1,721,131 research outputs found
Why are married men working so much? An aggregate analysis of intra-household bargaining and labor supply
No full textAre 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
Why are married men working so much? Relative wages, labor supply and the decline of marriage
No full textAre macro-economists mistaken in ignoring bargaining between spouses? The stationarity, since the mid 1970s, of married-men's average weekly hours of paid labor suggests that the inclusion of bargaining between spouses is essential for understanding the labor supply trends of married women. This paper develops and calibrates to US time-use survey data a simple macro-style model of marital bargaining, where the allocations depend on equilibrium marriage and divorce rates. The results suggest that bargaining reduces by roughly 50% the effect of the closing of the gender gap in wages on the labor supply of married women. Even with respect to average paid labor of married couples, the prediction error from ignoring bargaining would be on the order of 5 hours per week. The model without bargaining also exaggerates the impact on the decline of marriage resulting from the declining price of home equipment, from tax reform and from the closing of the gender ga
Why is child labor illegal?
Full text linkWe present a theory of the emergence of laws restricting child labor or imposing mandatory education that is consistent with the fact that poor parents tend to oppose such laws. We find that if altruistic parents are unable to commit to educating their children, child-labor laws can increase the welfare of higher-income parents in an ex ante sense. On the basis of an empirical analysis of Latin-American household surveys, we demonstrate that per capita income in the country of residence has the predicted effect on child labor supply, even after controlling for other household characteristics<br/
Dynamic squeezing: Marriage and fertility in France after World War One
No full textUnmarried people undoubtedly differ in their preferences for marriage, and such differences are likely to be linked to their preferences for children. We propose a model of people searching for marriage partners in which ageing and fertility propensities determine marriage probabilities. We apply our model to a quantitative analysis of the post-war marriage boom that began in France in 1918. We find that wartime shocks to the marriage market are perpetuated across generations and cause persistent increases in marital birthrates. Heterogeneity in women’s propensity to bear children accounts for most of the increase in marriage relative to trend
Can technological change account for the sexual revolution?
No full textBy reducing the risk of unwanted parenthood, better contraception reduces the cost of unmarried sex, increasing the value of single life. A simple one-period example suggests this could explain why marriage and birth rates have declined since 1970. We extend the analysis to allow for repeated matching over many periods, modelling the shotgun-marriage, contraception-method and abortion margins. We use US survey data on contraception, sexual activity and family dynamics to calibrate the model to the 1970s; we find that the effects of liberalizing access to contraception and abortion account for 60% of the behavioural shifts associated with the sexual revolution
Do marital prospects dissuade unmarried fertility?
No full textUnmarried 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 is the rate of single parenthood lower in Canada than in the U.S.? A dynamic equilibrium analysis of welfare policies
Full text linkA critical question in the design of welfare policies is whether totarget aid according to household composition, as was done in the U.S. under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)\ program, or to rely exclusively on means-testing, as in Canada. Restricting aid to single mothers, for instance, has the potential to distort behavior along three demographic margins: marriage, fertility and divorce. We contrast the Canadian and the U.S. policies within an equilibrium model of household formation and human capital investment on children. Policy differences weconsider are: eligibility, dependence of transfers on the number of children, and generosity of transfers. Our simulations indicate that the policy differences can account for the higher rate of single-parenthood in the U.S. They also show that Canadian welfare policy is more effective for fostering human capital accumulation among children from poor families. Interestingly, a majority of agents in our benchmark economy prefers awelfare system that targets single mothers (as the U.S. system does), yet does not (unlike the U.S. system) make transfers dependent on the number of children
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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