This paper examines household fertility and female labor supply over the life cycle. We investigate how maternal time inputs, market expenditures on offspring, as well as the benefits they yield their parents, vary with ages of offspring, and influence female labor supply and contraceptive behavior. Our econometric framework combines a female labor supply model and a contraceptive choice index function. It also accounts for the fact that conceptions are not perfectly controllable events. Using longitudinal data on married couples from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we estimate these equations and test alternative specifications of the technologies governing chld care. Our findings suggest that while parents cannot perfectly control conceptions, variations in child care costs do affect the life cycle spacing of births. Furthermore, our results demonstrate the gains of modelling the linkages between female labor supply and fertility behavior at the household level.

Recently, several authors have argued for the use for the use of dynamic preference structures for leisure which incorporate forms of intertemporally nonseparable utility in the analysis of intertemporal labor supply decisions. In this paper, we examine whether such nonseparable utility functions are important in characterizing microdata on life-cycle labor supply. Using longitudinal data on males from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we estimate a model of life-cycle labor supply and consumption under uncertainty in which the structure of intertemporal leisure preferences is allowed to be nonseparable in leisure. Our model nests as special cases a number of alternative specifications considered in the literature. We investigate the robustness of our findings to certain forms of population heterogeneity and to some types of model misspecification. Across a number of alternative specifications, we find evidence that the standard assumption of intertemporally separable preferences for leisure is not consistent with data for prime-age males.

We examine the impact of state child care regulations on the supply and quality of care in child care markets. We exploit panel data on both individual establishments and local markets to control for state, time, and, where possible, establishment-specific fixed effects to mitigate the potential bias due to policy endogeneity. We find that the imposition of regulations reduces the number of center-based child care establishments, especially in lower income markets. However, such regulations increase the quality of services provided, especially in higher income areas. Thus, there are winners and losers from the regulation of child care services.

We examine the relationship between income volatility and life expectancy in mid-sized U.S. commuting zones between 2006 and 2014. We use a commercial dataset, InfoUSA, to measure income volatility which we link to estimates of life expectancy by gender, county, race, and income. We find that higher income volatility in a county is associated with lower life expectancy, but only at the bottom of the income distribution and primarily for non-Hispanic Whites. Though we cannot extrapolate our findings to individual-level relationships, we do link them to existing literatures on place-based differences in mortality and the relationship between volatility and health.

We examine differences in minority science graduation rates among University of California campuses when racial preferences were in place. Less prepared minorities at higher ranked campuses had lower persistence rates in science and took longer to graduate. We estimate a model of students' college major choice where net returns of a science major differ across campuses and student preparation. We find less prepared minority students at top ranked campuses would have higher science graduation rates had they attended lower ranked campuses. Better matching of science students to universities by preparation and providing information about students' prospects in different major-university combinations could increase minority science graduation.

This paper investigates the wage returns to schooling and actual early work experiences and how these returns have changed over the past 20 years. Using the NLSY surveys, we develop and estimate a dynamic model of the joint schooling and work decisions that young men make in early adulthood and quantify how they affect wages using a generalized Mincerian specification. Our results highlight the need to account for dynamic selection and changes in composition when analyzing changes in wage returns. In particular, we find that ignoring the selectivity of accumulated work experiences results in overstatement of the returns to education.

This paper examines the effects of work experience acquired while youth were in high school (and college) on young men's wage rates. Previous studies have found sizeable and persistent rates of return to working while enrolled in school, especially high school, on subsequent wage growth. We evaluate the extent to which these estimates represent causal effects by assessing the robustness of prior findings to controls for unobserved heterogeneity and sample selectivity. We explore more-general econometric methods for dealing with the dynamic of selection and apply them to data on young men from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). We find that the estimated returns to working while in high school or college are dramatically diminished in magnitude and are not statistically significant when one applies dynamic selection methods.