We use survey data on twins in urban China, among whom many experienced the consequences of the forced mass rustication movement of the Cultural Revolution, to identify the roles of altruism, favoritism, and guilt in affecting family behavior. We exploit the fact that many families were forced...

This paper is based on the idea that for each partner in a marriage, there are two distinct types of leisure. One type is each person's independent (or private) leisure, and the other type is spousal leisure, whose importance has long been emphasized in the literature of psychology. While each...

Bequest to and marriage of children can lead to a Pareto-inefficient allocation. The inefficiency (or market failure) arises because one family, making a bequest to its own child, ignores the contribution to the utility of the other family whose child enters the marriage. This note shows that an...