This chapter describes the intellectual development and the empirical implications of the literature on the economics of fertility as it applies to fertility behavior in developed economies. The chapter reviews the literature on dynamic models of fertility behavior over the parents' life cycle,...

The chapter presents a survey and exposition of the development of the earnings function as an empirical tool for the analysis of the determinants of wage rates. Generically, the term earnings function has come to mean any regression of individual wage rates or earnings on a vector of personal,...

In traditional societies it is often argued that parents' desire for old age security in the form of transfers from their children provides an important motive for childbearing. Some doubt has been cast on this "old age security hypothesis" by recent estimates which suggest that the rate of...

Psychologists have developed effective survey methods of measuring how happy people feel at a given time. The relationship between how happy a person feels and utility is an unresolved question. Existing work in Economics either ignores happiness data or assumes that felt happiness is more or...

In this paper we develop a theory of the survey response decision process and apply it to the analysis of field office policy measures in an attempt to see which of these are effective in reducing panel attrition. We use data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to assess the effectiveness...

Measures of households’ past behavior, their expectations with respect to future events and contingencies, and their intentions with respect to future behavior are frequently collected using household surveys. These questions are conceptually difficult. Answering them requires elaborate...

A structural model of the demand for college attendance is derived from the theory of comparative advantage and recent statistical models of self-selection and unobserved components. Estimates from NBER-Thorndike data strongly support the theory. First, expected lifetime earnings gains influence...