decreases remittances. Third, the structure of the existing social network in Germany and the network structure in the home country both play important roles in explaining remittances.

We construct a new, direct measure of female autonomy in household decision-making by creating an index from the principal components of a variety of household variables on which mother of a child takes decision. We then examine its impacts on her child's secondary education in Mexico and find that the children of Mexican mothers with greater autonomy in domestic decision making have higher enrolment in and lower probability of dropping out of secondary school. We use the relative proximity of spousal parents as instruments for relative autonomy to ameliorate the potential endogeneity between autonomy and welfare outcomes. We argue that omitted variables that may drive education and autonomy are likely to be uncorrelated with the ones driving location choice of families given the migration patterns in Mexico. However, the positive autonomy effect is weaker and non-existent for older children and for girls suggesting that gender-directed conditional cash transfer policies may not necessarily hasten educational and gender transition in the process of development.

Economic research on the determinants of gender differences in economic outcomes particularly in income and consumption is well established. Extending these investigations to other outcomes such as wealth up till now has been limited due to lack of individual-level data. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) we find a significant ‘raw’ gender wealth gap of 50,000€ for married partners. Decomposition analyses reveal that the gap is largely driven by differences in characteristics between men and women (observables), particularly by individual’s own income and labour market experience. This is especially true at the bottom and at the top of the wealth distribution, which we show using semi-parametric decomposition techniques. Differences in the lower half of the distribution are mostly driven by the wealth function, i.e., the way in which women transform their characteristics into wealth. This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in the journal "Oxford Economic Papers" following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Examining the Gender Wealth Gap / Eva M. Sierminska, Joachim R. Frick, Markus M. Grabka. In: Oxford Economic Papers 62(2010) Heft 4 ; S. 669-690 is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oep/gpq007

Empirical literature has found evidence in favor of household bargaining models. In contrast to earlier tests that are limited to assignable private goods, we use child preference data in order to extend the empirical evidence on household bargaining to public household goods. In the empirical analysis, we exploit the different theoretical predictions for couples with heterogeneous and homogeneous preferences derived from household models. Our results indicate that couples bargain over fertility. Furthermore, we find that the ability to commit to household resource allocations depends on the gender of the partner with higher preferences.

Using cross-sections of microdata from Surveys of Consumer Finance and Surveys of Labour and Income Dynamics, we document changes in the availability of time and money in Canadian two-parent families between 1971 and 2006 as the paid work hours of mothers have increased. While long hours of paid work were mostly characteristic of higher-income families during the 1970's, by 2006 over half of families supplying more than 80 paid hours are from the bottom half of the income distribution. Between 1994 and 2006, the largest increases in paid hours have occurred in middle and lower-middle income families; these families have not experienced similarly large increases in real income. Canadian time use data from 1992 and 2006 confirm larger increases in parental time stress for low-income than for high-income families. Since, controlling income, high paid work hours are negatively correlated with life satisfaction, our results suggest that inequality of well-being may have increased even more than inequality of income over recent decades. While some policy attention has been directed at supporting incomes of modest income families with children, we identify a policy gap in alleviating time pressures for these families, after the first year.

Using data we collected in rural Burkina Faso, we examine how children's cognitive abilities influence resource constrained households' decisions to invest in their education. We use a direct measure of child ability for all primary school-aged children, regardless of current school enrollment. We explicitly incorporate direct measures of the ability of each child's siblings (both absolute and relative measures) to show how sibling rivalry exerts an impact on the parent's decision of whether and how much to invest in their child's education. We find children with one standard deviation higher own ability are 16 percent more likely to be currently enrolled, while having a higher ability sibling lowers current enrollment by 16 percent and having two higher ability siblings lowers enrollment by 30 percent. Results are robust to addressing the potential reverse causality of schooling influencing child ability measures and using alternative cognitive tests to measure ability.

We study the impact of income taxation on both partners' allocation of time to market work and unpaid house work in households with two adults. We estimate a structural household utility model in which the marginal utilities of leisure and house work of both partners are modelled as random coefficients, depending on observed and unobserved characteristics of the household and the two partners. We use a discrete choice model with choice sets of 2,401 points for each couple, distinguishing seven market work intervals and seven house work intervals for each partner. The model is estimated using data for France, which taxes incomes of married couples jointly, like, for instance, Germany and the US. We find that both partners' market and non-market time allocation decisions are responsive to changes in the tax system or other policy changes that change the financial incentives. Women's time allocation is more responsive to the own and the partner's wage rate than men's. Tax policy simulations suggest that moving from joint taxation for married couples to separate taxation of each spouse would go a small step in the direction of equalizing market and non-market work of spouses. Selective taxation with smaller tax rates for women than for men would magnify these effects.

The present paper analyses the expenditure behavior of Albanian families. The objective is to cast some light upon the relationship between education expenditure and the volume of remittances, sent from abroad by household members. To assess the existence of an education enhancing effect of remittances, an Engel curve framework is employed, where heterogeneity in interests or in bargaining power among the members within the households is assumed. The empirical estimation accounts for the censored nature of the education expenditure through using Heckman two-step as well as a semiparametric model for sample selection. Finally, quintile regression analysis is employed to investigate whether migrants' remittances have a differentiated effect on various quantiles of the conditional distribution of the education consumption.

We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study in order to quantify the economy-wide monetary gains achieved by household-size economies due to within-household sharing of goods by individuals living in multimember households. In most countries out of the twenty countries we examine, we observe a decline in monetary gains achieved by household-size economies over time. This decline is the result of a demographic trend towards smaller-sized household units, rather than a change in the shares of aggregate disposable income earned by household types of different size.

The role of women in the ritual of many religions changed dramatically at the end of the 20th century, to the point where full participation by women was the norm by 2000 rather than the rarity that it had been 30 years earlier. This paper considers some aspects of the economic context that help explain why the movement toward egalitarianism succeeded in that period in contrast to its many previous failures. It concludes with predictions of future trends.

This model is the first to solve for the optimal timing of childbirth and number of children in a continuous time framework simultaneously. The model depicts how changes in wage at different stages of an individual’s life influence the timing decision of childbirth and the optimal number of children. When a woman wants to have more children, she decides to have them at a younger age. Medical research that extends the fecund life span induces women to have fewer children. A reduction of the parental leave due to daycare centers or a reduction in the costs of leave due to child benefits increase the number of children. Women value labour more, when they face the risk of an unknown divorce. This paper also shows that divorce does not change the timing of childbirth directly, it influences the number of children negatively and the reduced number of children delays the timing. The model can be used to predict upper bound fertility rates, when the expected divorce rate continues to increase.

I develop an equilibrium, two-sided search model of marriage with endogenous population growth to study the interaction between fertility, the age structure of the population and the age at first marriage of men and women. Within a simple two-period overlapping generation model I show that, given an increase of the desired number of children, age at marriage is affected through two different channels. First, as population growth increases, the age structure of the population produces a thicker market for young people, inducing early marriages. The second channel comes from differential fecundity: if the desired number of children is not feasible for older women, women tend to marry younger and men older, with single men outnumbering single women in equilibrium. Using an extended version of the model to a finite number of periods and fertility data, I show that two mechanisms described above may have acted as persistence mechanisms after the US baby boom. I show that demographic transitional dynamics after the baby boom may account for approximately a 23% of the increase in men's age of marriage between 1985 and 2009, albeit the impact on women's age is small.

In this paper we estimate the effects of an unconditional basic income on labor supply and income distribution with a special focus on the incentives to work in the family context. An unconditional basic income guarantees every citizen a minimum income without any means-testing. We simulate a proposed basic income reform with a detailed microsimulation model, estimate labor supply reactions with a structural labor supply model and perform distributional analysis using micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. As the originally proposed basic income concept yields a very high deficit, we also analyze two budget neutral alternatives. Comparing labor supply and distributional results of the budget neutral alternatives, the well-known equity-effciency trade-off is unveiled. In the family context our analyzes suggest that the unconditional character of the basic income causes increasing family incomes, but also serious disincentives to work for secondary earners.

German time use data for 2001/02 are used to assess the impact of workplace characteristics on the private life of couples. The major aim is to solve the endogeneity resulting from individual preferences for work and leisure to identify the pure effects of the workplace independent from other diluting personal influences in a cross-sectional setting when no appropriate instruments are available. I propose a repeated random assignment of people into pseudo couples as a solution. By this approach, I am able to uncover additional marriage inherent mechanisms that result in a (de-)synchronization of joint time that are still family friendly.

This paper examines the gendered nature of asset accumulation between 1978 and 2004 in Indio Guayas, a low-income community on the periphery of the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador. In so doing, it emphasizes both the importance of combining quantitative and qualitative intra-household data, as well as taking a longitudinal perspective rather than at a single point in time. This paper seeks to examine the relationship not only between gender and urban income poverty but also, more importantly, between gender and urban asset accumulation, illustrating how the combination of quantitative econometric measurement of assets and qualitative in-depth anthropological findings on the complex underlying gender relations both contribute to a far more comprehensive analysis of asset accumulation processes in urban contexts than can be gained from any single methodological approach.

This paper investigates how families make decisions about the education of juveniles. The decision problem is analyzed in three variations: a 'decentralized' scheme, in which the parents control the purse-strings, but the children dispose of their time as they see fit; a 'hierarchical' scheme, in which the parents can enforce a particular level of schooling by employing a monitoring technology; and the cooperative solution, in which the threat point is one of the two noncooperative outcomes. Adults choose which game is played. While the subgame perfect equilibrium of the overall game is Pareto-efficient when viewed statically, it may yield less education than the hierarchical scheme. Regulation in the form of restrictions on child labor and compulsory schooling generally affects both the threat point and the feasible set of bargaining outcomes, and families may choose more schooling than the minimum required by law.