Do Family Wealth Shocks Affect Fertility Choices? Evidence from the Housing Market Boom and Bust

While there is a great deal of literature focusing on the relationship between income and fertility, little is known about how wealth affects fertility decisions of the household. This paper fills this gap in the literature by investigating how changes in housing wealth affect fertility. In particular, we use the wealth variation supplied by the recent housing boom and bust to generate exogenous variation in household wealth. We first conduct a state-level aggregate analysis to investigate how the birth rate is related to housing prices using differences in the timing and size of the housing market boom and bust across different states over time. We then conduct an analysis using restricted-use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics that allows us to track how women’s fertility behavior is related to individual-level housing price growth. The demographic and geographic controls in the PSID allow us to control extensively for any confounding effects driven by household selection across different cities or neighborhoods, and we find that for homeowners, a $10,000 increase in real housing wealth causes a 0.07 percent increase in fertility. We find little effects of MSA-level housing price growth on the fertility of renters, which supports our identification strategy. That increases in housing wealth are strongly associated with increases in fertility is consistent with some recent work showing a positive income effect on births, and our estimates are suggestive that the large recent variation in the housing market could have sizeable demographic effects that are driven by the positive effect of housing wealth on fertility.

Veal Re-Vealed: The Veal Industry

Veal is meat that comes from the male offspring of dairy cows. These animals are not grown to maturity for beef because dairy breeds have been developed primarily for their milk-producing capability and not for the quality of their meat. Therefore, these animals are slaughtered as calves and marketed as veal

Eligibility for federal financial aid strongly impacts potential students’ decisions about going to college

Every year, the U.S government gives billions in financial aid for people on low incomes who want to go to college. But is this federal spending actually effective in closing the education gap between low and high income Americans? By examining the period between 2001 and 2006, when those who had been convicted of drug offenses were banned from federal aid, Emily Owens and Michael Lovenheim find that without aid, students are forced to delay their college entry by two years, and are generally less likely to enroll in college. They also find that the ban on aid did not deter young people from committing drug offences

Letter from Peter Lovenheim and Joseph Gordon to the Secretary of McDonald\u27s Corporation

Mr. Henry Spira and Ms. Nannette Coco intend to present the enclosed proposal for action by the company\u27s shareholders at the 1994 annual meeting

Reporting Requirements Under the Animal Welfare Act: Their Inadequacies and the Public\u27s Right to Know

The Animal Welfare Act is the only federal statute designed to protect animals used in laboratory research. This law requires research facilities to register with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and meet minimum housing standards, care, and treatment standards for most warm-blooded animals. The Act is administered by the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), an agency of the USDA. Research institutions are required to file annual reports. However, the reports are frequently deficient. The authors argue that the USDA should issue clear definitions for what is meant by “pain” and “distress. ” They should also provide further explanation regarding what is meant by “routine procedures” and request additional information from those institutions reporting that they do not use pain-relieving drugs

House prices, wealth effects and labour supply

We examine the impact of house prices on labour supply decisions using UK microdata. We combine household survey data with local-level house price measures and controls for local labour demand. Our microdata also allow us to control for individual level income expectations. We find significant house price effects on labour supply, consistent with leisure being a normal good. Labour supply responses to house prices are concentrated among young married female owners and older owners. This finding suggests that house prices affect the decisions of marginal workers in the economy. Our estimates imply that house prices are economically important in the participation decisions for these workers

Why Have College Completion Rates Declined? An Analysis of Changing Student Preparation and Collegiate Resources

Partly as a consequence of the substantial increase in the college wage premium since 1980, a much higher fraction of high school graduates enter college today than they did a quarter century ago. However, the rise in the fraction of high school graduates attending college has not been met by a proportional increase in the fraction who finish. Comparing two cohorts from the high school classes of 1972 and 1992, we show eight-year college completion rates declined nationally, and this decline is most pronounced amongst men beginning college at less-selective public 4-year schools and amongst students starting at community colleges. We decompose the observed changes in completion rates into the component due to changes in the preparedness of entering students and the component due to collegiate characteristics, including type of institution and resources per student. We find that, while both factors play a role, it is the collegiate characteristics that are more important. A central contribution of this analysis is to show the importance of the supply-side of the higher education in explaining changes in college completion.

Increasing Time to Baccalaureate Degree in the United States

Time to completion of the baccalaureate degree has increased markedly in the United States over the last three decades, even as the wage premium for college graduates has continued to rise. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972 and the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, we show that the increase in time to degree is localized among those who begin their postsecondary education at public colleges outside the most selective universities. In addition, we find evidence that the increases in time to degree were more marked amongst low income students. We consider several potential explanations for these trends. First, we find no evidence that changes in the college preparedness or the demographic composition of degree recipients can account for the observed increases. Instead, our results suggest that declines in collegiate resources in the less-selective public sector increased time to degree. Furthermore, we present evidence of increased hours of employment among students, which is consistent with students working more to meet rising college costs and likely increases time to degree by crowding out time spent on academic pursuits.

Three Essays in Public Finance and Labor Economics.

The first paper of this dissertation utilizes unique data on teachers' union election certifications in Iowa, Indiana, and Minnesota to analyze the effect of teachers' unions on education production. I find teachers' unions have no impact on teacher pay, class sizes, or per-student expenditures, but they increase teacher employment by between 5 and 10 percent. Further, I estimate education production functions using high school dropout rates; my results are consistent with unions causing an increase in the returns to lower class sizes and higher teacher pay. These findings are in conflict with much of the past literature on teachers' union impacts, which I argue is due to measurement error in the union measure utilized in previous work. The second chapter uses micro-data on cigarette consumption from the CPS Tobacco Supplement to estimate demand models that incorporate cross-state purchasing behavior. I find demand elasticities with respect to the home state price are indistinguishable from zero on average and vary significantly with the distance individuals live to lower-price borders. However, when smuggling incentives are eradicated, the price elasticity is negative, though still inelastic. I also estimate cross-border sales cause a modest increase in consumption, and 13-25 percent of consumers purchase cigarettes in border localities in the CPS sample. These findings imply traditional models of cigarette demand have not yielded a complete picture of the impact of cigarette taxes on smoking behavior and tax revenues. The final chapter analyzes the increased time to baccalaureate degree and decrease in college completion rates in the United States over the last three decades. Using data from the NLS72 and NELS:88 longitudinal surveys, the increase in time to degree is found to be localized among those starting college at non-selective public and two-year institutions. There is no evidence changes in student characteristics explain the observed trends. The results indicate the increases in time to degree tend to be concentrated in states that experienced rapid growth in the size of their college-age cohort. There is also evidence of increased hours of employment among students, which is consistent with students working more to meet rising college costs.Ph.D.EconomicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/55683/2/mlovenhe_1.pd

WP 2017-361

This paper examines how older workers adjust their labor supply in response to information they receive about their retirement wealth from the provision of the Social Security Statement. We find that older male workers’ labor supply is highly responsive to receiving personalized information about future Social Security benefits, leading to a reduction of 119 hours worked per year, on average. However, our estimates point to significant heterogeneity in this response, with workers at the lower end of the hours-worked distribution increasing their labor supply and those at the high end decreasing their labor supply. We argue differences in knowledge about Social Security benefits across the labor supply distribution can explain much of this heterogeneity. We additionally explore the extent to which the information on the Statement may have led some workers to mistakenly reduce their labor supply by too much due to a lack of understanding of the dynamic nature of the Statement’s benefit projections with respect to earnings. Receipt of a second Statement led all but the lowest hour workers to increase their labor supply relative to workers who did not receive a second Statement. This is consistent with workers misunderstanding the information provided as accumulated rather than projected wealth. Our results point to older workers being very responsive to Social Security information, which highlights the need to accurately convey information about both pension wealth and its sensitivity to changes in earnings.Social Security Administration, RRC08098401, UM16-09https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138010/1/wp361.pdfDescription of wp361.pdf : Working pape