Children, spousal love, and happiness: An economic analysis

In this paper we examine how children affect happiness and relationships within a family by analyzing two unique questions in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth's 1997 cohort. We find that (a) presence of children is associated with a loss of spousal love; (b) loss of spousal love is associated with loss of overall happiness; but (c) presence of children is not associated with significant loss of overall happiness. If children reduce feelings of being loved by the spouse but do not reduce reported happiness even though spousal love induces happiness, then it must be the case that children contribute to parental happiness by providing other benefits. After ruling out some competing compensation mechanisms we infer that loss of spousal love is compensated with altruistic feelings towards children

Women’s Jobs and Marriage: Baby-Boom versus Baby-Bust (Travail des Femmes et Mariage: du baby-boom au baby-bust)

Studies of the determinants of labor supply do no typically include characteristics of the marriage market. What inspired this paper is Shoshana Grossbard-Shechtman's economic theory of marriage which considers how marriage market forces influence individual value of time in marriage. From pioneering work by Louis Henry and others, we know that changes in cohort size influence marriage market conditions. Consequently, it is hypothesized that changes in cohort size influence the value of time of women in marriage. Given that most women are married or plan to marry, this analysis implies that women born at times of increases in the number of births will be more likely to participate in the labor force. This hypothesis was using US. time series data on women's labor force participation and a number of other variables known to have an impact on labor supply. It is found that rapid increases in women's labor force participation coincided with rapid growth of the population entering marriage markets and therefore the creation of marriage market imbalances favoring men. Such rapid growth in population characterized not only the post World War II so-called baby-boom, but also an earlier period of growth in births starting in the late 1930s. As for the slow growth in women's labor force participation observed in recent years, it has coincided with the coming of age of successive generations of shrinking size born during the baby­ bust

Women’s Jobs and Marriage: Baby-Boom versus Baby-Bust (Travail des Femmes et Mariage: du baby-boom au baby-bust)

Studies of the determinants of labor supply do no typically include characteristics of the marriage market. What inspired this paper is Shoshana Grossbard-Shechtman's economic theory of marriage which considers how marriage market forces influence individual value of time in marriage. From pioneering work by Louis Henry and others, we know that changes in cohort size influence marriage market conditions. Consequently, it is hypothesized that changes in cohort size influence the value of time of women in marriage. Given that most women are married or plan to marry, this analysis implies that women born at times of increases in the number of births will be more likely to participate in the labor force. This hypothesis was using US. time series data on women's labor force participation and a number of other variables known to have an impact on labor supply. It is found that rapid increases in women's labor force participation coincided with rapid growth of the population entering marriage markets and therefore the creation of marriage market imbalances favoring men. Such rapid growth in population characterized not only the post World War II so-called baby-boom, but also an earlier period of growth in births starting in the late 1930s. As for the slow growth in women's labor force participation observed in recent years, it has coincided with the coming of age of successive generations of shrinking size born during the baby­ bust

Modeling eldercare by children and children-in-law: The role of marriage institutions

Informal eldercare is often supplied by family members, more so in Asia than in the West. Children and their parents as well as members of adjacent generations linked by marriage (in-laws) are modeled as self-interested agents offering or responding to material incentives. A first implication from the model is that studies of the impact of eldercare on the health and happiness of in-family caregivers could be enriched by taking account of material in-marriage transfers that the children of the needy elderly can possibly give to their spouses. A second implication discussed here is that the provision of care for older in-laws could be related to the presence of brideprice or dowry transfers (or their in-kind equivalents) and that within a society with a given set of premarital traditions the amount of such transfer will vary with the expected amount of care for elderly in-laws. Suggestive evidence was provided based on simple comparisons between some Asian and Western countries and between two Indian regions. Daughters-in-law in the rural North of India provide more eldercare than their counterparts in the South. Their families are also likely to pay lower dowries at the time of marriage, which is consistent with the model presented here. The conclusions found at the end of the paper include a list of more implications of policy relevance, especially to Asian economies

The New Home Economics at Colombia and Chicago

When Jacob Mincer and Gary Becker started the New Home Economics (NHE) at Columbia University in the early 1960s, they expanded on the field of family and consumption economics that Hazel Kirk and Margaret Reid began in the early 1920s. This paper studies forty years of household economics, the decisions that household members make regarding any allocation of resources. These decisions may regard consumption, labor supply, transportation, fertility, or health. A review of the history of the NHE shows that Jacob Mincer's original contribution tends to be underestimated. This paper also argues that the growth of the NHE benefited from the concentration of talent at Columbia, organizational support, the diversity of a student body that included many talented women, the ideological commitments that students, many of them married, had for the study of home production, a departmental policy de-emphasizing gender-related politics, and relatively high levels of civility.Household Economics, History Of Economic Thought, Gender, Labor Supply,