In-law Resources and Distribution Within Marriage

There has been increased attention in recent years to decision-making within the context of multi-member households in which individual members differ in their preferences. Two implications of various alternative specifications of the non-unitary household framework that highlight optimization by individuals have received particular attention and have important implications for the design and consequences of programs that seek to influence resource allocations via income transfers. The first is that the distribution of resources within the household may depend on who in the household receives income transfers. Recent changes in family welfare rules in England, which mandated a shift in the payments of family allowances to married couples from husbands to wives, is an example of a social policy attentive to the proposition that households engage in non-unitary decision-making (Lundberg, Pollak and Wales (1997))

“Ability Biases in Schooling Returns and Twins: A Test and New Estimates

Identical twins long have been used to control for “ability” in efforts to obtain unbiased estimates of the earnings impact of schooling and of biases in estimates that do not control for earnings endowments. This study (1) presents new estimates of schooling returns and of “ability” bias using a new twins sample, (2) develops and applies a test of the significance of that bias, and (3) demonstrates that there may be “ability” bias even if the genetically-endowed component of ability does not affect schooling decisions directly as long as this component of ability is correlated with other family characteristics such as income that do affect schooling and that it is not possible to identify separately these individual components of “ability” bias. The basic empirical result is that, net of measurement error, upward “ability” bias is statistically significant in OLS estimates, causing an overestimate of the schooling impact of 12%

Women\u27s Schooling, Home Teaching, and Economic Growth

The hypothesis that increases in the schooling of women enhance the human capital of the next generation and thus make a unique contribution to economic growth is assessed on the basis of data describing green revolution India. Estimates are obtained that indicate that a component of the significant and positive relationship between maternal literacy and child schooling in the Indian setting reflects the productivity effect of home teaching and that the existence of this effect, combined with the increase in returns to schooling for men, importantly underlies the expansion of female literacy following the onset of the green revolution

Women\u27s Schooling, Home Teaching, and Economic Growth

The hypothesis that increases in the schooling of women enhance the human capital of the next generation and thus make a unique contribution to economic growth is assessed on the basis of data describing green revolution India. Estimates are obtained that indicate that a component of the significant and positive relationship between maternal literacy and child schooling in the Indian setting reflects the productivity effect of home teaching and that the existence of this effect, combined with the increase in returns to schooling for men, importantly underlies the expansion of female literacy following the onset of the green revolution