Review of Economics of the Household最新文献

As the share of U.S. adult children living with their parents increases, it is important to understand how children who “boomerang” back home impact their parents in their pre-retirement and post-retirement years. We use data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to examine the effects of boomerang children on their parents’ labor market expectations and choices, as well as on their wealth, health, and life satisfaction. Event study analysis suggests that boomerang children return home due to short-term instabilities, such as negative shocks to marriage, income, and employment. We find that boomerang children are associated with a small increase in their parents’ subjective probability of working after age 65, and with a temporary increase in their parents’ non-housing debt. However, in the aggregate, we find no clear evidence that boomerang children impact parents’ current or future labor market choices, overall wealth, health, or life satisfaction. (We do find some evidence of an increase in hours worked among parents in the bottom wealth decile). One possible explanation for the lack of aggregate impact is that boomerang children contribute to household expenses. We find that boomerang events are associated with an increase in financial transfers from children to parents, particularly among parents in the bottom half of the wealth distribution.

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of exposure to armed conflict on fertility in Sri Lanka. Using a difference-in-difference methodology, I find that exposure to civil war led to a reduction in female fertility in Sri Lanka, with evidence of an increased female age at marriage in high-conflict districts as a mechanism. The paper further focuses on ethnic disparities in demographic adjustments triggered by exposure to conflict. It determines if conflict altered the fertility patterns of the Sinhalese majority and the Sri Lankan Tamil minority differently. Estimates suggest that there is a differential in fertility adjustments of the two ethnic groups in response to conflict: the reduction in crude birth rate was significantly smaller for the Sri Lankan Tamils compared to the Sinhalese across various model specifications. The presence of an ethnic group-level replacement effect led to a lesser reduction in fertility for Sri Lankan Tamils. These results contribute to the literature on the impact of armed conflict and underscore the importance of studying demographic adjustments by sub-groups, specifically ethnicity in this context, as the intensity of adjustment often varies with the socio-political vulnerability of the group. Understanding these disparities is crucial as a sustained demographic differential has the potential to impact the ethnic composition of Sri Lanka and may further crystallize the ethnic divide in an already volatile political setting.

Abstract

We study how the presence of promotion competition in the labor market affects household specialization patterns. By embedding a promotion tournament model in a household setting, we show that specialization can emerge as a consequence of competitive work incentives. This specialization outcome, in which only one spouse invests heavily in his or her career, can be welfare superior to a situation in which both spouses invest equally in their careers. The reason is that household specialization reduces the intensity of competition and provides households with consumption smoothing. The specialization result is obtained in a setting where spouses are equally competitive in the labor market and there is no household production. It is also robust to several modifications of the model, such as varying the number of households, two spouses competing for promotion in the same workplace, and the inclusion of household production.

This paper analyses the impact of enrollment in the recently launched contributory pension scheme, Atal Pension Yojana (APY), on formal retirement savings using a unit-level sample of households from an extensive, nationally representative survey for India. We address the endogeneity in the enrollment in APY using a novel semiparametric copula regression methodology. This methodology allows us to address and control for endogeneity due to observed and unobserved confounding, nonlinear covariate effects, and non-Gaussian distributions. Our results indicate that APY positively impacts formal retirement savings. APY crowd-in other forms of formal retirement savings. Our results suggest that marginalized populations, especially the Scheduled Tribe, are more likely to enroll in APY, and digital financial technologies can bring greater financial inclusion in India. The findings have significant policy implications on how households allocate their retirement savings and help us understand the role of APY in bringing additional savings.

In recent years, many states have legalized marijuana for medical use, recreational use, or both. At the same time, parental drug abuse is now the second most frequent reason for a child’s placement into the foster care system. We investigate the causal link between these two facts. Do states that legalize marijuana use experience an increase in foster care entries related to drug abuse? We utilize multiple difference-in-difference approaches to exploit the state level variation in recreational and medical marijuana laws. Our findings suggest that when states permitted recreational marijuana use, there was no corresponding change in the number of foster care entries related to drug abuse, relative to control states. For the legalization of medical marijuana, we find a roughly 20 percent decrease in the number of cases associated with parental drug abuse in the second year after legalization, followed by a roughly 30 percent decrease in the third and fourth years. We isolate this effect as coming from states with relatively strict tetrahydrocannabinol limits. While we find fewer entries related to parental drug abuse, there is no convincing evidence that total removals decreased.

In this paper, we propose the use of an extended well-being approach to assess economic insecurity. Our main purpose is to study its dimension and identify its main drivers in the United States by overcoming the dichotomy between income and wealth. To this end, we approximate an extended well-being measure that includes monetary resources from income and the potential stream from wealth, which can be understood as an emergency reserve to cope with future economic difficulties but could also be a source of financial distress due to fluctuations in asset holdings and prices. We find that economic insecurity levels are larger when considering our extended well-being variable than income alone. Household income and non-liquid assets appear to be the main drivers of economic insecurity, although part of the US population was able to obtain higher returns on non-liquid assets and maintain their income levels.

Despite the long-identified relationship between poverty and risk for intimate partner violence (IPV) and non-intimate partner domestic violence (DV), there is limited work on the relationship between public anti-poverty programs and the incidence of such violence in the United States. In this study, we examine the effect of state Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC) on reports of lethal IPV and DV, a previously unstudied relationship. We offer a conceptual framework for understanding the potentially countervailing mechanisms by which state EITCs could affect lethal violence. We use a combination of empirical strategies, including new econometric estimators, to causally identify how changes in state EITCs affect the rate of reported IPV and DV, measured as homicide rates per 100,000 population. We find no significant causal effects of state EITC (presence or relative generosity) on lethal IPV or DV at a population level. Our work provides insight into the mechanisms at play, and suggests a role for more targeted policy interventions to mitigate individual effects.

This study examines the impact of reducing formal care benefits on the well-being of informal caregivers, contributing to the ongoing discourse about establishing sustainable and adequate levels of formal care. We utilize a reform introduced in Japan’s public long-term care insurance system, which curtailed formal care benefits for a group of recipients with low care needs. Employing a difference-in-difference approach with fixed effects on a nationally representative sample of coresident informal caregivers, we explore both the overall and temporal effects of this reform. Our findings reveal that the reform had an adverse impact on caregivers’ physical well-being, leading to diminished mobility and stability. The impact on caregivers’ mental well-being was less clear, reflecting a competing influence of stress and the psychological rewards associated with caregiving. The decline in physical well-being endured over time, while the effects on mental well-being were transient. Additionally, female caregivers exhibited greater vulnerability compared to their male counterparts, experiencing more significant deterioration in both physical and mental well-being. Alarmingly, the reform also negatively influenced the well-being of care recipients, suggesting that reducing formal care benefits does not yield positive outcomes for either caregivers or recipients. This study underscores the necessity of accounting for caregivers’ well-being when evaluating the cost-effectiveness of reducing formal care benefits and advocates for policies aimed at safeguarding female caregivers from health and financial challenges.

This paper estimates the causal effect of a targeted panic button program—implemented in two Turkish provinces between 2012 and 2016—on domestic violence. Difference-in-differences and synthetic control estimates suggest that the program notably increased physical violence against women both at the extensive and intensive margins. The likelihood of physical violence in the treated provinces increased by more than 5 percentage points relative to the control provinces, and the number of physical violence incidents increased by about 10 percent. The increase comes almost entirely from the increase in violence against less-educated women. Employment rates and economic independence indicators improved for women in the treated provinces, which suggests that the program empowered vulnerable women. However, male partners increased physical violence in response to female empowerment. The results are consistent with the male backlash theories and a class of non-cooperative models incorporating violence as a vehicle for enhancing males’ bargaining power, but inconsistent with the models predicting that economic empowerment of women reduces violence by balancing bargaining power within the household. We also develop a method based on retrospective violence information to understand whether the increase is attributable to actual or self-reported violence and conclude that the estimates are entirely driven by the increase in actual violence.

The healthcare that a woman receives during pregnancy, at the time of delivery, and soon after delivery is imperative for the well-being and survival of both the mother and her child. Hence, understanding the factors that influence the utilization of healthcare around the period of birth is important for improving the health of the mother and her child as well as reducing maternal mortality. Although numerous studies have examined the factors that influence the utilization of healthcare around the period of birth, no study has considered the role of ethnic heterogeneity. This paper bridges a significant gap in the literature by reporting findings from the first study that examines the effect of ethnic heterogeneity on healthcare utilization in Ghana. The study utilized data from both the Demographic Health Survey and Ghana Population and Housing Census. Our estimates show that a unit increase in a heterogenous ethnic group lowers the likelihood of utilizing healthcare at the time of birth and after delivery via increasing household poverty.