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This paper offers a synthesis of agricultural household modeling, its evolution and uses; presents a general yet simple agricultural household model, estimated with Mexican village data and programmed using General Algebraic Modeling System software; and uses this model to explore household-level impacts of agricultural policy changes on production and incomes under alternative rural-market scenarios. We point out limitations of household-farm models in heterogeneous rural economies and discuss how to integrate multiple household models into economy-wide models designed to overcome these limitations.

This paper demonstrates how the availability of family planning and maternal and child health services alters the structure of intra-household bargaining. The overall welfare gains from such programs are likely to be large, but when women obtain access to services only through marriage, some of these gains may be partially offset by changes in their bargaining power and in the dowries that they pay their husbands. I examine these marriage market effects using a family planning and health services program in rural Bangladesh, finding that compared to women without program access, women in the treatment area are 35% less likely to be able to make purchases without permission from their husbands or another household member. Moreover, a difference-in-difference specification confirms that women pay 14% higher dowries in order to obtain husbands with access to the program. The fact that adjustments are made both before and within marriage suggests that marital contracts in rural Bangladesh are negotiated along multiple margins.

A growing literature in economics has examined the effect of early childhood health investments on adult human capital formation and labor market outcomes. This study is the first to examine the effect of having been breastfed as an infant on young adult earnings. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), ordinary least squares estimates suggest that breastfeeding is associated with a 10–12 % increase in hourly earnings. However, after ensuring common support on observables via propensity score matching and controlling for unmeasured family level heterogeneity common to siblings via family fixed effects, the estimated associations become much smaller and are statistically indistinguishable from zero. We conclude that the benefits of having been breastfed do not appear to extend to the labor market.

In spite of relatively generous public subsidies and a reputation for high quality, only a very limited proportion of Italian families use public child-care and a large proportion use informal care. In this paper, we attempt to explore the determinants of the use of child-care among dual workers families. Given the limitations of data available we match two different data sets: the Bank of Italy (SHIW) and ISTAT Multiscopo. We find evidence that the availability of public child-care affects in an important way its demand. We also find that increases in costs of public child-care reduce the use of public as well as private indicating a shift to informal child-care. The presence of a grandmother who lives near and is in good health is an important explanation of the choice especially in presence of very small children. An understanding of the importance of these factors is relevant in the evaluation of child-care policies. This is particularly important in Italy, where the majority of families with children have only one child and children would benefit also from the socialization aspects of the child-care system.

Becker/Mincer theory of home production was the first to systematically incorporate time in economic models, and the theory generated much empirical research in a wide variety of areas. However, the direct applications of Becker/Mincer home production theory in empirical research are scarce because of the innate immeasurability of commodities. In this paper, I recover unobservable commodities from the cost functions under certain assumptions about production technologies. Then, using the Philippine Bukidnon panel study of rural households, I test for the core of the Becker model: negative substitution effects between a time-intensive and a goods-intensive commodity arising from wage increases. The estimates of the structural form as well as the reduced form relative demand between childcare, which represents a time-intensive commodity, and meal consumption, which represents a goods-intensive commodity, support the major predictions of the model.

Non-cooperative couples are inefficient. Cooperation raises the utility of both parents, and of each child, but does not guarantee efficiency. In the presence of credit rationing, a cooperative equilibrium may not exist outside marriage, because the main earner cannot credibly promise to compensate the main childcarer at some future date, and may not be able or willing to do so at front. By allowing the main childcarer to credibly threaten divorce if the main earner does not deliver the promised compensation when the time comes, marriage makes that promise credible, and thus increases the probability that a cooperative equilibrium will exist. In a separate-property jurisdiction, a reduction in the cost or difficulty of obtaining a divorce increases married women’s participation in the labour market. In a community-property one, it has no such effect.

This study examines the changes in women’s decision-making roles due to the foreign labor migration of men from Nepal. Using a mixed-method strategy, based on qualitative analysis from fieldwork in four districts of Nepal and quantitative analysis from Nepal Demographic and Health Survey 2011, the study finds that women who take on the role of household heads make more decisions, while those living under the headship of other members experience a decline in their decision-making power. However, even for household heads, most gains in decision-making come from making smaller, non-strategic decisions. Strategic decisions, especially those related to children’s well-being and allocation of financial resources, are mostly made by men. Women’s ability to be empowered through increased decision-making is limited by their position in the family, their financial dependence on men, and norms restricting women’s access to resources.

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

A stated goal of the welfare legislation of 1996 was to develop policies to encourage “the formation and maintenance of two-parent families,” yet states were given little guidance about how to do this. Experimental evidence from the Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP), a program that tested the effects of an enhanced earnings disregard designed to encourage work and reduce poverty, shows that welfare policies can produce important effects on marital behavior even without explicit strategies aimed to do so. Three years after study entry, MFIP increased marriage rates among single parent long-term recipients and increased marital stability among two-parent recipient families. Similar effects were not found among newer applicants to welfare, possibly because many of these families leave welfare quickly. Replicating programs like MFIP in different settings and understanding why applicants responded differently will be essential to informing the policy significance of these findings.