Knowledge that Transforms

This work was supported, in part, by a grantfrom the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The paper was written mostly while the author was on sabbatical at the University of California, San Diego. I am grateful to everyone there for providing such a hospitable environment, and to Anil Bera, Russell Davidson, David Hendry, Timo Teriisvirta, Pravin Trivedi, three referees, and seminar participants at the University of -Indiana for helpful comments on earlier versions.

This paper looks at some of the methodological issues that arise in modeling the effects of children on household behavior and presents some estimates for selected areas. For our purposes household behavior will be taken to refer to household decisions on labor supply the allocation of expenditure to different periods... and the decision as to what to do with the difference between income and expenditure....I shall be concerned mainly with the effects of dependent children...[and] I restrict attention largely to Western societies. (EXCERPT)

The author would like to acknowledge support for prior work on this topic from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and helpful comments from three anonymous referees, Rebecca Blank, Howard Chernick, John Fitzgerald, Irwin Garfinkel, Peter Gottschalk, Edward Gramlich, David Greenberg, Judith Gueron, James Heckman, V. Joseph Hotz, Robert Hutchens, Michael Keane, Frank Levy, Larry Mead, Michael Murray, Robert Plotnick, Anuradha Rangarajan, Philip Robins, Howard Rolston, Jeffrey Smith, and Daniel Weinberg. All opinions and errors are those of the author alone.