Parenthood and the earnings of married men and women

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.     

Simplifying choice through attribute preservation or non-attendance: Implications for willingness to pay

There is a growing interest in seeking out rules that individuals invoke when processing information in choice experiments. A rule that is attracting attention in stated choice studies is the extent to which respondents attend to or ignore one or more attributes in processing the information on offer. A model specification method is implemented in the context of a stated choice data set where car drivers choose between tolled and non-tolled routes. The evidence into a willingness to pay (WTP) for travel time savings is obtained, and contrasted with the results from the traditional full preservation model. The evidence suggests that the WTP is sufficiently different and higher, on average.     

The opportunity cost of land use and the global potential for greenhouse gas mitigation in agriculture and forestry

This paper analyses the role of global land management alternatives in determining potential greenhouse gas mitigation by land-based activities in agriculture and forestry. Land-based activities are responsible for over a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet the economics of land-use decisions have not been explicitly modeled in global mitigation studies. In this paper, we develop a new, general equilibrium framework which effectively captures the opportunity costs of land-use decisions in agriculture and forestry, thereby allowing us to analyse competition for heterogeneous land types across and within sectors, as well as input substitution between land and other factors of production. When land-using sectors are confronted with a tax on greenhouse gas emissions, we find significant changes in the global pattern of comparative advantage across sectors, regions, and land types. Globally, we find that forest carbon sequestration is the dominant strategy for GHG emissions mitigation, while agricultural-related mitigation comes predominantly from reduced methane emissions in the ruminant livestock sector, followed by fertilizer and methane emissions from paddy rice. Regionally, agricultural mitigation is a larger share of total land-use emissions abatement in the USA and China, compared to the rest of the world, and, within agriculture, disproportionately from reductions in fertilizer-related emissions. The results also show how analyses that only consider regional mitigation, may bias mitigation potential by ignoring global market interactions. For example, USA-specific analyses likely over-estimate the potential for abatement in agriculture. Finally, we note that this general equilibrium framework provides the research community with a practical methodology for explicit modeling of global land competition and land-based mitigation in comprehensive assessments of greenhouse gas mitigation options.