Listing 1 - 7 of 7 |
Sort by
|
Choose an application
What do economists have to say about behavior within the context of the family? This book improves our understanding of how families and markets interact, why important aspects of families have been changing in recent decades, and how families respond to, and are affected by, public policy. It covers a broader range of topics with more consistency than have previous studies, including all major theoretical developments in the field over the past decade. John Ermisch builds his analysis on the premise that the standard analytical methods of microeconomics can help us understand resource allocation and the distribution of welfare within the family. Families are dynamic institutions--and so the author uses these same methods to study family formation and dissolution (including marriage, fertility, and divorce) and household formation, as well as intergenerational transfers, household production and investment, and bargaining between family members. He also shows how economic theories of the family can help guide and structure empirical analyses of demographic and related phenomena, such as labor supply, child support, and returns to education. Examples of studies that apply the theory are provided throughout the book. The most comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to an increasingly dynamic area of research, one with important implications for public policy, An Economic Analysis of the Family will be a valuable resource for advanced students of microeconomics and also for students and researchers in sociology, psychology, and other social sciences.
Choose an application
The purpose of this paper is to review the salient demographic trends affecting the structure of families in Britain and to consider the main economic implications of these. A rise in families in which the parents live in separate households is identified as the most important change in family structure. The second section of the paper argues that there is an ‘agency problem’ in such families that tends to produce inefficient outcomes and lower expenditure on and investment in children. The final substantive section investigates how policies concerned with child support from the non-custodial parent, and their interaction with income support policies, can affect these investment in children.
Family --- -Economic aspects --- -Family --- -Economic aspects -
Choose an application
The paper analyzes data on marriage expectations collected in the 1998 wave of the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) to shed light on the extent to which cohabiting unions and partnerships in which the two people live in separate residences are stable alternatives to marriage. The percentage of todays young people who will never marry appears to be around 20%. After a relatively short period, most cohabiting couples either marry or split-up and try again. Nearly three- fourths of people currently in cohabiting unions expect to marry each other and 7 out of 8 people in cohabiting unions expect to marry sometime. (ISER)
Choose an application
The paper uses the first 10 waves of the British Household Panel Survey to study the length of cohabiting unions started in the 1990s, and the time it takes to find a new partner for people who dissolved a marriage or cohabiting union in the 1990s. It finds that the time spent living together in cohabiting unions before either marrying each other or the union dissolving is usually very short. Seventy percent of people leaving a 'cohabiting union' find new partners within five years. This compares with the considerably lower figure of 43% for people leaving a marriage. Older people, whether they have been married or cohabiting, typically repartner more slowly. Repartnering also happens more slowly for widows and widowers, and for individuals who have custody of a child (most of whom are women). (ISER)
Choose an application
Estimates based on couples with dependent children in the first six years of the British Household Panel Study (1991-97) indicate that changes in a couples economic circumstances affect the probability that a partnership dissolves. In particular, unexpected improvements in finances substantially reduce the dissolution risk, which strongly supports the importance of new information in decisions concerning partnership dissolution. Measures of a couples own expectations concerning their financial situation over the coming year have been used in conjunction with realised changes to gauge the impact of unexpected changes. The study also finds that the risk of partnership dissolution increases with the number of children. (ISER)
Choose an application
This paper investigates the links between the socio-economic position of parents and the socio-economic position of their offspring and, through the marriage market, the socio-economic position of their offspring's parents-in-law. Using the Goldthorpe-Hope score of occupational prestige as a measure of status and samples drawn from the British Household Panel Survey 1991-1999, we find that the intergenerational elasticity is around 0.2 for men and between 0.17 and 0.23 for women. On average, the intragenerational correlation is lower, and of the order of 0.15 to 0.18, suggesting that the returns to human capital, which is transmitted across generations by altruistic parents, contribute more to social status than assortative mating in the marriage market. Substantially higher estimates are reported when measurement error is accounted for. We also find strong nonlinearities, whereby both inter- and intra-generational elasticities tend to increase with parental status. (ISER)
Choose an application
Listing 1 - 7 of 7 |
Sort by
|