The paper estimates how parents adjust bride-prices and land divisions to compensate their sons for differences in their schooling investments in rural China. The main estimate implies that when a son receives one yuan less in schooling investment than his brother, he will obtain 0.7 yuan more...

A substantial and growing fraction of children across Europe and the US live in single parent households. Law practices are evolving to encourage both parents to maintain contact with their children following parental separation/divorce, driven by the belief that such contact is in the best...

A substantial and growing fraction of children across Europe and the US live in single parent households. Law practices are evolving to encourage both parents to maintain contact with their children following parental separation/divorce, driven by the belief that such contact is in the best...

This paper uses seven nationally representative time use surveys in Latin America to identify key stylized facts regarding the quantity and quality of parental time investment on the skill formation of their children. Traditional models of household behavior have failed to account for the...

Twin births are often construed as a natural experiment in the social and natural sciences on the premise that the occurrence of twins is quasi-random. We present new population-level evidence that challenges this premise. Using individual data for more than 18 million births (more than 500,000...

Twin births are often used to instrument fertility to address (negative) selection of women into fertility. However recent work shows positive selection of women into twin birth. Thus, while OLS estimates will tend to be downward biased, twin-IV estimates will tend to be upward biased. This is...

Twin births are often construed as a natural experiment in the social and natural sciences on the premise that their occurrence is quasi-random. We present new population-level evidence challenging this premise. Using data on about 18 million births in 72 countries, we find that maternal...

Twin births are often construed as a natural experiment in the social and natural sciences on the premise that the occurrence of twins is quasi-random. We present new population-level evidence that challenges this premise. Using individual data for 17 million births in 72 countries, we...

Economists have devoted a tremendous amount of attention to understanding the role of parents in driving within-family income inequality and the motives behind their decisions. The empirical evidence, however, is mixed, with some papers finding reinforcing parental behavior, others finding...

The unequal treatment of children is not gender neutral from the parent side. Our results show that women try to compensate through debt for the unbalanced situation faced by their daughters compared to their sons. However, the lack of symmetry between mothers' and fathers' financial situations...