This book presents a theory that integrates marriage markets and labor markets (Part 2). She uses data, primarily from Israel and the United States, to predict the effects of particular factors, such as individual resources and market size, on individual and market labor supply and marital outcomes, including bargaining power, polygamy, marriage contract, divorce and fertility. Parts 3 and 4 consider some implications of the theory for the study of sex ratio effects and compensating differentials in marriage. Part 5 provides further applications to the study of cohabitation, divorce, and polygamy. Part 6 examines how a spouse's help increases a person's human capital. The approach is interdisciplinary, combining aspects of sociology, demography, and anthropology, as well as economics.

On the Economics of Marriage - A Theory of Marriage, Labor and Divorce.

The U.S. and Canadian governments conducted five negative income tax experiments between 1968 and 1980. The labor market findings of these experiments were an advance for understanding the effects of a basic income guarantee, but their conclusiveness is often overstated. A review of nonacademic articles on the experiments reveals poor understanding of the results. One often overlooked cause of this misinterpretation was the failure of researchers to make clear that the experiments could not estimate the demand response and therefore could not estimate the market response to the program. Although the evidence does not amount to an overwhelming case either for or against the basic income guarantee, some important conclusions can be drawn, if they are drawn carefully.

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A failure to communicate: what (if anything) can we learn from the negative income tax experiments?

Social scientists generally seek to explain welfare-related behaviors in terms of economic, social structural, or culture of poverty theories. Such explanations, however, do not account for nativity differences in public assistance receipt among immigrants of Mexican origin. This article draws on the sociology of migration and culture literatures to develop a materialist-based cultural repertoire account and attendant hypotheses to explain the welfare behaviors of Mexican immigrants. We argue that such immigrants arrive and work in the United States under circumstances that foster employment-based cultural repertoires that, compared with natives and other immigrant groups, encourage less welfare participation (in part because such repertoires lead to faster welfare exits) and more post welfare employment. This is particularly true in states with relatively more generous welfare policies. Using individual-level data predating the Welfare Reform Act, from multiple panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) merged with state-level information on welfare benefit levels, we examine immigrant-group differences in welfare receipt, retention, and transition to employment across locales with varying levels of welfare benefits. Findings are largely consistent with our cultural repertoire account: Mexican immigrants tend to utilize welfare not primarily to avoid work, cope with disadvantage, or perpetuate a culture of dependency, but rather to minimize the effects of employment discontinuities. Such findings carry important theoretical and policy implications?implications we outline in our conclusion.

Explaining Mexican-Immigrant Welfare Behaviors: The Importance of Employment-Related Cultural Repertoires

The theory presented here aims at explaining individual consumer behavior inside marriage and prior to marriage. It is a New Home Economics (NHE) model in the sense that it assumes the existence of household production. It is an intra-household bargaining model in the sense that it assumes that husbands and wives typically have different economic interests with respect to marriage, and they try to negotiate arrangements that suit them best. The more resources they have, the more they may obtain results that favor them rather than their spouse. It is a market theory similar to standard labor market theory. This theory throws light on gender differences in demand for commercial goods that have home-produced substitutes. This theory leads to an explanation why women are charged more for dry-cleaning. The theory can also explain differences in demand for different products. Predictions include that of a sex ratio effect on consumption. For example, it is predicted that in countries with more emigration of men than women, women will be expected to make higher contributions to newly weds’ costs of housing. It is also predicted that there will be compensating differentials in marriage. For instance, women married to considerably older men are expected to have relatively more control over the use the couple’s income than women married to men who are close to their own age. In contrast to bargaining theory, the insights presented here apply to both married individuals and to those who anticipate being married in the future.

A consumer theory with competitive markets for work in marriage

Previous static analyses of the work disincentive effects of welfare programs are extended to a dynamic context. Using a sample of continuous longitudinal labor market histories, estimates are derived for welfare-nonwelfare differences in labor market flows among the states of employment, unemployment, and nonparticipation. The estimates are used to identify the main sources of the lower employment and labor force participation rates and higher unemployment rate of welfare recipients. The findings indicate that welfare programs have substantial effects on virtually every labor market transition examined but that the primary source of the static work disincentive effect is slower entry into employment.

Labor Supply Response to Welfare Programs: A Dynamic Analysis

Ways in which heads of families in the Seattle and Denver Income Maintenance Experiments reduce their labor supply are analyzed in this paper By estimating transition rates of leaving and entering employment, the authors calculate the effect of the experiment on such measures as the average length of nonemployment, the likelihood of being employed at a given time, the number of entries into and exits from employment within a given period, and the average length of spells of employment Results indicate that heads of families on experimental negative income tax (NIT) programs have a greater tendency than controls to leave employment The results also indicate that the NIT programs substantially lengthen spells of nonemployment for all groups studied All groups also experience a significant decline in the probability of employment as a result of the NIT treatments

K. E. Yaeger

Papers

Effects of SIME/DIME on Changes in Employment Status

An Examination of Relocation Law in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island: Successful Trends toward Determining the Best Interests of the Child