Bargaining over Babies Doepke, Matthias; Kindermann, Fabian
The American economic review,
09/2019, Volume:
109, Issue:
9
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
It takes a woman and a man to make a baby. This fact suggests that for a birth to take place, the parents should first agree on wanting a child. Using newly available data on fertility preferences ...and outcomes, we show that indeed, babies are likely to arrive only if both parents desire one. In addition, there are many couples who disagree on having babies, and in low-fertility countries women are much more likely than men to be opposed to having another child. We account for this evidence with a quantitative model of household bargaining in which the distribution of the burden of child care between mothers and fathers is a key determinant of fertility. The model implies that fertility is highly responsive to targeted policies that lower the child care burden specifically for mothers.
CLANS, GUILDS, AND MARKETS de la Croix, David; Doepke, Matthias; Mokyr, Joel
The Quarterly journal of economics,
02/2018, Volume:
133, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe gradually pulled ahead of other world regions in terms of technological creativity, population growth, and income per capita. ...We argue that superior institutions for the creation and dissemination of productive knowledge help explain the European advantage. We build a model of technological progress in a preindustrial economy that emphasizes the person-to-person transmission of tacit knowledge. The young learn as apprentices from the old. Institutions such as the family, the clan, the guild, and the market organize who learns from whom. We argue that medieval European institutions such as guilds, and specific features such as journeymanship, can explain the rise of Europe relative to regions that relied on the transmission of knowledge within closed kinship systems (extended families or clans).
Before Gary Becker, fertility choice was widely considered to be outside the realm of economic analysis. Apart from intellectual tradition, one reason for this was that the data on fertility did not ...immediately suggest an economic mechanism. In industrialized countries, fertility had declined strongly over time, even though family incomes were rising. Similarly, in many studies using cross-sectional data the relationship between family income and fertility had been shown to be either flat or declining. To many observers, these observations suggested that the “taste” for children had waned over time and that high income families placed less value on childbearing than the poor.
In every developed country, the economic transition from pre-industrial Stagnation to modern growth was accompanied by a demographic transition from high to low fertility. Even though the overall ...pattern is repeated, there are large cross-country variations in the timing and speed of the demographic transition. What accounts for falling fertility during the transition to growth? To answer this question, this paper develops a unified growth model that delivers a transition from Stagnation to growth, accompanied by declining fertility. The model is used to determine whether govemment policies that affect the opportunity cost of education can account for crosscountry variations in fertility decline. Among the policies considered, education subsidies are found to have only minor effects, while accounting for child labor regulation is crucial. Apart from influencing fertility, the policies also determine the evolution of the income distribution in the course of development.
This study quantitatively assesses the effects of inflation through changes in the value of nominal assets. It documents nominal asset positions in the United States across sectors and groups of ...households and estimates the wealth redistribution caused by a moderate inflation episode. The main losers from inflation are rich, old households, the major bondholders in the economy. The main winners are young, middle‐class households with fixed‐rate mortgage debt. Besides transferring resources from the old to the young, inflation is a boon for the government and a tax on foreigners. Lately, the amount of U.S. nominal assets held by foreigners has grown dramatically, increasing the potential for a large inflation‐induced wealth transfer from foreigners to domestic households.
I compare the predictions of three variants of the altruistic parent model of Barro and Becker for the relationship between child mortality and fertility. In the baseline model fertility choice is ...continuous, and there is no uncertainty over the number of surviving children. The baseline model is contrasted to an extension with discrete fertility choice and stochastic mortality and a setup with sequential fertility choice. The quantitative predictions of the models are remarkably similar. While in each model the total fertility rate falls as child mortality declines, the number of surviving children increases. The results suggest that factors other than declining infant and child mortality are responsible for the large decline in net reproduction rates observed in industrialized countries over the last century.
We argue that one major cause of the U.S. post-war baby boom was the rise in female labour supply during World War II. We develop a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous ...fertility and female labour force participation decisions. We use the model to assess the impact of the war on female labour supply and fertility in the decades following the war. For the war generation of women, the high demand for female labour brought about by mobilization leads to an increase in labour supply that persists after the war. As a result, younger women who reach adulthood in the 1950s face increased labour market competition, which impels them to exit the labour market and start having children earlier. The effect is amplified by the rise in taxes necessary to pay down wartime government debt. In our calibrated model, the war generates a substantial baby boom followed by a baby bust.
We develop a theory of parent-child relations that rationalizes the choice between alternative parenting styles (as set out in Baumrind (1967)). Parents maximize an objective function that combines ...Beckerian altruism and paternalism towards children. They can affect their children's choices via two channels: either by influencing children's preferences or by imposing direct restrictions on their choice sets. Different parenting styles (authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive) emerge as equilibrium outcomes and are affected both by parental preferences and by the socioeconomic environment. Parenting style, in turn, feeds back into the children's welfare and economic success. The theory is consistent with the decline of authoritarian parenting observed in industrialized countries and with the greater prevalence of more permissive parenting in countries characterized by low inequality.
Inequality and growth De la Croix, David; Doepke, Matthias
The American economic review,
09/2003, Volume:
93, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We develop a new theoretical link between inequality and growth. In our model, fertility and education decisions are interdependent. Poor parents decide to have many children and invest little in ...education. A mean-preserving spread in the income distribution increases the fertility differential between the rich and the poor, which implies that more weight gets placed on families who provide little education. Consequently, an increase in inequality lowers average education and, therefore, growth. We find that this fertility-differential effect accounts for most of the empirical relationship between inequality and growth.
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