In a separate-property jurisdiction, marriage may induce domestic cooperation, and enhance efficiency in the production of children, because it may lend credibility to the prospective main earner's promise to compensate the main childcarer when the children will no longer be economically...

The economic analysis of labor and employment law is a bold effort to apply economic theory to explain important empirical facts about the regulation of the employment relationship and to provide positive predictions and normative analyses that are useful to policy-makers. This book draws...

The early contributions to the economic literature on this sub- ject assume that only market goods yield utility, and that the only way adults can secure the consumption of these goods in old age is by saving. More recent contributions recognize that the elderly derive utility also from the care...

Conventional pension systems suffer from a design defect which makes them financially unsustainable, and a source of inefficiency for the economy as a whole. The paper outlines a second-best policy which includes a public pension system made up of two parallel schemes, a Bismarckian one allowing...

The paper re-examines the idea that a family can be viewed as a community governed by a self-enforcing constitution, and extends existing results in two directions. First, it identi?es circumstances in which a constitution is renegotiation-proof. Second, it introduces parental altruism. The...

This chapter examines the scope for mutually beneficial intergenerational cooperation, and looks at various attempts to theoretically explain the emergence of norms and institutions that facilitate this cooperation. The contributions reviewed come from branches of economics as far apart as...