Intra-Household Work Timing: The Effect on Joint Activities and the Demand for Child Care

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

Income distribution: Second thoughts

As a follow-up of his book on income distribution the author reformulates his version on the scarcity theory of income from productive contributions. The need to introduce into an earnings theory several job characteristics, non-cognitive as well as cognitive, and the corresponding personality traits is stressed, the latter subdivided into innate and learnable capabilities. The theory is presented in two alternative mathematical versions: one where job and person characteristics are continuous and one where they have discrete values and their frequencies assume continuous values. Although, mainly in the United States, numerous empirical inquiries have been made, job characteristics and the corresponding personal characteristics have not been included in sufficient number. I want to express my profound gratitude to Professor Robert H. Haveman, who not only published a deep-delving review article on my book Income Distribution: Analysis and Policies but also commented on an earlier text of the present article. I also owe a great debt to Professor Jan Pen who in a long series of discussions challenged a number of my concepts and figures. Finally I want to thank Dr. S. K. Kuipers for helpful comments on an earlier draft

The Impact of Gender Diversity on the Performance of Business Teams: Evidence from a Field Experiment

This paper reports on a field experiment conducted to estimate the impact of the share of women in business teams on their performance. Teams consisting of undergraduate students in business studies start up a venture as part of their curriculum. We manipulated the gender composition of teams and assigned students randomly to teams, conditional on their gender. We find that teams with an equal gender mix perform better than male-dominated teams in terms of sales and profits. We explore various mechanisms suggested in the literature to explain this positive effect of gender diversity on performance (including complementarities, learning, monitoring, and conflicts) but find no support for them

Time and Money: Substitutes in Real Terms and Complements in Satisfactions

Time and money are basic commodities in the utility function and are substitutes in real terms. To a certain extent, having time and money is a matter of either/or, depending on individual preferences and budget constraints. However, satisfaction with time and satisfaction with money are typically complements, i.e., individuals tend to be equally satisfied with both domains. In this paper, we provide an explanation for this apparent paradox through the analysis of the simultaneous determination of economic satisfaction and leisure satisfaction. We test some hypotheses, including the hypothesis that leisure satisfaction depends on both the quantity and quality of leisure-where quality is proxied by good intensiveness and social intensiveness. Our results show that both the quantity and the quality of leisure are important determinants of leisure satisfaction, and, since having money contributes to the quality of leisure, this explains the empirical findings of the satisfactions being complementary at the same time as the domains are substitutes. Interestingly, gender matters. Intra-household effects and especially individual characteristics are more pronounced for women than for men for both domain satisfactions. Additionally, good intensiveness is more important for men (e.g., housing conditions), whereas social intensiveness is more important for women (e.g., the presence of children and participation in leisure-time activities)

Financial Satisfaction and (in)formal Sector in a Transition Country

This paper examines the relationship between working in the formal or informal sector and self-reported individual financial satisfaction in a country in transition. It does so by allowing for individual heterogeneity in terms of perceived financial insecurity and tax morale. The empirical analysis uses a dataset for Albania, a country in transition. The method applied is the ‘self-administered questionnaire’, which combines personal contacts with written questionnaire. The results indicate that, for most individuals, working in the informal sector has negative effects on their self reported financial satisfaction. For some individuals, however, this effect is positive. The characteristic defining these two groups of individuals is their attitude towards the perceived financial insecurity related to not paying taxes. These findings have important implications, in particular for transition countries with large informal sectors. Given the involuntary participation in the informal sector in these countries, the majority of individuals working in this sector will remain financially dissatisfied as long as they have no other social safety net

Human hippocampal neurogenesis drops sharply in children to undetectable levels in adults.

New neurons continue to be generated in the subgranular zone of the dentate gyrus of the adult mammalian hippocampus. This process has been linked to learning and memory, stress and exercise, and is thought to be altered in neurological disease. In humans, some studies have suggested that hundreds of new neurons are added to the adult dentate gyrus every day, whereas other studies find many fewer putative new neurons. Despite these discrepancies, it is generally believed that the adult human hippocampus continues to generate new neurons. Here we show that a defined population of progenitor cells does not coalesce in the subgranular zone during human fetal or postnatal development. We also find that the number of proliferating progenitors and young neurons in the dentate gyrus declines sharply during the first year of life and only a few isolated young neurons are observed by 7 and 13 years of age. In adult patients with epilepsy and healthy adults (18-77 years; n = 17 post-mortem samples from controls; n = 12 surgical resection samples from patients with epilepsy), young neurons were not detected in the dentate gyrus. In the monkey (Macaca mulatta) hippocampus, proliferation of neurons in the subgranular zone was found in early postnatal life, but this diminished during juvenile development as neurogenesis decreased. We conclude that recruitment of young neurons to the primate hippocampus decreases rapidly during the first years of life, and that neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus does not continue, or is extremely rare, in adult humans. The early decline in hippocampal neurogenesis raises questions about how the function of the dentate gyrus differs between humans and other species in which adult hippocampal neurogenesis is preserved