The size of the average American household has fallen dramatically - from six in 1850 to three in 2000. To explain this decline we model households as collections of roommates who share the costs of household public goods. If private goods are more income elastic than public goods, as we...

This paper analyzes what adult children would do for their parents were they frail and in need of long-term care. Focusing on the special case of parents' illness, the paper then investigates altruism in Japanese children. Descriptive statistics show that about 30% of adult children living...

The question that this paper addresses is whether or not parents are altruistic towards their children. A new approach will be introduced, where the life satisfaction data of parents will be regressed onto the living conditions of their children who now live independently. After controlling for...

Much progress has been made in recent years on developing and applying a direct measure of utility using survey questions on subjective well-being. In this paper we explore whether this new type of measurement can be fruitfully applied to the study of interdependent utility in general, and...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the hypothesis that after leaving the educational system, labour market integration has a causal effect on first-birth decisions. The analysis focuses on two major research questions: First, how is the timing of first parenthood associated with previous...

This paper investigates the impact of unemployment on the propensity to start a family. Unemployment is accompanied by bad occupational prospects and impending economic deprivation, placing the well-being of a future family at risk. I analyze unemployment at the intersection of state-dependence...

An emerging question in demographic economics is whether there is a link between family size and the geographic distance between adult children and elderly parents. Given current population trends, understanding how different configurations of fam- ily size and sibship influence patterns of...

An emerging question in demographic economics is whether there is a link between family size and the geographic distance between adult children and elderly parents. Given current population trends, understanding how different configurations of family size and sibship influence patterns of...

This paper investigates how the permanent departure of the head from the household, mainly due to death or divorce, affects children's school enrolment and work participation in rural Colombia. In our empirical specification we use household-level fixed effects to deal with the fact that...