Publications by Author

Shelly Lundberg

Research

Lundberg, S., (Forthcoming), Gender and Household Decisionmaking, Frontiers in Gender Economics, Bettio, F., Routledge.

An abstract for this publication is not available.

Lundberg, S., (Forthcoming), Childbearing Decisions: Can Attitude Measures Play a Role in Causal Modeling?, Creating the Next Generation: Social, Economic, and Psychological Processes Underlying Fertility in Developed Countires, Booth, A.; Crouter, N.; Erlbaum, L..

An abstract for this publication is not available.

Lundberg, S.; Choi, H.-j.; Joesch, J., (Forthcoming), Sons, Daughters, Wives, and the Labour Market Outcomes of West German Men, Labour Economics.

We find a strong association between family status and labor market outcomes for recent cohorts of West German men in the German Socio-Economic Panel. Living with a partner and living with a child both have substantial positive effects on earnings and work hours. These effects persist in individual fixed effects models that control for correlation in time-invariant unobservables that affect both family and work outcomes, though the inclusion of length of marriage reduces the effects of children. Child gender also matters — a first son increases fathers' work hours by 100 hours per year more than a first daughter, and positive effects of sons on work hours and earnings are particularly strong for men with higher levels of education. There is evidence of son “preference” in the probability that a German man is observed to be coresiding with a son — men are more likely to remain in the same household with a male child than a female child.

Lundberg, S.; Pollak, R., (Forthcoming), Family Decisionmaking, The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Durlauf, S. N.; Blume, L. E., Palgrave Macmillan.

An abstract for this publication is not available.

Lundberg, S.; Romich, J.; Tsang, K. P., (Forthcoming), Independence Giving or Autonomy Taking? Childhood Predictors of Decision-Making Patterns Between Youth Adolescents and Parents, Journal of Research on Adolescence.

An abstract for this publication is not available.

Lundberg, S.; McLanahan, S.; Rose, E., (2007), Child gender and father involvement in fragile families, Demography, 44: 1, 79-92.

In this article, we use data from the first two waves of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the effects of child gender on father involvement and to determine if gender effects differ by parents' marital status. We examine several indicators of father involvement, including whether the father acknowledges "ownership" of the child, whether the parents live together when the child is one year old, and whether the father provides financial support when the child is one year old. We find some evidence that child gender is associated with unmarried father involvement around the time of the child's birth: sons born to unmarried parents are more likely than daughters to receive the father's surname, especially if the mother has no other children. However, one year after birth, we find very little evidence that child gender is related to parents' living arrangements or the amount of time or money fathers invest in their children. In contrast, and consistent with previous research, fathers who are married when their child is born are more likely to live with a son than with a daughter one year after birth. This pattern supports an interpretation of child gender effects based on parental beliefs about the importance of fathers for the long-term development of sons.

Lundberg, S.; Pollak, R. A., (2007), The American Family and Family Economics, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21(2): 3.

Gary Becker's path-breaking Treatise on the Family (1981) subjected individuals' decisions about sex, marriage, childbearing, and childrearing to rational choice analysis. The American family has changed radically in recent decades; we survey these changes as well as the ongoing effort to understand partnering, parenting, and care of the elderly as results of maximizing choices made by individuals. First, we describe the recent changes in the American family: the separation of sex, marriage, and childbearing; fewer children and smaller households; converging work and education patterns for men and women; class divergence in partnering and parenting strategies; and the replacement of family functions and home production by government programs and market transactions. Second, we examine recent work in family economics that attempts to explain these changes. Third, we point out some challenging areas for further analysis and highlight issues of commitment in two primary family relationships: those between men and women, and those between parents and children. Finally, we consider the effectiveness of policies to target benefits to certain family members (for instance, children) or to promote marriage and fertility.

Lundberg, S.; Pollak, R. A.; National Bureau of Economic, R., (2007), The American family and family economics, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass..

Lundberg, S.; Startz, R., (2007), Information and racial exclusion, Journal of population economics., 20: 3, 621.

We present several economic models of racial segregation and income inequality. The use of race as a signal arises from imperfect information about the return to transactions with particular agents. In a search framework, signaling supports not simply a discriminatory equilibrium, but a pattern of racially segregated transactions, which in turn perpetuates the informational asymmetries. Equilibrium income disparities depend on the relative size of the minority group and on the informational “distance” between races. Under some circumstances, minority agents will self-segregate since they face an adverse selection of majority agents who are willing to trade with them.

Lundberg, S. "Sons, Daughters, and Parental Behavior," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2005, 21(3), pp. 340-356.

The prevalence of son preference and its implications for family behaviour in developing countries have received a great deal of scholarly attention, but child-gender bias is believed to be empirically unimportant in wealthy, non-traditional societies. Studies by sociologists and psychologists during the past 30 years, however, have documented consistent discrepancies between the behaviour of parents of sons and parents of daughters—boys tend to increase marital stability and marital satisfaction relative to girls, and fathers spend more time with, and are more involved with, sons than daughters. In recent years, economists have begun to contribute to the child-gender literature, re-examining the effects of sons and daughters on family structure and parental involvement with larger samples and greater concern for possible sources of selection bias. Other economic outcomes, such as market work and earnings, have also been studied, and some investigators have exploited the randomness of child gender as a source of exogenous variation in parental behaviour. In general, recent results suggest that child gender does affect family stability and the time allocation of parents, but it is not clear whether these responses reflect parental preferences for boys rather than girls or differences in the constraints parents face.

Lundberg, S. "Men and Islands: Dealing with the Family in Empirical Labor Economics," Labour Economics, August 2005, pp. 591-612.

(Presented as the Adam Smith Lecture, European Association of Labour Economists Annual Meeting, 2004). Recent research in family economics emphasizes the interdependence of men's decisions about work and family, and should prompt a reconsideration of the standard practice in labor economics of ‘controlling’ for marital status and children in the analysis of labor market outcomes. Several factors contribute to a concern about work-family simultaneity. First, married men behave very differently from single men, and fathers from non-fathers. Second, transitions into and out of marriage, cohabitation, and custodial parenthood respond to current economic conditions, and not just to fixed individual characteristics. Finally, demographic changes in developed countries have left marriage and parenthood optional, economically ambiguous, and relatively unstable. Labor economists need to recognize that a man's current partnership and parenting status are current choices that can change, that are expected to change, and that respond to the social, economic, and institutional forces that also condition labor market behavior.

Lundberg, S. "Investments in Sons and Daughters: Evidence from the Consumer Expenditure Survey," (with Elaina Rose)., in Family Investments in Children: Resources and Behaviors that Promote Success, eds. Ariel Kalil and Thomas DeLeire, Erlbaum, 2004, pp. 163-180.

The link to the abstract for this article is not available.

Lundberg, S. "Efficiency in Marriage," (with Robert Pollak), Review of Economics of the Household, September 2003, pp. 153-167.

Economists usually assume that bargaining in marriage leads to efficient outcomes. The most convincing rationale for this assumption is the belief that efficient allocations are likely to emerge from repeated interactions in stationary environments, and that marriage provides such an environment. This paper argues that when a current decision affects future bargaining power, inefficient outcomes are plausible. If the spouses could make binding commitments-in effect, commitments to refrain from exploiting the future bargaining advantage-then the inefficiency would disappear. But spouses seldom can make binding commitments regarding allocation within marriage. To investigate the efficiency of bargaining within marriage when choices affect future bargaining power, we consider the location decisions of two- earner couples. Initial location decisions are transparent and analytically tractable examples of choices likely to affect future bargaining power, but the logic of our analysis applies to many other decisions. For example, decisions about education, fertility, and labor force participation are also potential sources of inefficiency.

Lundberg, S. "Child Gender and the Transition to Marriage," (with Elaina Rose), Demography, May 2003, pp. 333-349.

We estimate the effect of a child's gender on the mother's probability of marriage or remarriage using data from the PSID Marital History and Childbirth and Adoption History Files. We find that the birth of a son speeds the transition into marriage when the child is born before the mother's first marriage. A competing-risks analysis shows that the positive effect of a son is stronger for marriages to the child's biological father than for other marriages. We find no significant effect of child gender on the mother's remarriage probabilities when the children are born within a previous marriage. These results are consistent with a marital-search model in which sons, more than daughters, increase the value of marriage relative to single parenthood.

Lundberg, S. "The Retirement Consumption Puzzle: A Marital Bargaining Approach," (with Dick Startz and Steve Stillman), Journal of Public Economics, May 2003, pp. 1199-1218.

Evidence from several countries reveals a substantial drop in household consumption around the age of retirement that is difficult to explain with life- cycle models. Using food consumption data from more than 550 households from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for the years 1979-1986 and 1989-1992, we find that married couple households decrease their expenditures on both food consumed at home and away from home by about 9% following the retirement of the male household head. No significant decrease in consumption is found for single households, either in a sample of males or a pooled sample of single males and females. These results are consistent with a model of marital bargaining in which wives prefer to save more than their husbands do to support an expected longer retirement period, and relative control over household decisions is affected by control over market income. The pattern of the consumption decline, which is increasing in the age gap between husband and wife, lends further support to this interpretation.

Lundberg, S. "The Effect of Sons and Daughters on Men’s Labor Supply and Wages," (with Elaina Rose), Review of Economics and Statistics, May 2002, pp. 251-268.

In this paper, we estimate the effects of children and the differential effects of sons and daughters on men's labor supply and hourly wage rates. The responses to fatherhood of two cohorts of men from the PSID sample are examined separately, and we use fixed-effects estimation to control for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that fatherhood significantly increases the hourly wage rates and annual hours of work for men from both cohorts. Most notably, men's labor supply and wage rates increase more in response to the births of sons than to the births of daughters.

Lundberg, S. "Bargaining and Distribution in Families," (with Robert Pollak), in The Well-Being of Children and Families: Research and Data Needs, ed. Arland Thornton, University of Michigan Press, 2001, pp. 314-338.

The link to the abstract for this article is not available.

Lundberg, S. "Nonmarital Fertility: Lessons for Family Economics," in Out of Wedlock: Causes and Consequences of Nonmarital Fertility, eds. Lawrence Wu and Barbara Wolfe, Russell Sage Foundation, 2001, pp. 383-389.

The link to the abstract for this article is not available.

Lundberg, S. "Parenthood and the Earnings of Married Men and Women," (with Elaina Rose), Labour Economics, November 2000, pp. 689-710.

We use longitudinal data to examine the relationship between parenthood, wages, and hours worked for married men and women. We find evidence of negative selection into parenthood, substantial child-related reallocations of time within the household, and heterogeneity in the effects of children on household behavior. In households in which the wife experiences an interruption in employment, mothers' wages and hours worked fall, while fathers' hours and wages increase. In households in which the mother remains continuously attached to the labor force, however, there is no evidence of a wage decline for mothers, and the hours worked by fathers decrease substantially.

Lundberg, S. "Inequality and Race: Models and Policy," (with Richard Startz), in Meritocracy and Economic Inequality, eds. Kenneth Arrow, Samuel Bowles and Steven Durlauf, Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 269-295.

The link to the abstract for this article is not available.

Lundberg, S. "Family Bargaining and Retirement Behavior," in Behavioral Dimensions of Retirement Economics, ed. Henry Aaron, Russell Sage/Brookings, 1999, pp. 253-272.

The link to the abstract for this article is not available.

Lundberg, S. "How Does Adolescent Fertility Affect the Human Capital and Wages of Young Women?" (with Daniel Klepinger and Robert Plotnick), Journal of Human Resources, Summer 1999, pp. 421-448.

We estimate the relationship between teenage childbearing, human capital investment, and wages in early adulthood, using a sample of women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and a large set of potential instruments for fertility-principally state and county-level indicators of the costs of fertility and fertility control. Adolescent fertility substantially reduces years of formal education and teenage work experience and, for white women only, early adult work experience. Through reductions in human capital, teenage childbearing has a significant effect on market wages at age 25. Our results suggest that public policies which reduce teenage childbearing are likely to have positive effects on the economic well-being of young mothers.

Lundberg, S. "On the Persistence of Racial Inequality," (with Richard Startz), Journal of Labor Economics, April 1998, pp. 292-323.

A model of the "new growth theory" type is applied to the persistence of racial income differentials in the presence of community segregation. When community human capital affects human capital accumulation by individuals, differences between groups can persist indefinitely, even in the absence of current discrimination. Intercommunity mobility can benefit advantaged minority workers, who leave behind an impoverished ghetto. Workplace integration without community integration may not lead to equality even in the long run. We examine various policies and show that a large, temporary intervention may be successful in achieving racial equality while a smaller permanent one fails.

Lundberg, S. "Do Husbands and Wives Pool Resources?: Evidence from the UK Child Benefit," (with Robert Pollak and Terry Wales), Journal of Human Resources, Summer 1997, pp. 463-480.

Common preference models of family behavior imply income pooling, a restriction on family demand functions such that only the sum of husband's income and wife's income affects the allocation of goods and time. Testing the pooling hypothesis is difficult because most family income sources are not exogenous to the allocations being analyzed. In this paper, we present an alternative test based on a "natural experiment"-a policy change in the United Kingdom that transferred a substantial child allowance to wives in the late 1970s. Using Family Expenditure Survey data, we find strong evidence that a shift toward greater expenditures on women's clothing and children's clothing relative to men's clothing coincided with this income redistribution.

Lundberg, S. "Bargaining and Distribution in Marriage," (with Robert Pollak), Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1996, pp. 139-158.

The standard economic model of the family is a 'common preference' model that assumes that a family maximizes a single utility function and implies that family behavior is independent of which individuals receive income or control resources. In recent years, this model has been challenged by game-theoretic models of marriage that do not impose 'pooling' and are, therefore, consistent with empirical evidence that income controlled by husbands and wives does have different effects on family behavior. In this paper, the authors review a number of simple bargaining models and relevant empirical evidence, and discuss their implications for distribution within marriage.

Lundberg, S. "Adolescent Premarital Childbearing: Do Economic Incentives Matter?" (with Robert Plotnick), Journal of Labor Economics, April 1995, pp. 177-200.

We develop an empirical model of adolescent premarital childbearing in which a woman's decisions affect a sequence of outcomes: premarital pregnancy, pregnancy resolution, and the occurrence of marriage before the birth. State welfare, abortion, and family planning policies alter the costs and benefits of these outcomes. For white adolescents welfare, abortion, and family planning policy variables have significant effects on these outcomes consistent with theoretical expectations. Black adolescents' behavior shows no association with the policy variables. The different racial results may reflect differences in sample size or important unmeasured racial differences in factors that influence fertility and marital behavior.

Lundberg, S. "Separate Spheres Bargaining and the Marriage Market," (with Robert Pollak), Journal of Political Economy, December 1993, pp. 998-1010.

This paper introduces the "separate spheres" bargaining model, a new model of distribution within marriage. It differs from divorce threat bargaining models (e.g., Manser-Brown, McElroy-Horney) in that the threat point is not divorce but a noncooperative equilibrium within marriage; this noncooperative equilibrium reflects traditional gender roles. The predictions of our model thus differ from those of divorce threat bargaining models; in the separate spheres model, cash transfer payments to the mother and payments to the father can--but need not--imply different equilibrium distributions in existing marriages. In the long run, the distributional effects of transfer policies may be substantially altered by changes in the marriage market equilibrium.

Lundberg, S. "The Enforcement of Equal Opportunity Laws Under Imperfect Information: Affirmative Action and Alternatives," Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 1991, pp. 309-326.

A study was conducted to examine the enforcement of regulations covering employment discrimination under conditions of imperfect information. Since firms usually have imperfect information about individual productivity, they discriminate in employing workers to retain profit-maximizing conditions. Thus, firms generally attempt to evade such regulations. Results show that firms enjoy optimal conditions when they apply an affirmative action type policy for employment.

Lundberg, S. "Private Discrimination and Social Intervention in Competitive Labor Market," (with Richard Startz), American Economic Review, June 1983, pp. 340-347.

The link to the abstract for this article is not available.