This chapter reviews the growing literature on the child quantity–quality (QQ) trade-off. During the transition from the traditional agricultural economy to modern economic growth, household real income increases, fertility decreases, and human capital investment per child increases. Motivated...

Using the 2010-2018 waves of the China Family Panel Studies, we investigate the impact of housing unaffordability on subjective well-being (SWB) among Chinese adolescents aged 10-15. Using a combined methodology of propensity score matching and fixed effects and instrumental variable...

We assess the role of gender-conforming social norms in household decision-making and gender inequalities in the labor market with a parsimonious household model that endogenizes commuting time. Using the American Community Survey 2008-2019, we test the model predictions and find that women in...

COVID-19 school closure has caused a worldwide shift towards technology-aided home schooling. Given widespread poverty in developing countries, this has raised concerns over new forms of learning inequalities. Using nationwide data on primary and secondary school children in slum and rural...

Socioeconomic (SES) gaps in academic achievement are well documented. We show that a very similar gap exists with respect to genetic differences measured by a polygenic score (PGS) for educational attainment. The genetic gap increases during elementary school, but only among the low SES...

We test whether households that face prospective home equity losses during a house price downturn use divorce to shed debt. We study the Dutch context, where qualifying homeowners can buy into a mortgage guarantee scheme that insures the lender against borrower default and transfers the risk to...

Rapid population aging elevates burden of chronic and non-communicable diseases among older adults. Despite the critical role of self-management in disease prevention and control, effective management of diseases can be cognitively demanding and may require additional supports from family and...

The occurrence of twin births has been widely used as a natural experiment. With a focus upon the use of twin births for identification of causal effects in economics, this chapter provides a critical review of methods and results.

This paper examines if the effect of parental labor market shocks on child development depends on the age of the child at the time of the shock. To address this question, we leverage rich Norwegian population-wide register data and exploit mass layoffs and establishment closures as a source of...

Schools are a key channel in formal reporting of violence against children, but this channel broke down with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We study how widespread such reporting declines are, and to what extent they were recovered once re-openings begin. Examining the universe of all...