Structural transformation in rural Viet Nam has led to rising incomes and a diversification of livelihoods away from agriculture. Using panel data on children in 2,181 rural households surveyed over the 2008-14 period, we examine how the welfare of children has been impacted by structural...

Economists have long been concerned that negative attitudes about relative income reduce social welfare. This paper investigates whether such attitudes can be mitigated by a simple information treatment. Toward this end, we conducted an original randomized online survey experiment in the US and...

In this paper we study the determinants of use of formal and informal credit sources. Given that awareness is a necessary step towards use of credit, in order to control for the possible selection bias we decompose the decision to use credit as a two stage decision process in which first,...

We develop a model in which novelty and conformity motivate fashion behavior. Fashion cycles occur if conformity is not too high. The duration of fashion cycles depends on individual-specific conformity, novelty, and the number of available styles. The use of individual-specific novelty and...

Most empirical studies assume only monotonic preferences for households. Behavioral research however providessubstantial evidence that preferences for wealth are measured relative to a reference point. In this paper weintroduce and solve a two-period consumption and savings model for a...

This paper studies the effects of local marriage markets on South African women’s marital decisions. The analysis is motivated by the low proportion of married among African mothers since 48% are never married. This means that the children of all these never married mothers have no access to...

There is a small but growing literature on the determinants of social capital. Most of these studies use a measure of trust to define social capital empirically. In this paper we use three different measures of social capital: the size of the individual’s social network, the extent of their...

Teenage motherhood is very high in South Africa. In 2001, 55 per thousand African South African women and 82 per thousand Coloured South African women were teenage mothers as compared to 8 among Indian South Africans and 3 among White South African women. In this paper we use the South African...

This paper focuses on the time allocation of spouses and the impact of economic variables. We present a stylized model of the time allocation of spouses to illustrate the expected impact of wages and non-labour income. The empirical model simultaneously specifies three time-use choices -paid...

This paper analyzes the time allocation of Italian spouses to paid work, childcare and household work. The literature suggests that Italian husbands contribute the least to unpaid household work, relative to other European countries, while Italian women have the lowest market employment rates....