Based on county-level census data for the German state of Bavaria in 1939 and 1946, we use World War II as a natural experiment to study the effects of sex ratio changes on out-of-wedlock fertility. Our findings show that war-induced shortfalls of men to women significantly increased the nonmarital fertility ratio at mid century, a result that proves robust to the use of alternative sex ratio definitions, post-war measures of fertility, and estimation samples. The magnitude of this increase furthermore appears to depend on the future marriage market prospects that women at the time could expect to face in the not-too-distant future. We find the positive effect on the nonmarital fertility ratio of a decline in the sex ratio to be strongly attenuated by the magnitude of countylevel shares of prisoners of war. Unlike military casualties and soldiers missing in action, prisoners of war had a sizeable positive probability of returning home from the war. Both current marriage market conditions, therefore, and foreseeable improvements in the future marriage market prospects of women appear to have influenced fertility behavior in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

Institution of marriage, Paternity uncertainty, Parental investment, D10, J12, J13,

In a stylised Robinson Crusoe economy, we illustrate basic dynamic programing techniques. In a first step, we define state‐like and control‐like variables. In a second step, we introduce the value‐function‐like function. While the former step reduces the number of variables that have to be considered when solving the model, the latter step reduces the dimensionality of the Bellman equation associated with the optimisation problem. The model's solution is shown to be saddle‐path stable, such that the phase diagram associated with the Bellman equation has two solution branches. The simplicity of our model allows us to state both the stable and the unstable branch explicitly. We also explain the usefulness of logarithmic preferences when studying the continuous‐time Hamilton‐Jacobi‐Bellman equation. In this case, the utility maximisation problem can be transformed into an initial value problem for an ordinary differential equation.

No abstract

Using a rich longitudinal data set of married couples from the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS), this article seeks to uncover the relationship between intrahousehold bargaining and the distribution of experienced utility within marriage. Providing an empirical test of the cooperative bargaining model, we confirm both substantial gains from marriage and the importance of the exogenous threat point in the distribution of happiness within the household. In particular, we find that the higher a partner's relative predicted earnings outside of marriage, the higher her/ his relative gains from marriage. In addition, this study reveals an asymmetry between women and men in older couples: men on average are endowed with a lower threat point utility, yet secure higher returns from marriage. This is likely to be due to social norms and prescribed gender roles which are more prevalent within the older generation.