Teaching

Week 1: Empirical stylized facts

We cover key stylized facts regarding family structure and behaviour from the post-war era to the present day.

 

Week 2: Economic gains

We go through key theories used is economics to explain partnership formation, including specialization, economies of scale, coordinated investments, and risk-sharing.

 

Week 3: Decision-making within the family

We look at theories used by economics to model intra-household interactions, including unitary models, bargaining models, and “collective models”, their relative empirical support, including the income-pooling and evidence based on cash-transfer programmes and field-experiments.

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Week 4: Matching and marital choices: Theory and empirics

We cover core concepts such as stable matching, transferrable utility, and search frictions and we explore the empirical content in each class of model.

 

Week 5: Matching and marital choices: Empirics

We look at recent empirical research on marriage markets, including understanding the inequality, intergenerational social mobility and integration.

 

Week 6: Fertility

We look at how economists model the fertility choices, the investment in child quality, and the empirical evidence on the “quantity-quality” tradeoff both in developed and developing countries, and at the role of policy.

 

Week 7: Investment in children and intergenerational social mobility

We look at models of parents’ investments in their children’s human capital, including recent research on “parenting methods” and dynamic human capital “production function”. We look at the issue of nature v nurture and the implications for social mobility.

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Week 8: Domestic violence and Child Maltreatment

We look how economics is contributing to the research on intimate partner violence in terms of drivers, effects and scope for policy. We also look at the impact of IPV on children’s outcome and the direct maltreatment of children.

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Week 9: Norms and Gender

We pick up on a range of recent research into the role of norms in relation to family behaviour, from basic “breadwinner hypothesis”, and “male backlash”, through to “sexism culture” and its implications for gender equality.