We present a theory of the emergence of laws restricting child labor or imposing mandatory education that is consistent with the fact that poor parents tend to oppose such laws. We find that if altruistic parents are unable to commit to educating their children, child-labor laws can increase the...

We argue from an empirical analysis of Latin-American household surveys that per capita income in the country of residence has a negative effect on child labor supply, even after controlling for other household characteristics. We then develop a theory of the emergence of mandatory-education...

According to Pareto (1896), the distribution of income depends on ``the nature of the people comprising a society, on the organization of the latter, and, also, in part, on chance.'' In the model developed here the ``nature of the people'' is captured by attitudes toward marriage, divorce,...

State-wide reports on police traffic stops and searches summarize very large populations, making them potentially powerful tools for identifying racial bias, particularly when statistics on search outcomes are included. But when the reported statistics conflate searches involving different...

This paper describes an overlapping-generations model of marriage, fertility, and income distribution.

Is variation by motorist race in the success rate of searches informative about racial bias if police are motivated by crime minimisation rather than success-rate maximisation? We show that the basic idea of extracting information from 'hit rates' may still be valid, provided one can verify some...

State-wide reports on police traffic stops and searches summarize very large populations, making them potentially powerful tools for identifying racial bias, particularly when statistics on search outcomes are included. But when the reported statistics conflate searches involving different...

Low sex ratios are often equated with unfavorable marriage prospects for women, but in France after World War 1, the marriage probability of single females rose 50%, despite a massive drop in the male/female ratio. We conjecture that the war-time birth-rate bust induced an abnormal postwar...

We develop a simple competitive equilibrium model of the marriage market with single mothers and step-families. We then explore the role of trends in relative wages and other observed changes, such as women's wages and contraception technology, in accounting for the evolution of the distribution...