To understand the issues involved, leading lawyers and economists examine various facets of the child support system from a law and economics perspective. They consider the incentives faced by both custodial and non-custodial parents, and search for policy actions that are more...

Based on subjective survival probability questions in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we use an econometric model to estimate the determinants of individual-level uncertainty about personal longevity. This model is built around the Modal Response Hypothesis (MRH), a mathematical...

This paper describes the job market experiences of new PhD economists, 2007-10. Using information from PhD programs' job candidate websites and original surveys, the authors present information about job candidates' characteristics, preferences and expectations; how job candidates fared at each...

In the past few years, there has been substantial progress in the application of the economic theory of household decision making to human fertility behavior. Theoretical emphasis has been given to the effects of the costs of parental tine and money resources devoted to rearing children on the...

In this paper, we discuss statistical problems that arise in studying sequences of quantal responses (e.g., labor force participation) in panel data on heterogeneous populations (i.e., populations in which there is unobserved variation in response probabilities). Assuming that response...

In traditional societies it is often argued that parents' desire for old age security in the form of transfers from their children provides an important motive for childbearing. Some doubt has been cast on this "old age security hypothesis" by recent estimates which suggest that the rate of...

A structural model of the demand for college attendance is derived from the theory of comparative advantage and recent statistical models of self-selection and unobserved components. Estimates from NBER-Thorndike data strongly support the theory. First, expected lifetime earnings gains influence...