The twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Gary Becker's path-breaking Treatise on the Family provides an occasion to reexamine both the American family and family economics. We begin by discussing how families have changed in recent decades: the separation of sex, marriage, and...

We analyze the way women's education influences the effect of children on their level of labor market involvement. We propose an econometric model that accounts for the endogeneity of labor market and fertility decisions, for the heterogeneity of the effects of children and their correlation...

We use panel data from NLSY79 to analyze the effects of the timing and spacing of births on the labor supply of married women in a framework that accounts for the endogeneity of labor market and fertility decisions, the heterogeneity of the effects of children and their correlation with the...

Goldin and Katz [2002], in an influential paper, argued that giving unmarried minors access to the contraceptive Pill was instrumental for women's professional advancement, because such access allowed marriage to be postponed. However, by 1960, married women could get the Pill and thence it is...

Little is known about why cohabiting couples have fewer children than married couples. We explore the factors that explain the difference in fertility between these two groups using a switching regression analysis, which enables us to quantify the contribution of different factors through a...

Identifying the effect of parental incomes on child outcomes is difficult due to the correlation of unobserved ability, education levels and income. Previous research has relied on the use of instrumental variables to identify the effect of a change in household income on the young adult...

We study the steady state of an overlapping generations economy where singles search for spouses. In our model economy men and women live for many years and they differ in their fecundity, in their earnings, and in their survival probabilities. These three features are age-dependent and...

The principal means by which individuals and families achieve economic self-sufficiency is through labor market earnings. As a consequence, it is natural for policy makers to look to interventions that increase the ability of individuals and families to achieve an adequate standard of living...

The nineteenth century witnessed dramatic improvements in the legal rights of married women. Given that these changes took place long before women gained the right to vote, they amounted to a voluntary renouncement of power by men. In this paper, we investigate men's incentives for sharing power...

This paper considers the effect of spouse's characteristics on three aggregated non-paid time uses, active leisure time; child caregiving time; and home production time, using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). The time diary of each married individual with children under the age of 13 (mothers...