This dissertation contains three essays analyzing how families form and how family members interact. The first chapter studies and connects recent trends in age at marriage and divorce. The second chapter looks within marriages to analyze household bargaining. The final chapter examines the effects on cohort characteristics of the changes in fertility induced by the legalization of abortion. In my first essay, I explore the extent to which the rise in age at marriage can explain the rapid decrease in divorce rates for cohorts marrying from 1980 to 2004. Three different empirical approaches all demonstrate that an increase in women’s age at marriage can explain at least 60 percent of the decline in the hazard of divorce since 1980. I further develop and simulate an integrated model of the marriage market to demonstrate that monotone decreases in gains to marriage could lead to both the initial rise in divorce and its subsequent fall. My second essays analyzes the impact of the early 1990s state waivers from welfare guidelines to understand how changes in options outside of marriage affect household expenditures. Welfare waivers decreased the public assistance available to impoverished divorced women and thereby reduced a woman’s bargaining threat point in marriage. Using expenditure data and an empirical synthetic control approach, I find that decreases in potential welfare benefits altered the expenditure patterns of two-parent families containing less-educated or stay-at-home mothers. The changes in expenditure patterns suggest that reductions in a wife’s outside options cause her utility within marriage to decline. My third essay examines how cohorts whose mothers had legal and safe access to abortion differ from those whose mothers did not. Using both birth certificate and wage data, I demonstrate that granting women access to abortion led to changes in child characteristics, even among groups of children born within months or weeks of each other. Analysis further suggests that soon after legalization, women used abortion to better-time their births. Moreover, access to abortion increased the eventual wages of low-wage, black, and Hispanic workers but not the wages of whites or high-wage workers. / Economics

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This thesis is concerned with a fundamental unit of the economy: Households. Even in advanced economies, upwards of 70% of the population live in households composed of multiple people. A large number of decisions are taken at the level of the household, that is to say, they are taken jointly by household members: How to raise children, how much and when to work, how many cartons of milk to purchase. How these decisions are made is therefore of great importance for the people who live in them and for their well-being.But precisely because household members make decisions jointly it is hard to know how they come about and to what extent they benefit individual members. This is why households are often viewed as unique decision makers in economics. Even if they contain multiple people, they are treated as though they were a single person with a single set of preferences. This unitary approach is often sufficient and can be a helpful simplification. But in many situations it does not deliver an adequate description of household behavior. For instance, the unitary model does not permit the study of individual wellbeing and inequality inside the household. In addition, implications of the unitary model have been rejected repeatedly in the demand literature.Bargaining models offer an alternative where household members have individual preferences and come to joint decisions in various ways. There are by now a great number of such models, all of which allow for the study of bargaining power, a measure of the influence a member has in decision making. This concept is important because it has implications for the welfare of individuals. If one household member’s bargaining power increases, the household’s choices will be more closely aligned with that member’s preferences, ceteris paribus.The three chapters below can be divided into two parts. The first part consists of Chapter 1, which looks to detect the influence of intra-household bargaining in a specific set of consumption choices: Consumption of the arts. The research in this chapter is designed to measure aspects of the effect of bargaining power in this domain, but does not seek to quantify bargaining power itself or to infer economic well-being of household members.Precisely this last point, however, is the focus of the second part of the thesis, consisting of Chapters 2 and 3. These focus specifically on the recovery of one measure of bargaining power, the resource share. Resource shares have the advantage of being interpretable in terms of economic well-being, which is not true of all such measures. They are estimated as part of structural models of household demand. These models are versions of the collective model of household decision making.Pioneered by Chiappori (1988) and Apps and Rees (1988), the collective model has become the go-to alternative to unitary approaches, where the household is seen as a single decision-making unit with a single well-behaved utility function. Instead, the collective model allows for individual utility functions for each member of the household. The model owes much of its success to the simplicity of its most fundamental assumption: That whatever the structure of the intra-household bargaining process, outcomes are Pareto-efficient. This means that no member can be made better off, without making another worse off. Though the model nests unitary models as special cases, it does have testable implications.The first chapter of the thesis is entitled “Household Decisions on Arts Consumption” and is joint work with Caterina Mauri, who has also collaborated with me on many other projects in her capacity as my girlfriend. In it, we explore the role of intra-household bargaining in arts consumption. We do this by estimating demand for various arts and cultural events such as the opera or dance performances using a large number of explanatory variables. One of these variables plays a special role. This variable is a distribution factor, meaning that it can be reasonably assumed to affect consumption only through the bargaining process, and not by modifying preferences. Such variables play an important role in the household bargaining literature. Here, three such variables are used. Among them is the share of household income that is contributed by the husband, the canonical distribution factor.The chapter fits into a literature on drivers of arts consumption, which has shown that in addition to such factors as age, income and education, spousal preferences and characteristics are important in determining how much and which cultural goods are consumed. Gender differences in preferences in arts consumption have also been shown to be important and to persist after accounting for class, education and other socio-economic factors (Bihagen and Katz-Gerro, 2000).We explore to what extent this difference in preferences can be used to shed light on the decision process in couples’ households. Using three different distribution factors, we infer whether changes in the relative bargaining power of spouses induce changes in arts consumption.Using a large sample from the US Current Population Survey which includes data on the frequency of visits to various categories of cultural activities, we regress atten- dance rates on a range of socio-economic variables using a suitable count data model.We find that attendance by men at events such as the opera, ballet and other dance performances, which are more frequently attended by women than by men, show a significant influence of the distribution factors. This significant effect persists irrespec- tively of which distribution factor is used. We conclude that more influential men tend to participate in these activities less frequently than less influential men, conditionally on a host of controls notably including hours worked.The second chapter centers around the recovery of resource shares. This chapter is joint work with Denni Tommasi, a fellow PhD student at ECARES. It relies on the collective model of the household, which assumes simply that household decisions are Pareto-efficient. From this assumption, a relatively simple household problem can be formulated. Households can be seen as maximizers of weighted sums of their members’ utility functions. Importantly the weights, known as bargaining weights (or bargaining power), may depend on many factors, including prices. The household problem in turn implies structure for household demand, which is observed in survey data.Collective demand systems do not necessarily identify measures of bargaining power however. In fact, the ability to recover such a measure, and especially one that is useful for welfare analysis, was an important milestone in the literature. It was reached by (Browning et al. 2013) (henceforth BCL), with a collective model capable of identi- fying resource shares (also known as a sharing rule). These shares provide a measure of how resources are allocated in the household and so can be used to study intra- household consumption inequality. They also take into account that households gen- erate economies of scale for their members, a phenomenon known as a consumption technology: By sharing goods such as housing, members of households can generate savings that can be used elsewhere.Estimation of these resource shares involves expressing household budget shares functions of preferences, a consumption technology and a sharing rule, each of which is a function of observables, and letting the resulting system loose on the data. But obtaining such a demand system is not free. In addition to the usual empirical speci- fications of the various parts of the system, an identifying assumption has to be made to assure that resource shares can be recovered in estimation. In BCL, this is the assumption that singles and adult members of households share the same preferences. In Chapter 2, however, an alternative assumption is used.In a recent paper, Dunbar et al. (2013) (hereafter DLP) develop a collective model based on BCL that allows to identify resource shares using assumptions on the simi- larity of preferences within and between households. The model uses demand only for assignable goods, a favorite of household economists. These are goods such as mens’ clothing and womens’ clothing for which it is known who in a household consumes them. In this chapter, we show why, especially when the data exhibit relatively flat Engel curves, the model is weakly identified and induces high variability and an im- plausible pattern in least squares estimates.We propose an estimation strategy nested in their framework that greatly reduces this practical impediment to recovery of individual resource shares. To achieve this, we follow an empirical Bayes method that incorporates additional (or out-of-sample) information on singles and relies on mild assumptions on preferences. We show the practical usefulness of this strategy through a series of Monte Carlo simulations and by applying it to Mexican data.The results show that our approach is robust, gives a plausible picture of the house- hold decision process, and is particularly beneficial for the practitioner who wishes to apply the DLP framework. Our welfare analysis of the PROGRESA program in Mexico is the first to include separate poverty rates for men and women in a CCT program.The third Chapter addresses a problem similar to the one discussed in Chapter 2. The goal, again, is to estimate resource shares and to remedy issues of imprecision and instability in the demand systems that can deliver them. Here, the collective model used is based on Lewbel and Pendakur (2008), and uses data on the entire basket of goods that households consume. The identifying assumption is similar to that used by BCL, although I allow for some differences in preferences between singles and married individuals.I set out to improve the precision and stability of the resulting estimates, and so to make the model more useful for welfare analysis. In order to do so, this chapter approaches, for the first time, the estimation of a collective household demand system from a Bayesian perspective. Using prior information on equivalence scales, as well as restrictions implied by theory, tight credible intervals are found for resource shares, a measure of the distribution of economic well-being in a household. A modern MCMC sampling method provides a complete picture of the high-dimensional parameter vec- tor’s posterior distribution and allows for reliable inference.The share of household earnings generated by a household member is estimated to have a positive effect on her share of household resources in a sample of couples from the US Consumer Expenditure survey. An increase in the earnings share of one percentage point is estimated to result in a shift of between 0.05% and 0.14% of household resources in the same direction, meaning that spouses partially insure one another against such shifts. The estimates imply an expected shift of 0.71% of household resources from the average man to the average woman in the same sample between 2008 and 2012, when men lost jobs at a greater rate than women.Both Chapters 2 and 3 explore unconventional ways to achieve gains in estimator precision and reliability at relatively little cost. This represents a valuable contribution to a literature that, for all its merits in complexity and ingenious modeling, has not yet seriously endeavored to make itself empirically useful. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This paper investigates factors that affect gender-based differences in intra-household bargaining power that are reflected in consumption decisions regarding the adoption of green technology. Using data from the Indian Human Development Survey-II and a probit regression analysis, I find that increasing the level of a woman’s education (a proxy for increasing bargaining power) increases the likelihood of her household adopting LPG, the cleanest fuel option available. I also create an experimental design to serve as a next step for future research and target data collection on individual-level factors and environmental outcomes. The setup is for a potential intervention that assesses whether there are gender-based differences in the propensity for men and women to purchase improved cookstoves, given increased access to credit as a means to increase bargaining power in the household.

The research project intends to investigate the responses of households to economic uncertainty and natural shocks and the coping strategies developed both in terms of growing migration rates and remittance inflows and of increasing labour supply. In the first Chapter, we employ household survey data from the Indian State of Kerala to evaluate how transfers of remittances sent from overseas respond to heterogeneous sectoral employment shocks experienced by migrants in the host country during the 2008 crisis. In the second chapter, migration and remittances have been investigated as coping strategies adopted by households after a dramatic flood that hit Bangladesh in August-September 2014. The combination of high-resolution satellite data to precisely measure our treatment variable and the difference-in-difference estimations allow us to causally identify the impact of the dramatic flooding on internal and international migration. The same robust estimation technique is then applied to evaluate the effect of the 2014 flood in Bangladesh on female labour force participation rate and on the probability for unemployed women to enter the labour force. In addition, correcting for selection into employment, we estimate how the flood affects the probability for women working in the household farm to engage in independent wage-earning activities, evaluatiing whether the expected rise in female labour force participation - instrumented by the shock intensity they face - would help to increase their bargaining power within the households.

This thesis investigates the factors that affect women's bargaining power within the household, in India. The first chapter introduces the literature on household bargaining mostly by describing how household outcomes like children's health indicators and expenditure pattern change with increase in resources under women's control. The second chapter describes the conceptual framework for intra-household bargaining. It discusses the two broad topics – household bargaining models and gendered institutions, that can be used to identify avenues for increasing women's bargaining power within the household. In chapters three and four, I analyze the factors that determine women's power position, using data on women's involvement in household decision making from a nationally representative longitudinal household survey (India Human Development Survey). The survey was conducted in over 40,000 Indian households, which covers over 200,000 individuals. In the third chapter, I investigate the effect of women's labor force participation on her involvement in household decision making. After addressing the issues of endogeneity using a fixed effects model, I find that her labor market participation significantly increases her involvement in decision making process, which can be seen as a direct outcome of her increased bargaining power. In my fourth chapter I analyze whether the women's bargaining power within the household increases with the presence of female politicians at both state and local level. Studying the causal impact of a variable like female political representation is generally riddled with concerns of endogeneity for existence of voter preference. Using share of seats won by women in man-woman close elections as an instrument for overall female representation in in a fixed effect model, I show that an increase in number of female state legislators can actually lead to an increase in the bargaining power of women. This chapter further shows that increase in women's involvement in decision making process in the household is also associated with the female political representation at local level. The fifth chapter concludes the dissertation by making policy recommendation for strengthening women's bargaining position within the household. / Ph. D.

This thesis sheds light on several aspects of the economics of marital formation, dissolution, and bargaining. The first chapter focuses on the relationship between divorce law and family wellbeing, and shows that lowering the cost of divorce can reduce spousal conflict. The second chapter analyzes the effects of property division laws upon divorce on marital instability and female labor supply. Results suggest that a redistribution of property rights over family assets in case of divorce towards the financially weaker spouse, usually the wife, may increase marital instability and reduce female labor supply. The third chapter examines the role of sex ratios in college in explaining family formation patterns of young adults. Empirical evidence suggests that individuals who are exposed to a larger fraction of opposite-sex school mates are more likely to be married or residing with a partner from the same field of study shortly after finishing school. / Esta tesis arroja luz sobre algunos aspectos de la economía de la formación, disolución y negociación familiar. El primer capítulo se centra en la relación entre la regulación sobre el divorcio y el bienestar de la familia, y muestra que una disminución del coste del divorcio puede reducir el nivel de conflicto entre esposos. El segundo capítulo analiza los efectos de las leyes de división de activos en caso de divorcio sobre la inestabilidad matrimonial y la oferta de trabajo de las mujeres. Los resultados sugieren que una redistribución de los derechos de propiedad sobre los activos familiares en caso de divorcio en favor de la parte financieramente más débil, habitualmente la mujer, puede aumentar la inestabilidad matrimonial y reducir la oferta de trabajo de las mujeres. El tercer capítulo examina el papel de la ratio de sexos en la universidad en explicar el patrón de formación familiar de adultos jóvenes. La evidencia empírica sugiere que los individuos que están expuestos a una mayor proporción de compañeros del sexo opuesto durante la universidad tienen más probabilidad de estar casados o residiendo con una pareja de la misma carrera, poco después de finalizar los estudios.

Le chapitre 1 évalue l'impact d'une politique publique au Pérou visant à améliorer l'accès à la justice et à réduire la violence contre les femmes. Ce chapitre utilise des données sur les centres de justice pour femmes (CJF) au Pérou, des institutions spécialisées qui emploient principalement des femmes et fournissent des services de police et des services juridiques pour réduire la violence fondée sur le genre. En examinant le déploiement progressif des CJF dans les districts, nous constatons que l'ouverture d'un centre augmente de 40 % le nombre de signalements de crimes spécifiques au genre et réduit d'environ 10 % l'incidence de la violence fondée sur le genre, mesurée par la violence domestique, les féminicides et les hospitalisations pour cause de santé mentale. Nous constatons en outre qu'une diminution de l'exposition des femmes à la violence domestique a des effets intergénérationnels : les CJF augmentent considérablement les investissements en capital humain pour les enfants, ce qui augmente la scolarisation, la présence scolaire et les résultats aux examens. Le chapitre 2 examine l'effet de la fécondité sur les décisions des parents albanais en matière d'offre de travail. Afin d'aborder la question de l'endogénéité potentielle de la décision de fécondité, j'exploite la préférence des parents albanais pour avoir des garçons combinés avec l'instrument de composition du genre des frères et sœurs comme source exogène de variation. En utilisant un échantillon représentatif de parents ayant au moins deux enfants, je constate un effet positif et significatif de la fécondité sur l'offre de travail pour les parents plus jeunes, moins scolarisés ou vivant dans une famille élargie. Les estimations pour les mères montrent qu'elles augmentent l'offre de travail en termes d'heures travaillées et de probabilité de travailler hors secteur rural. De même, la probabilité pour le père de travailler hors secteur rural et d'avoir un deuxième emploi augmente à la suite d'autres naissances. L'analyse de l'hétérogénéité suggère deux mécanismes plausibles : les services de garde offerts par des adultes non-parentaux (grands-parents) dans les familles élargies et les coûts financiers plus élevés liés au maintien d'un plus grand nombre d'enfants. Le chapitre 3 analyse l'effet du déplacement forcé de populations sur l'offre de travail des adultes et la scolarisation des enfants dans le contexte de l'après-guerre au Kosovo. Ce chapitre utilise la guerre du Kosovo de 1998-1999 et les déplacements massifs de population comme une expérimentation naturelle afin d'estimer l'impact du déplacement forcé dû au conflit sur les Kosovars qui sont partis et qui ont décidé de revenir par rapport à ceux qui sont restés pendant la guerre. J'exploite l'intéraction de la variation spatiale de l'intensité du conflit - mesurée par le nombre de victimes et de bombardements - et de la distance à la frontière albanaise comme source de variation exogène dans le statut de déplacement. Les résultats indiquent que les hommes kosovars déplacés sont moins susceptibles d'être employés dans le secteur agricole et de travailler pour leur propre compte, tandis que les femmes kosovares déplacées sont plus susceptibles d'être inactives. La perte d'actifs (terres, bétail, etc.) dans une économie agraire fondée sur les compétences et la perte de réseaux sociaux dans un marché du travail informel pourraient avoir réduit davantage la probabilité de trouver un emploi par rapport aux personnes qui sont restées. Toutefois, peu après le retour au pays, les résultats indiquent également que les hommes et les femmes kosovars déplacés sont plus susceptibles de travailler hors secteur rural, en particulier dans les secteurs de la construction et de l'administration publique, ce qui indique une reprise relativement rapide. En outre, les filles kosovares déplacées sont plus susceptibles d'être inscrites à l'école primaire, mais je ne constate aucun effet sur la scolarisation des garçons. / Chapter 1 evaluates the impact of a policy intervention in Peru aimed at improving access to justice and reducing violence against women. In many developing countries, access to justice remains unequal, especially for women. What are the implications of this inequality for gender-based violence, intra-household bargaining, and investment in children? This paper provides evidence from Peru on all-women's justice centers (WJCs), specialized institutions that mostly employ female officers and provide police and legal services to reduce gender-based violence. Examining the gradual rollout of WJCs across districts/ villages, we find that the opening of a center increases reporting of gender-specific crimes by 40% and reduces the incidence of gender-based violence measured by domestic violence, femicides and hospitalizations due to mental health by about 10%. We find, moreover, that a decrease in the exposure of women to violence has intergenerational effects: WJCs substantially increase human capital investments in children, raising enrollment, attendance, and test scores. These results are consistent with a bargaining model in which women's access to justice determines the threat point. Chapter 2 examines the effect of fertility on labor supply decisions of Albanian parents, with particular attention to the intervening role of childcare provided by grandparents in extended families. In order to address the potential endogeneity in the fertility decision, I exploit Albanian parental preference for having sons combined with the sibling’s sex-composition instrument as an exogenous source of variation. Using a repeated cross-section of parents with at least two children, I find a positive and statistically significant effect of fertility on parental labor supply for those parents who are more likely to be younger, less educated or live in extended families. In particular, IV estimates for mothers show that they increase labor supply, especially in terms of hours worked per week and the likelihood of working off-farm. Similarly, father’s likelihood of working off-farm and having a second occupation increase as a consequence of further childbearing. The heterogeneity analysis suggests that this positive effect might be the result of two plausible mechanisms: childcare provided by non-parental adults in extended families and greater financial costs of maintaining more children. Chapter 3 analyzes the effect of forced displacement on adult’s labor market outcomes and children’s schooling in the context of the post-war Kosovo. This chapter uses the 1998-1999 Kosovo war and the following massive displacement of people as a natural experiment in order to estimate the impact of conflict displacement on Kosovars that left and decided to come back relative to those who stayed in the province. I exploit the interaction of the spatial variation in conflict intensity -as measured by casualties and bombings- and distance to the Albanian border as a source of exogenous variation in the displacement status. Results indicate that displaced Kosovar men are less likely to be employed in the agricultural sector and to work on their own account, while displaced Kosovar women are more likely to be inactive. Loss of assets (e.g. land, livestock) in an agrarian skill-based economy and also loss of social networks in an informal labor market might have further decreased the probability to find employment relative to stayers. However, shortly after the return home, the results also indicate that displaced Kosovar men and women are more likely to be working off-farm, especially in the construction and public administration sectors, which indicates a relatively quick recovery. In addition, displaced Kosovar girls are more likely to be enrolled in primary school, but I find no effect on education for boys. The refugee camp experience might have provided better conditions to young Kosovar girls compared to the precarious pre-war “parallel" education system.