This paper studies the effect of cultural attitudes on childcare provision, fertility, female labour force participation and the gender wage gap. Cross-country data show that fertility, female labour force participation and childcare are positively correlated with each other, while the wage gap seems to be negatively correlated with these variables. The paper presents a model with endogenous fe...

Marginal tax rate changes have the ability to affect fertility decisions by altering the opportunity cost of time through a change in the after-tax wage. Using a natural experiments framework developed to examine women’s labor force participation we investigate the effect of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 on marital fertility. The data were from the March Current Population Survey. We find the wome...

Israel’s 1994 adoption of free in vitro fertilization (IVF) provides a natural experiment for how fertility time horizons impact women’s marriage timing and other outcomes. We find substantial increase average age at first following the policy change, using both men Arab-Israeli women as comparison groups. This shift appears to be driven by increased marriages older younger delaying marriage. A...

Substitution Effects in Parental Investments The paper estimates how parents adjust bride-prices and land divisions to compensate their sons for differences in their schooling investments in rural China. The main estimate implies that when a son receives one yuan less in schooling investment than his brother, he will obtain 0.7 yuan more in observable marital and post-marital transfers as parti...

The Effect of Children on Specialization and Coordination of Partners’ Activities This paper first documents the extent of the specialization in time use in couple families, and the impact of children on this specialization. It then examines the links between the time allocations of partners in couple families, the impact of children on these links, and the effects these factors have on special...

The Family Gap in Wages: What Wombmates Reveal We shed new light on the effects of having children on hourly wages by exploiting access to data on the entire population of employed same-sex twins in Denmark. Our second contribution is the use of administrative data on absenteeism; the amount of hours off due to holidays and sickness. Our results suggest that childbearing reduces female hourly w...

A Socio-economic Analysis of Youth Disconnectedness Disconnectedness among youth can have several dimensions. From a socio-economic viewpoint, failure in school, unemployment and the lack of an intimate relationship are among the most important ones. In our samples from SOEP youth questionnaires, approximately 13% of young people in Germany between the ages of 17 and 19 are disconnected. The pe...

During World War I, the birth rate in France fell by 50 percent. Why? I build a model of fertility choices where the war implies a positive probability that a wife remains alone, a partially-compensated loss of a husband’s income, and a temporary decline in productivity followed by faster growth. I calibrate the model’s key parameters using pre-war data. I find that it accounts for 91 percent o...

The Impact of Participation in Sports on Educational Attainment: New Evidence from Germany We analyze the impact of exercising sports during childhood and adolescence on educational attainment. The theoretical framework is based on models of allocation of time and educational productivity. Using the rich information from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), we apply generalized ordered prob...

This paper investigates the relationship between growth and inequality from a demographic point of view. In an extended model of the accidental bequest with endogenous fertility, we analyze the effects of a decrease in the old-age mortality rate on the equilibrium growth rate as well as on the income distribution. We show that the relationship between growth and inequality is at first positive ...