The paper re-examines the idea that a family can be viewed as a community governed by a self-enforcing constitution … renegotiation-proof. Second, it introduces parental altruism. The behavioural and policy implications are illustrated by showing the … effects of public pensions and credit rationing. These implications are not much affected by whether altruism is assumed or …

. Focusing on the special case of parents' illness, the paper then investigates altruism in Japanese children. Descriptive … care is not motivated entirely by altruism. We show that children provide parental care when their parents are wealthy …

, which can be interpreted as weak evidence for parental altruism. The paper uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel …

-enforcing family constitutions. We identify a circumstance in which an agent will behave differently if she is optimizing subject to a … family constitution, than if she is moved by either altruistic or exchange motivations. The circumstance is the presence of a … family constitution exists, but will have the opposite effect if the transfer is either a gift, or payments for services …

We analyze the effects of family ties on the incentives for productive effort. A family is modelled as a pair of … other. We show that altruism has a non-monotonic effect on effort. We study how this effect depends on climate, the … magnitude and volatility of returns to effort. We also analyze the evolutionary robustness of family ties and how this …