The Internet offers a wealth of opportunities to learn about public opinion and behavior of political and other actors. Data from social networks, search engines or web services open avenues for new ways of measuring human behavior and preferences in previously unknown velocity and variety.
Many authors suggest that when employed people have children, they are unable to reduce their work hours as much as they would prefer. Existing research, however, offers mixed support for that claim. Jeremy Reynolds will discuss the roots of this popular hypothesis and potential reasons for the mixed support, and offer an analysis of parenthood and work hour
mismatches using U.S. panel data.
Existing estimates of the cost of children focus on what parents spend on their children, which has limited relevance to parents’ financial capacity to meet those costs. An alternative indicator of the affordability of children - their impact upon couples’ wealth accumulation - is estimated using the life-cycle model and Australian household panel data. The results suggest children have a very small impact upon wealth accumulation, seemingly at odds with the large ‘costs’ implied from expenditure-based estimates in existing studies.