Legalization of abortion in the 1970s represents a major cultural change: it gives women a higher degree of freedom to directly control their fertility, allowing them to ultimately decide upon children without man's consent and to decrease uncertainty in their expected labor market returns. This...

Roughly one third of a cohort drop out of high school across OECD countries, and developing effective tools to address prime-aged high school dropouts is a key policy question. We leverage high quality Norwegian register data, and for identification we exploit reforms enabling access to high...

We draw lessons from existing work and our own analysis on the effects of parental leave and other interventions aimed at aiding families. The outcomes of interest are female employment, gender gaps in earnings and fertility. We begin with a discussion of the historical introduction of family...

In this paper, I assess whether earnings-dependent maternity leave positively impacts fertility and narrows the baby gap between highly educated (high-earning) and less-educated (low-earning) women. I exploit a major maternity leave benefit reform in Germany that considerably increased the...

This chapter provides an account of the major family transformations that occurred in recent decades across Latin American and Caribbean countries and examines the implications of such transformations for childrens school attendance and progress and womens labor force participation. Latin...

We investigate the role of grandparental childcare for fertility decisions of their offspring. Exploiting pension reforms in Italy, we argue that delayed retirement represents a negative shock to the supply of informal childcare for the next generation. We show that, when the maternal...

This paper uses microdata from Brazilian natality and mortality vital statistics between 2000 and 2010 to estimate the impact of in-utero exposure to local violence - measured by homicide rates - on birth outcomes. The estimates show that exposure to violence during the first trimester of...

One-quarter of married, fertile-age women in Sub-Saharan Africa report not wanting a pregnancy and yet do not use contraceptives. To study this issue, we collect detailed data on women’s subjective probabilistic beliefs and estimate a structural model of contraceptive choices. Our results...

Poor families have more children and transfer less resources to them. This suggests that family decisions about fertility and transfers dampen intergenerational mobility. To evaluate the quantitative importance of this mechanism, we extend the standard heterogeneous agent life cycle model with...