Econometric simulations provide no evidence that families in West Virginia encouraged sons to drop out of high school in order to earn income as coal miners, at the net expense of later income that they would have earned with more education. Estimates of the typical family's subjective rate of...

In the presence of two-sided altruism, i.e., when parents and children care about each other’s utility, increases in parental income need not always lead to increases in schooling and to decreases in child labor. This surprising result derives from the systematic way capital market constraints...

The income contribution of child work is undoubtedly a key factor influencing child work and schooling decisions. Yet, few studies have attempted to directly measure this contribution. This is particularly the case for work performed on the household farm, as is the case for the vast majority of...

Economic research by and large is dominated by a ‘rationality’ paradigm. Economic decision making within this paradigm is viewed as a maximising procedure. In general the latter represents the decision-making as a choice amongst a well defined set of alternatives. In this paper we question...

If partners derive utility from joint leisure time, it is expected that they will coordinate their work schedules in order to increase the amount of joint leisure time. This paper tries to answer three questions using a new matching procedure where couples are matched to other couples. (1) Do...

The consumption literature uses adult equivalence scales to measure individual level inequality. This practice imposes the assumption that there is no within household inequality. In this paper, we show that ignoring consumption inequality within households produces misleading estimates of...

This paper argues that spacing between consecutive births is an important aspect of competition among siblings for survival. Since parents simultaneously choose their desired values of birth spacing and the amount of time and other resources invested in children (which in turn affect child...

This paper analyzes the household decision-making process leading to the allocation of time and consumption in the family. We estimate, on the British Household Panel Survey, a collective model of demand for leisure generalized to the production of a household public good. For the first time in...

Painkilling drugs produce a good called relief which reduces the fixed level of bad (pain) the individual is endowed with. These drugs have the side-effect of reducing the utility the individual gets from consuming goods. This means that the shadow price of relief counts not only the cost of...

We analyze how the financial crisis affected a wide range of investments in Indonesian children and children's outcomes including school enrollment, immunizations, and mortality. Our dataset is the National Socio-Economic Survey (Susenas), a large nationally representative sample. We build on...