Research has shown that parental health shocks and child health status each exert measurable effects on child educational attainment, particularly in low-middle income countries. In 2005, the Vietnamese government enacted a new health insurance policy increasing the proportion of population covered by health insurance from 22% of total population to approximately 43%. Using a quasi-experimental setup

There is substantial evidence that due to perceived childcare obligations, mothers are disadvantaged in labor markets. To what extent can childcare support ameliorate such a disadvantage? To answer this question, we ran a CV experiment in a large Indian city and examined whether indicating access to childcare support in a CV may offset the motherhood penalty associated with labor market entry. We randomly

The objective of this study is to use data from the National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs (NS-CSHCN) to test whether Medicaid physician fees are correlated with access to health services and adequacy of insurance coverage among CSHCN. We start with a difference-in-differences method, comparing the effects of Medicaid physician fees on outcomes of publicly-insured children in states

This paper analyzes how aging parents’ health conditions affect household labor supply. I propose a time-use model with wage heterogeneity and assume that care responsibilities involve both time and budget constraints. When households can purchase care services, differences in secondary earners’ wages and care requirements lead to heterogeneity in household responses to a parental health shock. Primary

This paper suggests analytical strategies for obtaining informative parameter bounds when multivariate health-related time use data are partially observed in a particular yet common manner. One familiar context is where M>1 outcomes’ respective totals across N>1 time periods are observed but where questions of interest involve features—probabilities, moments, etc.—of their unobserved joint distribution

This paper analyses the effect of retirement on the familiarity with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) of older individuals. We argue that inability to cope with ICT might represent a threat for older individuals’ social inclusion. To account for the potential endogeneity of retirement with respect to familiarity with ICT, we instrument retirement decision with the age-eligibility for

Subsidized childcare is a key instrument to support maternal employment in most OECD countries. Using a major reform implemented in Luxembourg in 2009, I study the effects of expanding access to subsidized childcare on the employment decisions of women in a context where childcare is universal and heavily subsidized, but is limited by capacity constraints. The identification strategy relies on temporal

Foreseeable income reductions around retirement should not affect aggregate consumption. However, given higher leisure endowments after retirement, theory also predicts lower consumption of leisure substitutes. To avoid misinterpreting this predicted drop as a puzzle, our novel approach focuses on housing consumption (complementary to leisure in utility) and controls for leisure changes. In Germany

Using data from the Italian Survey on Household Income and Wealth from 1995 to 2014, we study the relation between informal credit (loans from relatives and friends) and a household’s access to bank credit. While most of the literature has focused on the substitutability channel, we highlight that even households with full access to the formal credit market are more likely to be indebted to relatives

Child well-being is multidimensional and inequality in intrahousehold resource allocation is evident. Yet, there is scant evidence linking inequality-adjusted monetary, nutritional and multidimensional measures of child well-being. After identifying children as money-poor using resource shares adjusting inequality in intrahousehold resource allocation, this study extends the traditional multidimensional

In this paper, we exploit rich cross-country survey data covering 15 European countries over the period 2000–2015 to investigate the relationship between the gender of the immediate supervisor (i.e. having a male or a female “boss”) and perceived gender discrimination at the workplace. We show that a female boss is associated with reduced gender discrimination, with positive spillovers mainly on female

This paper studies how secular changes in the student sex ratio affect marriage market outcomes for university graduates. Using data from Germany, I find that a higher own-gender share within the field of study reduces marriage market opportunities for women, while the opposite is true for men. Moreover, an imbalanced student sex ratio changes the composition of couples. For women, a higher female

Medical divorce occurs when couples split up so that one spouse’s medical bills do not deplete the assets of the healthy spouse. It has not been studied in the economics literature, but it has been discussed by attorneys and widely reported in the media. We develop a model of medical divorce that demonstrates that divorce is optimal when a couple’s joint assets exceed the exempted asset level. We use

Many governments are aiming to extend working lives by raising the age at which people can claim retirement pensions. This makes it vital to understand how these policies affect retirement decisions. In this paper, I revisit the labor supply effects of a major Australian reform that increased women’s pension age from 60 to 65. Atalay and Barrett (2015) studied these effects using repeated household

Many of the direct and indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are mediated mainly through the economics of the household. The Review of Economics of the Household has published 17 papers on interactions between COVID-19, ensuing policy responses, and the economics of the household. Five were published in the December 2020 issue, six in the March issue, and six in this June 2021 issue. Here I give

In this paper, we use data on mixed-gender dual-earner couples in Southern and Western Europe to investigate how the division of unpaid household labor within mixed-gender couples varies depending on the ratio of the partners’ market wages. From analysis of the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, we first show that married or cohabiting women do twice as much household work as single women

The 2030 Agenda of the United Nations clearly sets the inclusion of persons with disabilities in the labour market as a main goal. However, especially in care welfare systems characterized by a low level of social services, disability not only impacts the labour market participation of disabled people themselves but may also affect the labour opportunities of other members of their household. Using

In early 2020, a novel coronavirus quickly spread across the globe. In response to the rapidly increasing number of confirmed U.S. cases, state and local governments suggested social distancing, issued stay-at-home orders, and restricted travel, fundamentally changing how individuals allocate time. Directly impacted time activities, such as work, eating food away from home, grocery shopping, and childcare

We study the optimal consumption-saving problem for consumers who are ambiguous about labor income shocks and have a preference for (absolute) wealth. It is shown that the preference for wealth interacts with the degree of ambiguity in non-trivial ways in determining the optimal consumption. The model predicts that ambiguity and preference for wealth can produce substitution or complementarity effects

We use country-wide data on all electronic payments in point-of-sale (POS) and online terminals of Iran to study the change in the pattern of consumption and online-offline substitution during the COVID-19 lockdown and after the relaxation of restrictions in May and June. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find that during the strictest lockdown month, growth in value of transactions dropped

Although previous research documents that having dinner together as a family positively relates to long-run child and family outcomes, one aspect of family dinner that has not been explored previously is the role that dinner timing may play in facilitating or hindering parental time investments in their children. We use time diary data for roughly 41,000 families from the nationally representative

What makes adult children live with their parents? This paper examines the extent to which individual and family characteristics are associated with co-residence decisions between adult children and their parents. Using Mexico’s 2011 Social Mobility Survey (EMOVI) retrospective data and focusing on the young adult population in Mexico, we test empirically what parent and adult children characteristics

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-021-09552-z

Buying a house changes a household’s balance sheet by simultaneously reducing liquidity and introducing mortgage payments, which may leave the household more exposed to other shocks. We examine how this change impacts consumer credit beyond the mortgage. Using a large panel, we show that on acquiring a mortgage, credit card debt increases by about $1500 in the short term, severe delinquencies increase

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented event with wide-ranging implications. Given that households are at the center of major changes affecting the entire world, the Review of Economics of the Household is publishing a series of issues on COVID-19 and the economics of the household. Here we review eight articles documenting the enormous costs of the COVID containment policies, in particular the

This paper analyzes the impact of women’s empowerment on two aspects of food security—calorie and protein intake of children—using data on agricultural households from the Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey. We are interested both in the differential impact of mother’s empowerment on the food security of boys and girls as well as in whether different aspects of empowerment have different effects

We propose an improved method to assess the economic value of unpaid housework and childcare. Existing literature has typically assigned a minimum, generalist or specialist’s wage, or the performer’s opportunity cost to the hourly value of these activities. Then it was used to calculate macro-level value based on the number of hours spent in this work. In this paper, instead of imputing an average

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-021-09548-9

We show that the descendants of ancient farmers may have an interest in marrying among themselves, and thus maintaining the gendered division of labour originally justified on comparative-advantage grounds by the advent of the plough, even after they emigrate to a modern industrial economy where individual productivity depends on education rather than physical characteristics. The result rests on the

In 2005, Tennessee disenrolled about 170,000 adults from its Medicaid program. This health insurance reform has been shown to decrease access to care and worsen financial well-being. Those affected by the disenrollment greatly overlaps with the population responsible for paying child support. We examine whether the contraction of public health insurance eligibility in Tennessee affected child support

Using individual-level data from the National Family Research of Japan Survey (1999, 2004 and 2009) and exploiting variation in the share of individuals with non-traditional gender norms across birth-cohorts, survey year, education, and prefecture, we find that an increase in the share of individuals with non-traditional beliefs by one standard deviation is associated with an increase in Japanese women’s