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Working Paper
Improving Child Welfare in Middle Income Countries: The Unintended Consequence of a Pro-Homemaker Divorce Law and Wait Time to Divorce
This study identifies the impact of access to and the speed of divorce on the welfare of children in a middle income largely Catholic country. Using difference-in-difference estimation techniques, I compare school enrollment for children of married and cohabiting parent households before and after the legalization of divorce. Implementing pro-homemaker divorce laws increased school enrollment anywhere from 3.4 to 5.5 percentage points, and the effect was particularly salient on secondary school students. I provide evidence that administrative processes influencing the speed of divorce affect ...
Working Paper
Home Production and Leisure During the COVID-19 Recession
Between the months of February and April of 2020, average weekly market hours dropped by 6.25, meanwhile 35% of commuting workers reported switching to remote work arrangements. In this paper, we examine implications of these changes for the time allocation of different households, and on aggregate. We estimate that home production activity increased by 2.1 hours a week, or 34% of lost market hours, whereas leisure activity increased by 3.8 hours a week. The monthly value of home production increased by $30.83 billion – that is 10.5% of the concurrent $292.61 billion drop in monthly GDP. ...
Journal Article
Division of Financial Responsibility among Mixed-Gender Couples
This paper uses individuals' self-assessments of their contribution to four household activities to study how mixed-gender couples divide household responsibility. Household responsibility dynamics are characterized according to a three-point ordinal variable, whose distribution is linked to a variety of household demographics via a proportional odds model fit using survey data from both members of 327 couples. The data reveal that household tendencies depend on household demographics, albeit differently across the four activities. For household shopping, gender is the primary determinant of ...
Discussion Paper
How COVID-19 Affected First-Time Homebuyers
Efforts in the spring of 2020 to contain the spread of COVID-19 resulted in a sharp contraction in U.S. economic growth and an unprecedented, rapid rise in unemployment. While the first wave of the pandemic slowed the spring housing market, home sales rebounded sharply over the rest of the year, with strong gains in house prices. Given the rising house prices and continuing high unemployment, concerns arose that COVID-19 may have negatively affected first-time homebuyers. Using a new and more accurate measure of first-time homebuyers, we find that these buyers have not been adversely affected ...
Discussion Paper
Mixed Impacts of the Federal Tax Reform on Consumer Expectations
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 changed the tax brackets, tax rates, credits and deductions for individuals and similarly altered corporate tax rates, deductions and exclusions. In this post, we examine whether the reform has shifted individuals’ expectations about their financial situation and the macroeconomic outlook. We also ask whether households have already started to adjust their behavior in line with their expectations. In order to answer these questions, we use novel data from a special module of the New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) fielded in February 2018 ...
Report
Identifying and evaluating sample selection bias in consumer payment surveys
Making meaningful inferences based on survey data depends on the ability to recognize and adjust for discrepancies between the survey respondents and the target population; this partly involves understanding how survey samples differ with respect to heterogeneous clusters of the population. Ex post adjustments for unbiased population parameter estimates are usually based on easily measured variables with known distributions in the target population, like age, gender, or income. This paper focuses on identifying and assessing the effect of an overlooked source of heterogeneity and potential ...
Working Paper
Accounting for Innovations in Consumer Digital Services: IT still matters
This paper develops a framework for measuring digital services in the face of ongoing innovations in the delivery of content to consumers. We capture what Brynjolfsson and Saunders (2009) call "free goods" as the capital services generated by connected consumers' stocks of IT digital goods; this service flow augments the existing measure of personal consumption in GDP. Its value is determined by the intensity with which households use their IT capital to consume content delivered over networks, and its volume depends on the quality of the IT capital. Consumers pay for delivery services, ...
Working Paper
Home Hours in the United States and Europe
Using data from the Multinational Time Use Study, this paper documents the trends and levels of time allocation, with a focus on home hours, for a relatively large set of industrialized countries during the past 50 years. Three patterns emerge. First, home hours have decreased in both the United States and European countries. Second, female time allocation contributes more to the cross-country difference in both the trends and the levels of market hours and home hours per person. Third, time allocations between the United States and Europe are more similar for the prime-age group than for the ...
Working Paper
The influence of gender and income on the household division of financial responsibility
This paper studies how gender and income dynamics influence the division of responsibility in two-adult households for various activities, including those tasks directly related to financial decisionmaking. The data, from the 2012 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice, consist of the respondents? categorical self-assessments of their individual levels of responsibility for various tasks. A data construct, in which some households have both adults participate in the survey, is exploited to develop a penalized latent variable model that accounts for systemic response errors. The data reveal that ...
Working Paper
Revisiting the Role of Home Production in Life-Cycle Labor Supply
This paper examines the role of home production in estimating life-cycle labor supply. I show that, consistent with previous studies, ignoring an individual?s time spent on home production when estimating the Frisch elasticity of labor supply biases its estimate downwards. I also show, however, that ignoring other ways a household can satisfy the demand for home production biases its estimate upwards. Changes in this demand over the life-cycle have an income effect on labor supply, but the effect can be mitigated through purchases in the market and through the home production of other ...