Our main goal is to quantify the returns to a career in the United States Congress. We specify a dynamic model of career decisions of a member of Congress and estimate this model using a newly collected dataset. Given estimates of the structural model, we ...

In this paper we assess the value of retrospectively-ascertained information on the wantedness of children by evaluating (i) the extent to which such information provides an unbiased estimate of the excess births occurring solely as a consequence of imperfect fertility control and (ii) whether...

This paper outlines a simple dynamic model of child health incorporating uncertainty to demonstrate the complexity of household decision rules concerning the allocation of resources to and across children when there is variation in child traits within the family and in healthiness across...

In this paper we examine the allocation of resources in the form of shared housing provided by parents to their young adult children in the context of a model in which there are multiple optimizing offspring. We set out a framework for estimation that considers the constraints of available data...

Information on ability and achievement test scores of sibling children, many of whom had mothers who continued their schooling between births, is used to test the hypothesis that maternal schooling augments the production of children's human capital, that there are increasing returns to human...

An extensive literature in economics seeks to determine the quantitative impact of welfare benefits on economic and demographic behaviors. Most studies adopt a static choice framework to motivate their empirical specifications. The behaviors that are studied, however, have both immediate and...

In this paper, we provide estimates of welfare benefit effects on a set of behaviors that includes welfare participation, fertility, marriage, work and schooling using approximations to the decision rules that would be derived from an explicit dynamic optimization problem. We use the stylized...

None available