Children are increasingly treated as active members in the household.  However, their preferences over consumption and leisure are rarely modelled.  This paper considers heterogeneity in siblings' preferences over leisure and consumption and builds a theoretical and empirical model for...

I study the impact of a universal child benefit on fertility and family well-being. I exploit the unanticipated introduction of a new, sizeable, unconditional child benefit in Spain in 2007, granted to all mothers giving birth on or after July 1, 2007. The regression discontinuity-type design...

We model the allocation of time resources by adult children between competing caring activities - those towards coresiding elderly and those towards coresiding children. We test the implications of our model for children's school performance by focusing on Indonesia, a country characterized by...

Considering family labor and hired labor as heterogeneous inputs, we present a theoretical framework in which the optimal decisions of a farm household on on-farm family and hired labor, off-farm labor supply, and leisure are determined uniquely and endogenously. Focusing on two alternative...

Achieving low unemployment in an environment of weak growth is a major policy challenge; a more egalitarian distribution of hours worked could be the key to solving it. Whether worksharing actually increases employment, however, has been debated controversially. In this article we present...

In spite of relatively generous public subsidies and a reputation for high quality, only a very limited proportion of Italian families use public child care. In this paper we explore the significance of various factors on the choices made between different types of child care. In part one, we...

In this paper we analyse with the PISA data on literacy achievement of fifteen-year-old pupils in six member countries of the OECD, whether the fact of having many siblings affects the individual educational outcome. The hypothesis that we test is whether parents? resources matter for...

According to the agenda for employment set by the EU in 2000 for the following ten years, the target for female employment was set at 60 per cent for the year 2010. While Northern and most Continental countries have achieved this quantitative target, the Mediterranean countries are lagging...

In this paper we analyse the sibling size and birth-order effect on educational achievement in Switzerland on the basis of PISA data. We find an overall modest size and birth-order effect. The sibling size effect, however, is a product of a substantial and significant negative size effect for...

Economic models of household behavior typically yield the prediction that increases in schooling levels and wage rates of married women lead to increases in their labor supply and reductions in fertility. In Italy, as well as in other Southern European countries, low labor market participation...