Review of Economics of the Household最新文献

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.

Previous studies have observed heterogeneous changes in domestic violence-related 911 calls, police incident reports, and arrests at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, we use a large-scale medical claims database with coverage of over 100 million patients to examine the impact on domestic violence victims’ use of emergency department care for their injuries in the early weeks of the pandemic compared to the corresponding weeks in previous years. We find a 23–35% decrease in utilization of emergency medical services by domestic violence victims between March and June of 2020. Based on this finding, it is essential to use caution when using medical claims to measure domestic violence in future research covering this time period. Decreases in care utilization also have important implications for the detection, screening, and treatment of domestic violence injuries during future public health crises.

I examine assumptions about intra-household resource allocation, using panel from the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study and Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data. I test for the complete pooling of household resources after the experience of a transitory shock, accounting for income earned individually by men and women, as well as income earned jointly by multiple household members. I find evidence that food expenditures do not respond to shocks; household members pool resources for this expenditure, even when individuals face substantial shocks to their income. All other expenditures respond to shocks. These findings are robust to inclusion and exclusion of income earned jointly, as well as controlling for household-level unobserved preference heterogeneity. This study extends our understanding of intra-household behavior, beyond standard utility, collective, and non-cooperative conceptions of the household in a panel data context.

This study evaluates the impact of a policy popularly known as “redlining” on marriage. This policy led to the creation of a series of maps that guided banks in their lending, where some areas were favored and others were discriminated against. Given the quasi-randomness of mortgage discrimination, this policy allows us to make inferences regarding whether housing credit constraints affect marriage. Furthermore, it also provides insight into whether unequal access to housing credit played a role in the contemporary racial marriage gap. This policy allows us to make these inferences due to the fact that neighborhood blocks that were more heavily discriminated against had higher proportions of Black residents. The study uses a spatial differences in discontinuities design to show that the maps led to a reduction in marriage in discriminated areas. These effects are shown to not be due to sorting. They can also be ascribed to the housing credit mechanism per se, rather than competing second-order mechanisms that result from individuals being denied mortgages. These second-order effects can include, for instance, neighborhood decline effects found in other redlining work.

Given that child abuse and intimate partner violence often co-occur, intra-household bargaining models provide a useful framework to investigate the relationship between macro-economic factors and child abuse. Non-cooperative bargaining models predict that labor market opportunities that benefit women improve their bargaining power and lower the risk of intimate partner violence against them. We posit that this protective effect extends to children as well. We examine the impact of gender specific wages and employment on police reported child abuse using incident level data from South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Our results show that narrowing the gender wage gap leads to a decline in child sexual abuse reported to the police. While effects on physical abuse are similar in direction, they are not statistically significant. The findings underscore important spillover benefits of policy solutions directed towards narrowing the gender wage gap.

Lewbel and Pendakur (2021) propose a model of consumption inefficiency in collective households, based on “cooperation factors". We simplify that model to make it empirically tractable, and apply it to identify and estimate household member resource shares, and to measure the dollar cost of inefficient levels of cooperation. Using data from Bangladesh, we find that increased cooperation among household members yields the equivalent of a 13% gain in total expenditures, with most of the benefit of this gain going towards men.

The Netherlands reformed its disability insurance (DI) scheme in 2006. Reintegration incentives for employers became stronger, access to DI benefits became more difficult, and benefits became less generous. Using administrative data on all individuals who fell sick shortly before and after the reform, we study the impact of the reform on labor participation of individuals who fell sick and their spouses. Difference-in-differences estimates show, among other things, that the reform led to an increase of labor participation of the individuals who fell sick only if these individuals had a permanent job, whereas spouses responded to the DI reform in other cases, where the individuals reporting sick had a temporary job or were unemployed. More generally, the spouses respond when the sick individual’s labor market position is weak and the individual him- or herself has trouble finding or retaining employment. The effects are persistent during the 10 years after the reform. The effect on the spouse can be seen as an “added worker effect,” where additional earnings of the spouse compensate for the sick individual’s income loss so that both partners share the burden of a more stringent DI scheme. Comparing individuals reporting sick with and without partner provides further support for the notion that the responses of couples to the reform are joint decisions of the two partners.

Abstract

This paper studies the effect of transfer programs on the allocation of resources among household members. Based on a collective household model and data from Ecuador, I find important intra-household inequalities, but the transfer produces resource redistribution among household members. Unlike existing approaches, I also employ a framework that accounts for other household structures, finding that transfers impact resource allocation in extended households with children. I validate the main findings using experimental data and document that in-kind transfers are comparable to cash transfers in improving the within-household redistribution of resources. I further examine the potential implications of this reallocation of resources in several domains and find that transfers increase women’s control of resources and reduce women’s poverty. I also show that changes in women’s control of resources driven by the transfer affect the household’s consumption patterns and how households react to unexpected shocks. These results contribute to understanding better the redistributive and behavioral effects of income support programs.