Valuable insights into the labor supply of married women have recently been gained by analyzing the problem in the household production context. Pioneered by Jacob Mincer, this approach sees women as choosing not simply between work and leisure, but between work in the home, work in the market, and leisure. While income affects the total amount of work, its division between home and market depends on wage rates, productivity in the home, and the price and availability of substitutes for the wife's labor in the home. Participation of married women in the market has, of course, increased dramatically in the past thirty years; this increase in labor force participation has been accompanied by various changes in inputs and outputs of household work which have only recently come under detailed scrutiny. It appears that over a fifty-year period the total time devoted to work in the home by urban nonemployed women has remained virtually constant at fiftythree hours per week (Joann Vanek). But since employed women have always devoted less time to household production than nonemployed women, and since the proportion of women in the labor force has been rising, the average time devoted to household tasks by all women has been falling over the past fifty years. One of the factors drawing women into the labor market has been their rising educational attainment. But what is the effect of the considerable rise in schooling levels on production within the home? First, it is important to understand how home production varies with schooling. Michael Grossman has recently found that a married man's health is positively related to his wife's schooling level. Lee Benham finds evidence to support his hypothesis that the earnings of married men are positively related to their wives' schooling. Robert T. Michael finds that education affects the efficiency with which contraception is carried on. In contrast to these papers, which relate a woman's education to various household production outputs, the present paper will try to determine how schooling affects one of the inputs of household production, namely, time. Time budget data will be used to determine how time allocation to various activities varies with schooling level.

By the time children enter first grade, significant differences in verbal and mathematical competence exist among them.'These differences reflect variations in (1) inherent ability, and (2) the amounts of human capital acquired before the children reach the age of six.2The stocks of acquired human capital reflect, in turn, varying inputs of time and other resources by parents, teachers, siblings, and the child.The process of acquiring preschool human capital is analogous to the acquisition of human capital through schooling or on-the-job training.Assuming a constant rental rate for human capital, earnings can be interpreted as a measure of capital stocks at later ages.The IQalso can be interpreted as such a measure of human capital stocks.It is related to some commonly used inputs of human capital, for it is well known that measured IQ is not independent of years of schooling acquired before the age of testing.At preschool ages IQmeasures should be related to human capital inputs in early childhood as well as to inherent genetic ability.Viewing measured ability as an index of the stock of human capital puts a different light on earnings functions which include ability and schooling.If contemporaneous ability and schooling measures are used to predict earnings (as itt Hansen, Weisbrod, and Scanlon 1970), it is not surprising to find that earnings are more closely related to an ability measure, which

In this paper we seek to explain why legislative committees exist and what is the optimal number and size of committees in a legislature. Our theory is based on the idea that committees are a “sample” taken from the full house and on the assumption that the majority party seeks to maximize the proportion of its favored bills which are reviewed and passed in voting trials. We show that for a given size of majority fewer and larger committees lead to larger passage rates, if majority members do not always vote the party-line.

We estimate how cost sharing, the portion of the bill the patient pays, affects the demand for medical services. The data come from a randomized experiment. A catastrophic insurance plan reduces expenditures 31 percent relative to zero out-of-pocket price. The price elasticity is approximately -0.2. We reject the hypothesis that less favorable coverage of outpatient services increases total expenditure (for example, by deterring preventive care or inducing hospitalization).