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...

In every developed country, the economic transition from pre-industrial stagnation to modern growth was accompanied by a demographic transition from high to low fertility. Even though the overall pattern is repeated, there are large cross-country variations in the timing and speed of the demographic transition. What accounts for falling fertility during the transition to growth? To answer this ...

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...

Nearly a quarter of all children under the age of two in China are left behind in the countryside as parents migrate to urban areas for work. We use a longitudinal survey following young children and their caregivers from 6 to 30 months of age to estimate the e↵ects of maternal migration on development, health, and nutritional outcomes in the critical first stages of life.We find significant ne...

A central question in human development is what causes health inequalities over the life cycle. We link a harsh environment in the teen years to individuals’ health conditions almost 40 years later, and employ Regression Discontinuity Design to make a causal inference between adolescent adversity and long-term health. Specifically, we exploit the mandatory “send-down” policy during China’s Cult...

Most work by economists has been inconclusive when seeking a consistent relationship between income-support programs (like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)) and births to unwed women (or, as the literature traditionally terms it, illegitimacy). But a recent study (Kimenyi and Mbaku (1995)) reports a large, positive and statistically-significant relationship when data are weighted ...

Delayed First Birth and New Mothers’ Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Biological Fertility Shocks We investigate the impact of delaying the first birth on Italian mothers’ labor market outcomes around childbirth. The effect of postponing motherhood is identified using biological fertility shocks, namely the occurrence of miscarriages and stillbirths. Focusing on mothers’ behavior around fir...

Taxing Childcare: Effects on Family Labor Supply and Children Previous studies report a wide range of estimates for how female labor supply responds to childcare prices. We shed new light on this question using a reform that raised the prices of public daycare. Parents respond by reducing public daycare and increasing childcare at home. Parents also reduce informal childcare indicating that pub...

Low-Skilled Immigration and Parenting Investments of College-Educated Mothers in the United States: Evidence from Time-Use Data This paper uses several decades of US time-diary surveys to assess the impact of low-skilled immigration, through lower prices for commercial child care, on parental time investments. Using an instrumental variables approach that accounts for the endogenous location of...

Unwilling or Unable? Spatial, Institutional and SocioEconomic Restrictions on Females' Labor Market Access We analyze the effects of regional structures on both females’ willingness to work and the probability of being employed for those willing to work. Special permission was granted to link regional data to individual respondents in the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Results of a bivari...