Research
Fertility Subsidies Can Have Ambiguous Effects on Birth Timing
Economics Letters 229, June 2023
Abstract: Pronatalist subsidies often vary with birth order (parity). I study the effect of such subsidies on birth timing in a life-cycle model of fertility choice. In the model, births permanently reduce the rate of human capital accumulation. While subsidies to marginal births always accelerate the time to next birth, subsidies to higher-order births can extend those times for women at low parities. The result is not driven by income effects, quantity-quality substitution, biological constraints, or uncertainty. Instead, it is that slower anticipated earnings growth in the future raises the marginal value of human capital in the present.
The Engel Curves of Noncooperative Households
(with Pierre-Andre Chiappori), The Economic Journal 130 (627), April 2020, p. 653 – 674
Abstract: We provide a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a system of Engel curves to have been generated by a non-cooperative model of family behaviour. These conditions fully characterise the local behaviour of household-level consumption in the cross-section, i.e., as a function of total income and distribution factors. In this setting, any demand system compatible with a non-cooperative model is also compatible with a collective model, but the converse is not true. We describe how these nested conditions may be tested using standard instrumental-variables strategies.