This paper extends Brock and Durlauf’s models on binary choice with social interactions. In the extended model, an individual will form expected behaviors of peers taking into account their characteristics. The expected behaviors of peers in a group are heterogeneous. The expectations of peers are determined as rational expectations. We consider models in both group and network settings. Endoge...

We leverage non-linearities in Danish child support guidelines and rich administrative data to provide causal estimates of parental behavioral responses to child support obligations. We estimate that a 1, 000 DKK ($160) increase in a father’s obligation is associated with a 273 DKK ($45) increase in his payment. A higher obligation reduces father-child co-residence, pointing to substitution bet...

We use a Barro–Becker model of endogenous fertility, in which parents are subject to idiosyncratic shocks that are private information (either to labor productivity or taste for leisure), to study the efficient degree of consumption inequality in the long run. The planner uses the trade-off between family size and future consumption and leisure, to provide incentives for workers to reveal their...

Back to Baseline in Britain: Adaptation in the BHPS We look for evidence of adaptation in well-being to major life events using eighteen waves of British panel data. Adaptation to marriage, divorce, birth of a child and widowhood appears to be rapid and complete, whereas this is not the case for unemployment. These findings are remarkably similar to those in previous work on German panel data. ...

This paper examines the relationship between fertility and human capital investment and its implications for economic growth, focusing on the effects of declining mortality. Unlike the existing literature, this paper stresses the role of uncertainty about the number of surviving children. If the marginal utility of a surviving child is convex, then there will be a precautionary demand for child...

Does Breastfeeding Support at Work Help Mothers and Employers at the Same Time? This paper asks whether the availability of breastfeeding facilities at the workplace helps to reconcile breastfeeding and work commitments. Using data from the 2005 UK Infant Feeding Survey, we model the joint probability to return to work and breastfeeding and analyse its association with the availability of breas...

Pooling microdata from five Australian censuses, I explore the relationship between child gender and divorce. By contrast with the United States, I find no evidence that the gender of the first child has a significant impact on the decision to marry or divorce. However, among two-child families, parents with two children of the same sex are 1.7 percentage points less likely to be married than p...

The Trade-off between Fertility and Education: Evidence from before the Demographic Transition The trade-off between child quantity and education is a crucial ingredient of unified growth models that explain the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth. We present first evidence that such a trade-off indeed existed before the demographic transition, exploiting a unique census-base...

This paper carries out an investigation into the socio-economic determinants of childbearing decisions made by couples in Italy. The analysis accounts for the characteristics of both possible parents. Our results do not support established theoretical predictions according to which the increase in the opportunity cost of motherhood connected to higher female labour participation is responsible ...

A number of studies have shown that teenagers who abstain from sex are more likely to graduate from high school and attend college than their sexually active peers. However, it is unclear whether this association represents a causal relationship or can be explained by unmeasured heterogeneity. This study employs a variety of econometric techniques to distinguish between these hypotheses using d...