In this paper we use a new data set describing households with and without twin children in China to quantify the trade-off between the quality and quantity of children using the incidence of twins that for the first time takes into account effects associated with the lower birthweight and...

This article conducts a systematic analysis of four bequest motives in a simple model of endogenous growth. It analyzes how bequest motives affect fertility, savings, growth, and the effects of pay-as-you-go Social Security. It is found that altruistic and exchange motives give equivalent...

A simple economic model of criminal behavior shows that welfare payments will reduce the time allocated to illegal activities under risk aversion and other reasonable assumptions. This theoretical prediction is confirmed by the empirical findings: using a set of cross-sectional U.S. state data...

In this paper, the effects of social security in a simple model of endogenous growth with alternative motives of having children are analyzed. It shows how the effects of social security depend on the size of the social security tax, the motive to have children, and the pattern of...

We review existing approaches to the specification and estimation of dynamic microeconomic models of fertility. Dynamic fertility models explain the evolution of fertility variates over the life-cycle as the solution to a dynamic programming model involving economic choices. Dynamic models may...

Data from two surveys of twins in China are used to contribute to an improved understanding of the role of economic development in affecting gender differences in the trends in, levels of, and returns to schooling observed in China and in many developing countries in recent decades. In...

Multinomial logit discrete-choice models are now being used more frequently in sociological research, but often without appropriate attention to the central role played by the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) property. In this article, three tests of the IIA property are discussed...

Using combined data from population censuses and Urban Household Surveys, we study the effects of demographic structural changes on the rise in household saving in China. Variations in fines across provinces on unauthorized births under the one-child policy and in cohort-specific fertility...

An interesting puzzle in estimating the effect of education on labor market earnings (Card (2001)) is that the 2SLS estimate for the return to schooling typically exceeds the OLS estimate, but the 2SLS estimate is fairly imprecise. We provide a new explanation that it could be due to the...