Empirical evidence about the relationship between legal gambling and crime is mixed; some studies find that legalized gambling increases crime and others find no relationship between legalized gambling and crime, controlling for other factors like hotels. We develop a utility maximizing model of time spent in legal work, crime, and leisure and use this model to understand the relationship betwe...

The Effectiveness of Policies that Promote Labor Force Participation of Women with Children: A Collection of National Studies Numerous countries have enacted policies to promote the labor force participation of women around the years of childbearing, and unsurprisingly, many research articles have been devoted to evaluating their effectiveness. Perhaps more surprisingly, however, six such artic...

Parental Leave – A Policy Evaluation of the Swedish “Daddy-Month” Reform Many countries are trying to incentivize fathers to increase their share in parental leave and in household work to improve female labor market opportunities. Our unique data set stems from a natural experiment in Sweden. The data comprises all children born before (control group) and after the reform (treatment group) in ...

Although Mexico’s Conditional Cash Transfer Program Oportunidades has increased overall school enrollment, many adolescents do not attend school, especially in urban areas. This paper simulates the effects of changes in program design using a simple parametric method based on a simultaneous probability model of school attendance and child labor. The paper also provides alternative non parametri...

Gender Differences in Sickness Absence and the Gender Division of Family Responsibilities This study investigates possible reasons for the gender difference in sickness absence. We estimate both shortand long-term effects of parenthood in a within-couple analysis based on the timing of parenthood. We find that after entering parenthood, women increase their sickness absence by between 0.5 days ...

This paper examines the impact of a change in the German child benefit system in 1996, which led to a large increase in lump sum transfers to families with children. We analyze the impact on the labor force participation of family members as well as on household consumption directed to children. Comparing behavioral changes of adults with children with behavioral changes of adults without child...

Life Expectancy, Schooling, and Lifetime Labor Supply: Theory and Evidence Revisited This paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the role of life expectancy for optimal schooling and lifetime labor supply. The results of a simple prototype Ben-Porath model with age-specific survival rates show that an increase in lifetime labor supply is not a necessary, nor a sufficient, condit...

Supporters of recent welfare reforms argue that time limits and other eligibility restrictions serve recipients. We present a simple model of agents with present-biased preferences to investigate the theoretical validity of this claim. We first identify four types of outcome that describe the behavior of a present-biased agent in the absence of time limits. We then show that the behavioral cons...

Female Labour Supply, Human Capital and Welfare Reform We consider the impact of tax credits and income support programs on female education choice, employment, hours and human capital accumulation over the life-cycle. We analyze both the short run incentive effects and the longer run implications of such programs. By allowing for risk aversion and savings, we quantify the insurance value of al...

A model of time-consistent procrastination is developed to assess the extent to which the observed behavior is compatible with rational behavior. When a finite work requirement must be completed by a deadline, the remaining time for leisure is an exhaustible resource. With a positive rate of time preference, the optimal allocation of this resource results in more hours spent working (and fewer ...