We use a model of human capital investment and activity choice to explain facts describing gender differentials in the levels and returns to human capital investments. These include the higher return to and level of schooling, the small effect of healthiness on wages, and the large effect of...

Using Current Population Survey (CPS) data from 1989 to 1999, we examine the impact of family cap policies, which deny incremental welfare benefits, on out-of-wedlock birth rates. We use the first five states that were granted waivers from the Department of Health and Human Services to implement...

Ireland's relatively late and feeble fertility transition remains poorly-understood. The leading explanations stress the role of Catholicism and a conservative social ethos. This paper reports the first results from a project that uses new samples from the 1911 census of Ireland to study...

The decline of human fertility that occurred in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, and elsewhere in the twentieth century, remains a topic of debate largely because there is no accepted explanation for the event. Disagreement persists in part because researchers have rarely used...

Using micro-data from 1984 and 1993 in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, this paper estimates a dynamic stock adjustment model, relating observed drops in fertility post-Communism to new wages, prices, and risks. Earnings influence total demand for children during Communism through substitution...

Two explanations for the weakening of the nuclear family are increased state support of poor unmarried mothers, and increased wage earning opportunities for women relative to those available for men. This paper tests both of these hypotheses by estimating a model for the joint determination of...