Essays on Family Economics
Abstract
This thesis studies decisions the family makes regarding household unions, fertility, and child investment. Chapter 2 studies the educational gradient in non-marital fertility and posits that cohabitation is a driver behind the gradient. I build a lifecycle model of fertility and household union choices, featuring a trade-off between quality and quantity of children. Using the model calibrated to the U.S. data, I study implications of introducing common-law marriage, where cohabiting parents are considered to be married couples. I find that the policy leads fewer people to choose cohabitation, and more children are born to married parents. As a result, children receive 20\% more parental investment during their childhood compared to the case without the policy.
Chapter 3 studies the trend of household unions. I posit that the trend of delaying marriage arises from a substitution toward cohabitation. I build a bilateral household union decision model that includes cohabitation and marriage as unions. Using the model, I study implications of increasing income uncertainty and closing the gender earnings gap on the trend. I find that increasing income volatility alone can account for the majority of changes in household unions. The result also highlights the importance of considering cohabitation separately from marriage, which is not common in the literature.
In Chapter 4, I study the educational gradients in mothers' time allocation. According to the American Time Use Survey, mothers with higher education spend more time on childcare compared to mothers with lower education. Despite the growing evidence of the significance of parental time on child development, few studies attempt to understand the observed gradients in time allocation. I examine conditions that generate the gradient in a standard time allocation model. I find that the productivity of time input on children and the substitutability of time and goods inputs are the two parameters that determine the gradient in childcare time.