African-American consumers differ markedly from their Caucasian counterparts in terms of financial product preferences, product research, and investment asset portfolio composition. This study examines some of the principal differences between African-American and Caucasian households in evaluating and purchasing investment assets and explores differences in asset holdings between the two racia...

Short-Run and Long-Term Effects of Childbirth on Mothers’ Employment and Working Hours Across Institutional Regimes: An Empirical Analysis Based on the European Community Household Panel The employment behavior of mothers is strongly influenced by labor market regulations and certain institutional arrangements, which both vary greatly across European countries. Using the European Community Hous...

Exponential Growth Bias and Financial Literacy The tendency to underestimate the future value of a variable growing at a constant rate, an example of exponential growth bias, has been linked to household financial decision making. We show that exponential growth bias and standard measures of financial literacy are negatively correlated in a representative sample of Swedish adults. Since financi...

this paper evaluates the welfare effects of price changes in the main commodity groups in iran. using the iranian urban households’ data issued by the iranian statistics center over the period 1994-2007 we estimate the subsistence level. in addition, using the results from the linear expenditure system we calculate the price and income elasticities along with the compensation and equivalent var...

The Effect of Power Outages and Cheap Talk on Willingness to Pay to Reduce Outages Using an open-ended contingent valuation survey, we analyze how (i) experience of a power outage due to one of the worst storms ever to hit Sweden and (ii) a cheap talk script affect respondents’ WTP to avoid power outages. Experience significantly increases and a cheap talk script decreases the proportion of res...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the effects of weight-based pricing in the collection of household waste. Using a comprehensive panel data set on all households in a Dutch municipality we estimate short-run as well as long-run price effects for the amounts of both compostable and non-recyclable household waste. We find significant and sizeable price effects, with the elasticity for...

The Measurement of Child Costs: Evidence from Ireland We apply an extension of the Rothbarth approach to estimate the share of household resources accruing to children (i.e., the cost of children) in Ireland. The method also allows us to identify the economies of scale in the household and indifference scales in Lewbel (2003)’s sense. A practical aspect of the present approach is that it does n...

Household accumulation of debt and arrears on debt, especially among low income families, is an extremely topical issue in the UK media and in policy circles. The paper utilises data from the UK’s Survey of Low Income Families in order to examine use of credit, and default and arrears, among low income families with children. It shows how credit use and accumulation of arrears differs between s...

Why do some men father children outside of marriage without providing support? Why do some women have children outside of marriage when they receive little support from fathers? Why is this behavior more common among blacks than whites? We estimate a dynamic equilibrium model of marriage, employment, fertility, and child support decisions. We consider the extent to which low earnings, marriage ...

This note presents a detailed formal derivation of the equilibrium conditions of a variation of the deep habit model developed by Ravn, Schmitt-Grohé, and Uribe (2003). In the present note, the single-period utility function depends on the quasi ratio of current consumption to the stock of habit of each variety, whereas in the original deep habit model it depends on the quasi difference of thes...