The theoretical and empirical literature on parental investment focuses on whether child-specific parental investments reinforce or compensate for a child's initial endowments. However, many parental investments, such as neighborhood quality and family size and structure, are shared wholly or in...

The authors use data from the earlier and later cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to estimate the effect of marriage and childbearing on wages. Their estimates imply that marriage lowers female wages by between two and four percent in the year of marriage. Marriage also lowers...

The effective tax on earnings embodied in the Social Security retirement earnings test has been as high as 50 percent. Despite numerous empirical studies, there is surprisingly little agreement about whether the earnings test affects male labor supply. In this paper, the authors provide a...

This paper tests whether parents reinforce or compensate for child endowments. The authors employ birth weight as a proxy for endowments and estimate how the difference in birth weight across siblings impacts specific parental investments, including breastfeeding initiation and duration,...

This comprehensive, quantitative assessment of how injury sustained by service members deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan affects their subsequent labor market earnings also explores the extent to which retirement and disability payments compensate for any resulting earnings losses. The analysis...

To fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Department of Defense has relied heavily on its reserve components. Among the hardships of activation is the possibility that reservists might suffer an earnings loss following their period of active-duty service due to difficulties reentering the...

Age at first mariage has risen dramatically since the mid-1960s among a wide spectrum of the U.S. population. Researchers have considered many possible explanations for this trend. Few, though, have asked why individuals should want to delay marriage in the first place. One possibility is that...