Collaborative Research: Family Law and Investment in Children

合作研究：家庭法和儿童投资

• 批准号: 0517960
• 负责人: Christopher Flinn
• 金额: $ 17.69万
• 依托单位: New York University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-08-01 至 2009-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0517960&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Family; Law; Investment

The fact that legal institutions may have profound impacts on the distribution of welfare in a society has been long appreciated but only recently subject to rigorous analysis (see, e.g., the seminal paper of Mnookin and Kornhauser (1979)). In this research program the PI's investigate the manner in which three parameters of the divorce environment, the presence of a bilateral divorce standard, physical custody awards, and child support orders, affect (i) investment in children; (ii) the divorce decision; and (iii) the decision to have additional children. The PI's perform their empirical analysis using data from the NLSY Mother-Child sample and estimate a continuous-time, discrete state model in which initially married parents with one child experience shocks to marriage match quality and child quality, and where the rate of child quality improvement is a function of the investments each parent makes in the child within a Markov Perfect Equilibrium. Changes in any of the state variables can result in some combination of the following: divorce (if currently married), adding another child to the household (if married), and equilibrium investment levels (in any marital state). As currently implemented, the PI's assume noncooperative parental behavior in both the married and divorced states. The PI's have also limited their attention to the case of single-child households. In addition to estimation of an expanded version of the current setup (e.g., including covariates in the flow utility in the divorce state and in the initial distribution of child quality), the PI's will considerably generalize the modeling framework by allowing for cooperative behavior in both marital states and an endogenous fertility decision: i.e., married parents of a single child will have the option of adding more children to the family. These extensions will allow a better fit of the model to the data, enhanced credibility of the policy simulations, which are the focus of the research, and an opportunity to explore innovative techniques for solving strategic models in a continuous time context and estimating the parameters which characterize them using simulation methods. Intellectual Merit: To the PI's knowledge this is the first research in which strategic models of parental investment decisions in public goods (i.e., children) are developed and estimated. Their preliminary results indicate that it is important to consider the impact of the family law environment on investment behavior both for divorced parents and for married ones. Allowing fertility decisions to depend on the (endogenous) quality outcomes of existing children is also a novel feature of the proposed research. Most importantly, the research is designed to make a contribution to the analysis of the effect of endogenously-determined institutional environments on efficiency and the distribution of welfare in the population.Broader Impacts: Family law and policies have potentially significant implications for the welfare of parents and children. The intricate paths through which these impacts arise can only be discovered through the use of general dynamic models of family behavior. After estimating the parameters associated with various model specifications, the PI's will be able to begin to address the question of how to design welfare-enhancing family laws. This will be accomplished through the simulation of outcomes under a number ofpotential family law structures and the construction of welfare distributions of parentsand children associated with each.

法律的制度可能对社会中的福利分配产生深远影响，这一事实长期以来一直受到重视，但直到最近才受到严格的分析（见，例如，Mnookin和Kornhauser（1979）的开创性论文）。在这项研究计划中，PI调查了离婚环境的三个参数，即双边离婚标准的存在，实际监护权裁决和子女抚养令，影响（一）对子女的投资;（二）离婚决定;（三）决定有更多的孩子。PI使用NLSY母子样本的数据进行实证分析，并估计一个连续时间，离散状态模型，其中最初结婚的父母有一个孩子经历婚姻匹配质量和孩子质量的冲击，并且孩子质量改善的速度是每个父母在孩子中的投资的函数。任何状态变量的变化都可能导致以下情况的某种组合：离婚（如果目前已婚），再增加一个孩子（如果已婚），以及均衡投资水平（在任何婚姻状态下）。正如目前所实施的，PI在已婚和离婚状态下都采取不合作的父母行为。PI还将注意力限制在独生子女家庭的情况上。除了估计当前设置的扩展版本（例如，包括离婚状态下的流动效用和儿童质量的初始分布中的协变量），PI将通过允许婚姻状态和内源生育决定中的合作行为来显著地概括建模框架：即，只有一个孩子的已婚父母可以选择增加更多的孩子。这些扩展将允许更好地拟合模型的数据，提高可信度的政策模拟，这是研究的重点，并有机会探索创新的技术，解决战略模型在连续的时间范围内，并估计参数的特点，他们使用模拟方法。知识价值：据PI所知，这是第一项研究，其中父母投资决策的战略模型在公共产品（即，儿童）的发展和估计。他们的初步研究结果表明，无论是离婚的父母还是已婚的父母，考虑家庭法律环境对投资行为的影响都很重要。允许生育决定取决于现有儿童的（内源性）质量结果也是拟议研究的一个新特点。最重要的是，研究的目的是作出贡献的内生决定的制度环境的效率和福利在population.Broader影响的分配的影响分析：家庭法和政策有潜在的重大影响的福利的父母和子女。这些影响产生的复杂途径只能通过使用家庭行为的一般动态模型来发现。在估计了与各种模型规格相关的参数之后，PI将能够开始解决如何设计福利增强家庭法的问题。这将通过模拟一些潜在的家庭法结构下的结果以及构建与每个结构相关的父母和子女的福利分配来实现。