This article examines the resource allocations of parents in the form of both shared residence with and financial transfers to their young adult sons. Based on an overlapping generations model incorporating a game between parents and adult children, estimates of the determinants of such transfers are obtained from the kinship-linked cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys. The estimates suggest that both types of parental assistance are as important as governmental transfers in supporting young men and are responsive to the current and anticipated earnings of their offspring, suggesting that young men cannot adequately smooth their consumption without parental help.

The recent literature exploiting natural events as “natural experiment” instruments is reviewed to assess to what extent it has advanced empirical knowledge. A weakness of the studies that adopt this approach is that the necessary set of behavioral, market, and technological assumptions made by the authors in justifying their interpretations of the estimates is often absent. The methodology and findings from twenty studies are summarized and simple economic models are used to elucidate the implicit assumptions made by the authors and to demonstrate the sensitivity of the interpretations of the findings to the relaxation of some of these assumptions.

A household time-allocative model which explicitly takes into account the economic contribution of children in agricultural areas of less-developed countries is applied to direct-level data pertaining to the rural population of India. Joint family decisions concerning fertility and the allocation of male and female child time to schooling and work activities are examined empirically in a simultaneous equations system. The properties of the formal model are used to derive inferences from the parameter estimates with respect to the shadow price configuration influencing these joint decisions.

03 We show how comparisons between the within-twin correlations of human capital outcomes across identical and nonidentical twins can be used to identify the variability in the individual-specific component of endowments and the responsiveness of schooling to individual-specific endowments in the family and in the marriage market even when schooling is measured with error. Estimates from two twins samples indicate that 27 (42) percent of the variance in log earnings (obesity) is due to variability in individual-specific endowments, allocations of schooling reinforce specific endowments, and individual-specific earnings endowments of men and their wives' schooling are negatively associated.

Mark R. Rosenzweig, Kenneth I. Wolpin, Specific Experience, Household Structure, and Intergenerational Transfers: Farm Family Land and Labor Arrangements in Developing Countries, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 100, Supplement (1985), pp. 961-987

"In this paper, we formulate a statistical model of dynamic intrafamily investment behavior incorporating endowment heterogeneity and heritability. We use the model's estimates to evaluate alternative estimation procedures that have exploited family and kinship data to obtain estimates of the determinants of human capital." The sequential decision-making framework developed is applied to data on birthweight and gestation of children born to mothers surveyed in the U.S. National Survey of Labor Market Experience youth cohort. "The empirical results imply that the least restrictive statistical formulation, consistent with dynamic behavior and heterogeneity among siblings, fits the data best. All of the estimation procedures that control for a family-specific endowment indicate, however, that the biological effect of having a birth at younger ages is to marginally increase birthweight and to increase fetal growth."

The predictive content of the quantity-quality model of fertility and the empirical information required for verification under a minimal set of restrictions on the utility function is described. It is demonstrated that commodity-independent compensated price effects must be known to infer the existence of the unobservable interdependent shadow prices of the model with a relatively weak structure improsed on preference orderings. A method of using multiple birth events to substitute for these exogenous prices is proposed and applied to household data from India.

A model is formulated incorporating linkages among nutrition, labor-market productivity, health heterogeneity, and the intrahousehold distribution of food and work activities in a subsistence economy. Empirical results, based on a sample of households from Bangladesh, indicate that, despite considerable intrahousehold disparities in calorie consumption, households are averse to inequality. Furthermore, consistent with the model, the results also indicate that both the higher level and greater variance in the calories consumed by men relative to women reflect in part the greater participation by men in activities in which productivity is sensitive to health status.