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The authors describe job market experiences of new PhD economists, 2007-10. Using information from PhD programs' job candidate Web sites and original surveys, they present information about job candidates' characteristics, preferences, and expectations; how job candidates fared at each stage of the market; and predictors of outcomes at each stage. Some information in this article updates findings of prior studies. However, design features of the data used in this article may result in findings that are more generalizable. This article is unique in comparing premarket expectations and preferences with post-market outcomes on the new PhD job market. It shows that outcomes tend to align with premarket preferences, and candidates' expectations are somewhat predictive of their outcomes. Several analyses also shed light on subgroup differences.

This article analyzes data from the Health and Retirement Study regarding interviewing and panel attrition. The authors found that reducing the length of an interview does not affect participation, unless excessively long, and maintaining the same interviewer for multiple interviews increases participation.

Households can be analyzed in terms of individuals within them, and children can be seen as collective goods. This helps explain an increase in female-headed households among people on low incomes. Sex ratios may also be important.

This article investigates the role of surprises in marital dissolution. Surprises consists of changes in the predicted earning capacity of either spouse. Data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 is used. We find that an unexpected increase in the husband's earning capacity reduces the divorce hazard, while an unexpected increase in the wife's earning capacity raises the divorce hazard. Couples sort into marriage according to characteristics that are likely to enhance the stability of the marriage. The divorce hazard is initially increasing with the duration of marriage, and the presence of children and high levels of property stabilizes the marriage.

per year through two post-secondary Standards until all secondary schools were converted to Malay in 1982 (DeTray 1984). In the late 1980s, the Malaysian government extended this policy to conversion [...]

Despite increased labor force participation rates among women and reforms under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, widowhood remains an important risk factor for transition into poverty, although somewhat less [...]

We analyze divorce settlements made by a cohort of whites who graduated from high school in 1972. The effects of spouses' incomes on the divorce transfer are estimated and used to simulate the welfare effects of divorce on husbands, wives, and children under alternative assumptions about marriage contracts and the ability of a couple to continue coordinating resources in the aftermath of divorce. We find a positive (negative) relationship between divorce transfers and the growth of husband's (wife's) earnings during marriage. The estimated expenditure on children in the divorce state is only half the accustomed level during marriage.

Missing data controls In order to maintain sample size we have included dummy (0, 1) variables for missing parent data. Missing parent's education and occupation was coded at their mean [...]

In 1960, marriage was a virtual precondition for childbearing. By 1997, out-of-wedlock births accounted for 26 percent of fertility among whites and 69 percent among blacks. This paper presents a model that integrates economic theories of fertility and marriage to help understand the growth of out-of-wedlock childbearing. In the theory, fathers can shift the costs of child rearing to single mothers. If females are in excess supply and have sufficiently high incomes, a marriage market equilibrium may exist in which children are born within marriage to high-income parents, whereas in low-income groups men father children by multiple partners outside of marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The family is distinguished from other social institutions, such as firms, by its crucial role in the production and nurture of children and its rationale is ultimately to be found in the preferences of individuals for own children. Sexual reproduction means that the production of one's own child requires the participation of another person of the opposite sex. The production of a child who will survive, become a successful adult, and produce his or her own children requires the expenditure of both personal and purchased resources over a lengthy period of time. The cost of time hypothesis follows from the assumption that childrearing is relatively more intensive in the use of mother's time than are non-child-related household production activities. The article permits a rich cross fertilization between family economics and other branches of economics that has already borne fruit many times. There is no alternative theory of demographic behavior that comes close in terms of either scope or power.

The restrictions placed on the specification of the individual equations of the structural model of fertility behavior that I have presented and on the structure as a whole represent a drastic simplification of the complex inter-connections among fertility, family formation, and family behavior. Consideration of these restrictions and the manner in which they may be relaxed or changed suggests that the present model is only one particularly simple member of a large class of economic models of individual fertility behavior which share the common framework of the economic theory of the family. Thus, the static lifetime framework of the present model could be changed to a dynamic life-cycle framework. The assumptions of (1) perfect fertility control could be removed in favor of a theory of imperfect fertility control, (2) exogenous date of marriage and characteristics of marital partners could be replaced by a theory of marriage, and (3) exogenously determined efficiency in household production could be relaxed by applying the theory of investment in human capital to nonmarket efficiency, and so on. Work under-way on a number of such models promises to provide a rich source of alternative hypotheses about fertility behavior and, simultaneously, about many other aspects of family behavior. in the theoretical model. If scientific progress consists in large part of the process of rejecting hypotheses, it follows that progress will be impeded if hypotheses are not proposed. It is in this spirit that the hypotheses implied by the theoretical model of this paper are advanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]