Research on child custody primarily focuses on the well-being of children following divorce. We extend this literature by examining how the prospect of joint child custody affects marriage-specific investment in children’s private-school education. Variation in the timing of joint-custody...

Whether the family makes decisions as a unit or through a collective decision making process has been tested elsewhere by examining whether the income pooling hypothesis holds or by examining whether premarital assets have significant effects on household consumptions. The results, however, may...

This paper examines how each parent's bargaining power affects intrahousehold resource allocations to children's nutrition and education. I test whether the marriage market condition summarized by the sex ratio affects the allocations and whether the parental resources are pooled. I also derive...

Altruism among family members can, in some cases, inhibit cooperation by increasing the utility that players expect to receive in a non-cooperative equilibrium. To test this, we examine agricultural productivity in polygynous households in West Africa. We find that cooperation is greater –...

Tariff reductions have gender-specific effects on the labor market that change the relative bargaining power within households, which in turn affects child outcomes. We estimate how changes in parental labor supply due to these tariff reductions affect child schooling by focusing on young...

In Germany, it has become conventional wisdom that the economic uncertainty associated fixed-term employment contracts prevents young couples from realizing their desire to have children. From a research perspective, it is however far from clear whether fixed-term contracts are the obstacle to...

The structure of a family may have important consequences for the material well-being of its members. For example, in large families, an individual must share resources with many others, but she may benefit from economies of scale in consumption. In this paper, we study individual consumption in...

Gaps in welfare attainment between boys and girls in China have attractedinternational attention. In this paper demand analysis is used to try and uncoverthe factors which may be driving the emergence of these gender gaps.Drawing on household expenditure data from a poor (Sichuan) and rich...

This paper investigates the gendered effects of the cost-of-living crisis on households across six European countries using household consumption data linked to price changes between April 2021 and July 2023. It examines how different consumption patterns between male- and female-headed...

The author wants to note that welfare reform is but one part of what is happening politically to gender relations, to women, and to poor mothers, even within the system of income support, in the United States. Of particular importance within income support is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC),...