Following the death of Mao in 1976, abandonment of collective farming lifted millions from poverty and heralded sweeping pro-market policies. How did China's excess in male births respond to rural land reform? In newly-available data from over 1,000 counties, a second child following a daughter...

China’s population is set to age fast, owing to low fertility and rising life expectancy. With ongoing migration of the younger cohorts to urban areas the increase in the old-age dependency ratio will be even more pronounced in rural than in urban areas. Very different pension arrangements...

Several recent papers have concluded that precautionary saving motives are needed to reconcile data on lifetime patterns of consumption and income with a standard optimising model. In this paper we contest that we necessarily need a precautionary motive and we show that if we take consumption to...

This paper investigates the impact of a conditional cash transfer on child nutritional status in Brazil. We use data from "Bolsa Família" Research Impact Evaluation. "Bolsa Família" is a conditional cash transfer program focused on Brazilian poor families. In order to evaluate the average...

Using the ECHP, we explored the determinants of having the first child in Spain. Our main goal was to study the relation between female wages and the decision to enter motherhood. Since the offered wage of non-working women is not observed, we estimate it and impute a potential wage to each...

Individual fertility preference is influenced by observed social norms. The present paper estimates the effect of the observed fertility of peers on a woman’s fertility preference. We find that both neighbourhood peers and religious peers have a significant impact on individual fertility...

We study the effect of alternative parental teaching strategies on the propensity to save and the amount saved during adulthood. Using a panel dataset from the Dutch DNB Household Survey we find that parental teaching to save increases the likelihood that an adult will save by 16%, and the...

We study the effect of alternative parental teaching strategies on the propensity to save and the amount saved during adulthood. Using a panel dataset from the Dutch DNB Household Survey we find that parental teaching to save increases the likelihood that an adult will save by 16%, and the...

Why do some men father children outside of marriage but not provide support? Why are some single women willing to have children outside of marriage when they receive little or no support from unmarried fathers? Why is this behavior especially common among blacks? To shed light on these...