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This paper uses a nonstructural, ordered discrete choice model to measure the e¤ects of various parent and child characteristics upon the independent caregiving decisions of the adult children of elderly parents sampled in the 1982 and 1984 National Long Term Care Survey (NLTCS). While significant e¤ects are noted, emphasis is placed on test statistics constructed to measure the independence of caregiving decisions. The test statistic results are conclusive: the caregiving decisions of adult children are dependent across time and family members. Structural models taking dependencies among family members into account note e¤ects similar to those in the nonstructural model.

The objective of this research is to further our understanding of how and why individuals enter and leave coresidential relationships. We develop and estimate an economic model of nonmarital cohabitation, marriage, and divorce that is consistent with current data on the formation and dissolution of relationships. Jovanovic's (Journal of Political Economy 87 (1979), 972-90) theoretical matching model is extended to help explain household formation and dissolution behavior. Implications of the model reveal what factors influence the decision to start a relationship, what form this relationship will take, and the relative stability of the various types of unions. The structural parameters of the model are estimated using longitudinal data from a sample of female high school seniors from the United States. New numerical methods are developed to reduce computational costs associated with estimation. The empirical results have interesting interpretations given the structural model. They show that a significant cause of cohabitation is the need to learn about potential partners and to hedge against future bad shocks. The estimated parameters are used to conduct several comparative dynamic experiments. For example, we show that policy experiments changing the cost of divorce have little effect on relationship choices.

We present a structural model of how families decide who should care for elderly parents. We use data from the National Long-Term Care Survey to estimate and test the parameters of the model. Then we use the parameter estimates to simulate the e¤ects of the existing longterm trends in terms of the common but untested explanations for them. Finally, we simulate the e¤ects of alternative family bargaining rules on individual utility to measure the sensitivity of our results to the family decision-making assumptions we make.JEL codes: J12, J14, C21, C73

We use the 1993 wave of the Assets and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old (AHEAD) data set to estimate a game-theoretic model of families' decisions concerning the provision of informal and formal care for elderly individuals. The outcome is the Nash equilibrium where each family member jointly determines her consumption, transfers for formal care, and allocation of time to informal care, market work, and leisure. We use the estimates to decompose the effects of adult children's opportunity costs, quality of care, and caregiving burden on their propensities to provide informal care. We also simulate the effects of a broad range of policies of current interest.

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