This paper investigates the causal impact of free primary education (FPE) on fertility decisions among parents in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the interplay between the policy, intra-household bargaining, and cultural norms. Using Demographic and Health Survey data and exploiting the...

Ethnically diverse countries are more prone to conflict, but why do some groups engage in conflict while others do not? I show that civil conflict is explained by ethnic groups' cultural distance to the central government: an increase in cultural distance, proxied by linguistic distance,...

There is a vigorous debate on whether arrests for domestic violence (DV) will deter future abuse or create a retaliatory backlash. We study how arrests affect the dynamics of DV using administrative data for over 124,000 DV emergency calls (999 calls) for West Midlands, the second most populous...

We study a situation where two players first choose a sharing rule, then invest into a joint production process, and then split joint benefits. We investigate how social preferences determine investments. In our experiment we find that even the materially disadvantaged player cares more for...

We present a non-cooperative model of a family's time allocation between work and a home-produced public good, and examine whether the income tax should apply to couples or individuals. While tax-induced labor supply distortions lead to overprovision of the public good, spouses' failure to...

A large fraction of domestically abused women report that their partners interfere with their participation in education and employment. As of yet, mainstream economics has not dealt in any systematic way with this phenomenon and its implications for welfare policy. This paper puts forward a...

Over the last several decades, there has been a widespread decrease in civic engagement coinciding with a breakdown in traditional family structures in many countries throughout the developed world. According to Putnam in Bowling alone (2000), however, none of the major declines in civic...

This paper explores the implications of gender-based income taxation in a non- cooperative model of a couple's time allocation between market work and providing a household public good. We find that the optimal structure of differential taxation by gender is solely determined by spouses'...

What role does affordable and widely available public child care play for fertility? We exploit a major German reform generating large temporal and spatial variation in child care coverage for children under the age of three. Our precise and robust estimates on birth register data reveal that...

We consider a bargaining model in which husband and wife decide on the allocation of time and disposable income. Since her bargaining power would go down otherwise more strongly, the wife agrees to have a child only if the husband also leaves the labor market for a while. The daddy months...