A longstanding question in the economics of the family is the relationship between sibship size and subsequent human capital formation and economic welfare. If there is a causal quantity-quality tradeoff, then policies that discourage large families should lead to increased human capital, higher...

Given the intrinsically sequential nature of child birth, timing of a child's birth has consequences not only for itself, but also for its older and younger siblings. The paper argues that prior and posterior spacing between consecutive siblings are thus important measures of intensity of...

The paper analyzes 141 villages in Matlab, Bangladesh from 1974 to 1996, in which half the villages received from 1977 to 1996 a door-to-door outreach family planning and maternal-child health program. Village and individual data confirm a decline in fertility of about 15 percent in the program...

The paper deals with female employment in developing countries. We set out a model to test our argument that, at the first stage of development, demographic and health programmes have proven to be more effective for women's position in the society than specific labour and income support...

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Gary Becker's path-breaking Treatise on the Family provides an occasion to reexamine both the American family and family economics. We begin by discussing how families have changed in recent decades: the separation of sex, marriage, and...

Population policies are defined here as voluntary programs which help people control their fertility and expect to improve their lives. There are few studies of the long-run effects of policy-induced changes in fertility on the welfare of women, such as policies that subsidize the diffusion and...

We study the effect of child care costs on the fertility behavior of Swedish women and find that reductions in child care charges influence fertility decisions, even when costs are initially highly subsidized. Exploiting the exogenous variation in child care costs caused by a Swedish child care...