Is it better to apply effort to increase personal consumption, or control what one wants? The model presented here provides a characterization of demand for self control, namely, its responsiveness to price and risk. Unlike most other models of self control, the model does not identify self...

Service was one of the main characteristics of the European Marriage Pattern in pre-industrial western Europe. During this stage of the life cycle adolescents could acquire the material assets and skills that were required to marry and start an independent household. Whilst in service, servants...

The reorientation occurred in the socioeconomic, politic and institutional development of the Latin American and Caribbean countries, since 80's decade, provoke significant transformations in the regional rural spaces. The socioeconomic bipolarization is one of the most remarkable phenomena in...

Research on child custody primarily focuses on the well-being of children following divorce. We extend this literature by examining how the prospect of joint child custody affects marriage-specific investment in children’s private-school education. Variation in the timing of joint-custody...

The dynamics of multiple time use in paid work and in household activities with housework, child rearing and DIY of married women are analyzed with a two step procedure: the estimation of the participation decision in intertemporal labor force participation strategies (entering, leaving the...

In the past 30 years, microfinance has carried many promises of social and economic transformation, with the shift towards targeting women being seen as a major strategic move through which the promise of social development could be most effectively delivered. However, ethnographic studies have...

This paper detects pro-girl (age 5-15) bias in intrahousehold allocation of consumption budget in the rural Philippines using Deaton’s “adult goods” method. Based on additional checks (including those for endogeneity), the results appear to be robust. The paper also finds that a larger...

We analyze differences by gender in the time dedicated to total work (paid and unpaid) by families in Latin America, with particular attention to the effect of social norms. To this end, we use survey data on time use in Mexico (2009), Peru (2010), Ecuador (2012) and Colombia (2012), to estimate...

This paper investigates the impacts of firm technology choice on cross-country variations in gender gaps---particularly those variations in the wages and time devoted to home production. For this purpose, we construct a general equilibrium model that includes firm technology choice and home...

We prove the existence of a Pareto optimal state of a finite society that has socially differentiated persons, each with non-binary personal preferences that quasi-order a finite set of alternatives. Everybody engages in a volitional act of choice by maximization of non-binary preferences. As a...