There is a signifi cantly higher prevalence of multigenerational living arrangements among migrants than among natives in Germany which may be explained with migrants choosing this household structure in order to compensate for economic disadvantages. This hypothesis is tested by analyzing the economic conditions within multigenerational households. The results show that in multigenerational mi...

There is some controversy in the field of household economics regarding the effi ciency of household decisions. We make the point that a flexible specification of spousal preferences and the household production technology precludes the possibility of using revealed preference data on household time allocations to determine the manner in which spouses interact: effi ciently or ineffi ciently. U...

Divorce and the Excess Burden of Lawyers We present a model where divorcing spouses can choose to hire lawyers in their divorce process. Spouses encounter incentives as in the classical prisoners’ dilemma: Despite the zero sum nature of the game and the lawyers’ fees, each spouse has an incentive to hire a lawyer. We propose a simple institutional setting allowing for joint lawyers in order to ...

In this paper we examine the effect of family structure on children’s educational outcomes by exploiting the sibling structure in the NLSY and NLSY-Child to control for unobserved heterogeneity across families and individuals. We also compare outcomes for children within the same family—stepchildren with their half-siblings in the same blended family who are the biological children of both pare...

In recent years the distribution of work in Britain has "hollowed out", with a growth in the proportions of both "work-rich" and" work-poor" households. The growth in twoand zero-earner couples evident in cross-sectional snapshots has different implications for the distribution of family income (in long and short terms) according to whether more people are experiencing episodes of a given lengt...

We model parental sex selection and the equilibrium sex ratio. With intrinsic son preference, sex selection results in a male-biased sex ratio. This is ine¢ cient, due to a marriage market congestion externality. Medical innovations that facilitate selection increase ine¢ ciency. If son preference arises endogenously, due to population growth causing an excess of women on the marriage market, s...

A model of how personality traits affect household time and resource allocation decisions and wages is developed and estimated. In the model, households choose between two behavioral modes: cooperative or noncooperative. Spouses receive wage offers and allocate time to supplying labor market hours and to producing a public good. Personality traits, measured by the so-called Big Five traits, can...