There is limited empirical evidence on whether unrestricted cash social assistance to poor pregnant women improves children’s birth outcomes. Using program administrative micro-data matched to longitudinal vital statistics on the universe of births in Uruguay, we estimate that participation in...

Many countries are currently expanding access to child care for young children. But are all children equally likely to benefit from such expansions? We address this question by adopting a marginal treatment effects framework. We study the West German setting where high quality center-based care...

This paper attempts to disentangle the direct effects of experience from those of culture in determining fertility. We use the GSS to examine the fertility of women born in the US but from different ethnic backgrounds. We take lagged values of the total fertility rate in woman’s country of...

This paper examines a novel mechanism linking fertility and growth. There are three components to the model. First, increases in capital per worker raise women's relative wages, since capital is more complementary to women's labour input than to men's. Second, increasing women's relative wages...

Gender stereotypes are well established also among women. Yet, a recent literature suggests that learning from other women experience about the effects of maternal employment on children outcomes may increase female labor force participation. To further explore this channel, we design a...

This paper models gender discrimination in the labor market as originating from bargaining between husbands and wives within the family. The husband-wife household bargains over resource distribution, with each spouse's bargaining power determined by his/her market income. Men are reluctant to...

It is well known that highly `female' fields of study in tertiary education are characterized by higher fertility. However, existing work does not disentangle the selection-causality nexus. We use variation in gender composition of fields of study implied by the recent expansion of tertiary...

The most commonly used measure of reproductive behavior is the total fertility rate (TFR), which is a measure of the number of children born per woman. However, almost no work exists measuring the fertility behavior of men. In this paper we use survey data from several recent waves of the...

We consider a society where parents prefer boys to girls, but also value grandchildren. Parental sex selection results in a biased sex ratio that is socially inefficient, due to a congestion externality in the marriage market. Improvements in selection techniques aggravate the inefficiency....

Until the early decades of the 20th century, women spent more than 60% of their prime-age years either pregnant or nursing. Since then, the introduction of infant formula reduced women's comparative advantage in infant care, by providing an effective breast milk substitute. In addition, improved...