Do marital prospects dissuade unmarried fertility?

Unmarried fertility was a lot lower in the 1970s than in the 1990s. It was also the case that unmarried mothers had much lower marriage rates than non-mothers, a differential that has largely vanished over time. Could this marriage-market penalty have been strong enough to explain why unmarried fertility rates were lower then? To explore this issue, we introduce a new model of fertility and marriage, based on directed search. Relative to the existing literature, the essential contributions of the model are to allow for accumulation of children over the lifecycle and for the marriage of single mothers. We use the model, in conjunction with US survey data, to explore the impact of marital prospects on the fertility decisions of unmarried women. We find that the decline, from the 1970s to 1995, in marriage rates of unmarried women with no children, can account for the dramatic rise in unmarried women’s share of births over that period

Why are Married Men Working So Much?

We document a negative trend in the leisure of men married to women aged 25-45, relative to that of their wives, and a positive trend in relative housework. Taken together, these trends rule out a popular class of labor supply models in which unitary households maximize the sum of the spouse’s utility. We develop a simple bargaining model of marriage, divorce and allocations of leisure-time and housework. According to the model, a rise in women’s relative wage will reduce husband’s leisure and marriage rates when the quality of single life is relatively high for women. Calibration to US data shows the trend in relative wages explains most of the trend in relative leisure and about a third of the trend in housework, while the simultaneous trend in home-durables prices explains the balance of the housework trend.General Aggregative Models, Neoclassical, Marriage, Marital Dissolution, Family Structure, Economics of Gender, Non-labor Discrimination, Time Allocation, Work Behavior, Employment Determination and Creation, Human Capital, Time Allocation and Labor Supply

Why is Child Labor Illegal?

We argue from an empirical analysis of Latin-American household surveys that per capita income in the country of residence has a negative effect on child labor supply, even after controlling for other household characteristics. We then develop a theory of the emergence of mandatory-education laws. If parents are unable to commit to educating their children, child-labor laws can increase the welfare of altruistic parents in an ex ante sense. The theory suggest that measures that reduce child wages can make poor families better off, but that this may come at the expense of even poorer families.Child Labor Legislation, Economic Development

More on Marriage, Fertility and the Distribution of Income

Publicado también en la serie: UCLA Department of Economics. Penn CARESS. Working paperAccording to Pareto, the distribution of income depends on “the nature of the people comprising a society, on the organization of the latter, and, also, in part, on chance.” An overlapping generations model of marriage, fertility and income distribution is developed here. The “nature of the people” is captured by attitudes toward marriage, divorce, fertility, and children. Singles search for mates in a marriage market. They are free to accept or reject marriage proposals. Married agents make their decisions through bargaining about work, and the quantity and quality of children. They can divorce. Social policies, such as child tax credits or child support requirements, re‡ect the “organization of the (society).” Finally, “chance” is modelled by randomness in income, opportunities for marriage, and marital bliss

Racial profiling or racist policing? bounds tests in aggregate data

State-wide reports on police traffic stops and searches summarize very large populations, making them potentially powerful tools for identifying racial bias, particularly when statistics on search outcomes are included. But when the reported statistics conflate searches involving different levels of police discretion, standard tests for racial bias are not applicable. This paper develops a model of police search decisions that allows for non-discretionary searches and derives tests for racial bias in data that mixes different search types. Our tests reject unbiased policing as an explanation of the disparate impact of motor-vehicle searches on minorities in MissouriHouseholds ; Public policy

Love and Money: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Household Sorting and Inequality

This paper examines the interactions between household matching, inequality, and per capita income. We develop a model in which agents decide whether to become skilled or unskilled, form households, consume and have children. We show that the equilibrium sorting of spouses by skill type (their correlation in education) is increasing as a function of the skill premium. In the absence of perfect capital markets, the economy can converge to different steady states, depending upon initial conditions. The degree of marital sorting, wage inequality, and fertility differentials are positively correlated across steady states and negatively correlated with per capita income. We use household surveys from 34 countries to construct several measures of the skill premium and of the degree of correlation of spouses' education (marital sorting). For all our measures, we find a positive and significant relationship between the two variables.

Women on Welfare: A Macroeconomic Analysis

Macroeconomics, Labor Economics, Demographic Economics

More on marriage, fertility, and the distribution of income

This paper describes an overlapping-generations model of marriage, fertility, and income distribution.Income distribution

More on Marriage, Fertility and the Distribution of Income

According to Pareto (1896), the distribution of income depends on ``the nature of the people comprising a society, on the organization of the latter, and, also, in part, on chance.'' In the model developed here the ``nature of the people'' is captured by attitudes toward marriage, divorce, fertility, and children. Singles search for mates in a marriage market. Married agents bargain about work, and the quantity and quality of children. They can divorce. Social policies, such as child support requirements, reflect the ``organization of the (society).'' Finally, ``chance'' is modelled by randomness in income, marriage opportunities, and marital bliss.Fertility; Marriage and Divorce; Nash Bargaining; Income Distribution; Public Policy

Why are married men working so much? An aggregate analysis of intra-household bargaining and labor supply

Are macro-economists mistaken in ignoring bargaining between spouses? This paper argues that models of intra-household allocation could be useful for understanding aggregate labor supply trends in the US since the 1970s. A simple calculation suggests that the standard model without bargaining predicts a 19% decline in married-male labor supply in response to the narrowing of the gender gap in wages since the 1970s. However married-men's paid labor remained stationary over the period from the mid 1970s to the recession of 2001. This paper develops and calibrates to US time-use survey data a model of marital bargaining in which time allocations are determined jointly with equilibrium marriage and divorce rates. The results suggest that bargaining effects raised married men's labor supply by about 2.1 weekly hours over the period, and reduced that of married women by 2.7 hours. Bargaining therefore has a relatively small impact on aggregate labor supply, but is critical for trends in female labor supply. Also, the narrowing of the gender wage gap is found to account for a weekly 1.5 hour increase in aggregate labor supply