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on Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty |
| By: | Chiappori, Pierre-André; Meghir, Costas; Okuyama, Yoko |
| Abstract: | We develop a money metric welfare index for individuals within households, allowing for public goods, work, and heterogeneous preferences for men and women. Using Japanese data, we estimate a collective model of labor supply, private consumption, and expenditures on children and other public goods. We find that women have stronger preference for spending on children and other public goods than men. Within-household inequality is larger than between-household inequality, but has been declining across cohorts, reflecting improvements in women’s position. This is driven by the increase in women’s college graduation, improvement in their relative wages, and the increase in childcare availability. |
| Date: | 2025–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:19978 |
| By: | Lovenheim, Michael F. (Dept. of Economics, Cornell University); van Egeraat, Eppie (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration); Willén, Alexander (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration) |
| Abstract: | We use population-wide Norwegian administrative data to examine how social capital is transmitted across generations. We construct a multidimensional measure of families’ social position based on six dimensions: elite education, elite occupation, executive status, corporate elite, elite positions in top firms, and elite residential tract. Social capital is highly persistent across generations and strongly predicts children’s long-run income and access to elite positions, even conditional on parental income, wealth, education, and cognitive ability. Horse-race regressions suggest that social capital is a distinct dimension of inherited advantage that is quantitatively as important as parental income and cognitive ability in shaping children’s outcomes. Moreover, the influence of social capital grows over the life cycle, and reaching the very top of the income distribution typically requires both high inherited income and high inherited social capital. Accounting for social capital also meaningfully alters conventional estimates of income-based mobility, indicating that part of what is typically attributed to inherited income reflects the transmission of social position. Quasi-experimental evidence from adoption placements and parental lottery prizes suggests that these patterns primarily reflect environmental transmission rather than genetic inheritance or direct financial resources. |
| Keywords: | Social capital; Intergenerational mobility; Inequality; Elite positions |
| JEL: | J01 J12 J16 |
| Date: | 2026–08–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2026_009 |
| By: | Inés Berniell (CEDLAS-IIE-FCE-UNLP); Raquel Fernández (NYU) |
| Abstract: | Female labor force participation (LFP) and fertility have evolved jointly across Latin America, with participation rising as fertility declined over the last two decades. This paper studies the extent to which changes in fertility can account for increases in women’s labor supply in the five largest economies in the region as well as in the US. Defining three groups based solely on the presence of children under age 6, under age 13, and no children under age 13, we find that in all countries changes in labor supply within groups overwhelmingly dominate the compositional shifts induced by declining fertility. When we further disaggregate women into groups by their education in addition to the age of their children, the changing composition of the population becomes more important and the increase in LFP is mostly driven by more educated women without children under age 13, reflecting increases in both their participation and population share. |
| JEL: | J13 J16 J21 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dls:wpaper:0379 |