Topics in population and family economics

This dissertation is composed of three chapters that study topics in population and family economics. It places households at the center of the investigation and it answers questions on their decisions about fertility, abortion, migration and labor market outcomes. It elaborates on the importance of cultural norms in decision making and it studies how different constraints can affect these decisions. The first chapter studies a mechanism that can lower the sex ratio at birth by implementing policies that eliminate the sex bias in parents’ preferences for children and the gender gap in intra-household bargaining. This study tackles the problem of sex-selective abortion in Albania by developing a parsimonious theoretical model which incorporates different utilities for boys and girls, the bargaining between family members and the decision about abortion dependent on its cost. The model is calibrated using data from the Demographic and Health Survey dataset on Albania for the year 2008. We find that equal investment in children and gender empowerment are not strong channels in bringing sex ratios at birth down to biological values. There is still a presence of a residual that considering historical backgrounds it can be accounted for as cultural norms. The second chapter investigates how slow deterioration of soil, caused by climate change, affects internal migration and household resettlement. To examine this link, together with my co-author Stefanija Veljanoska, we instrument soil degradation by using distant climate shocks and controlling for recent weather conditions. We use the Integrated Household Survey in Malawi for the years 2010-2016. The underlying mechanism is that soil degradation is harmful for agricultural productivity, and therefore food security, which incentivizes households to seek for better opportunities through pushing their members to migrate. The third chapter studies whether cultural norms in the origin country, measured at different times, affect fertility and labor working time of second-generation migrant women in France. Together with Thomas Baudin, we investigate empirically and follow an epidemiological approach to test that the culture of origin affects people’s behavior and decisions. We rely on the dataset TeO (Trajectoires et Origines) on population diversity in France in 2008. We find that not only culture is an important aspect in decision making but its power depends on the timing when the cultural norms are measured. Norms transmitted from peers can be stronger than those transmitted from parents. Moreover, the feeling of being French moderates the persistence of cultural norms differently for fertility and labor force participation, while the perceived feeling of being discriminated does not alter the persistence of the cultural norms.