David C. Ribar

Altruistic and Joy-of-Giving Motivations in Charitable Behavior

This study theoretically and empirically examines altruistic and joy‐of‐giving motivations underlying contributions to charitable activities. The theoretical analysis shows that in an economy with an infinitely large number of donors, impurely altruistic preferences lead to either asymptotically zero or complete crowd‐out. The paper then establishes conditions on preferences that are sufficient to yield zero crowd‐out in the limit. These conditions are fairly weak and quite plausible. An empirical representation of the model is estimated using a new 1986–92 panel of donations and government funding from the United States to 125 international relief and development organizations. Besides directly linking sources of public and private support, the econometric analysis controls for unobserved institution‐specific factors, institution‐specific changes in leadership, year‐to‐year changes in need, and expenditures by related organizations. The estimates show little evidence of crowd‐out from either direct public or related private sources. Thus, at the margin, donations to these organizations appear to be motivated solely by joy‐of‐giving preferences. In addition to addressing the basic question of motives behind charitable giving, the results help explain the existing disparity between econometric and experimental crowd‐out estimates.

Child Care and the Labor Supply of Married Women Reduced Form Evidence

This paper empirically analyzes family demands for market and nonmarket child care services and the impact of these demands on the work effort of married women. The paper first develops a general model of child care and labor force participation. The model predicts that higher wages increase the likelihood of labor force participation and that higher costs decrease the likelihood of child care utilization. The paper then develops a three-equation, reduced-form econometric specification of the general model. The equations in the specification are estimated simultaneously using 1985 data from the Survey of Income Program Participation. The estimates reveal that the cost of market child care has a strong negative effect on the labor supply of married women.

Teenage Fertility and High School Completion

This paper uses 1979-85 data on women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine the economic, sociological, and institutional antecedents of adolescent childbearing and high school completion and to analyze the effect of early childbearing on school completion. Fertility and school completion are modeled as dichotomous outcomes, and their determinants are estimated using a bivariate probit specification. The paper finds evidence that adolescent childbearing is an endogenous determinant of high school completion and that failing to account for this endogeneity leads to an overestimate of the schooling consequences of early childbearing. Copyright 1994 by MIT Press.

The Effects of Economic Conditions and Access to Reproductive Health Services on State Abortion Rates and Birthrates

The effects that such factors as wages, welfare policies and access to physicians, family planning clinics and abortion providers have on abortion rates and birthrates are examined in analyses based on 1978-1988 state-level data and longitudinal regression techniques. The incidence of abortion is found to be lower in states where access to providers is reduced and state policies are restrictive. Calculations indicate that decreased access may have accounted for about one-quarter of the 5% decline in abortion rates between 1988 and 1992. In addition, birthrates are elevated where the costs of contraception are higher because access to obstetrician-gynecologists and family planning services is reduced. Economic resources such as higher wages for men and women and generous welfare benefits are significantly and consistently related to increased birthrates; however, even a 10% cut in public assistance benefits would result in only one birth fewer for every 212 women on welfare. Economic factors showed no consistent relationship with abortion rates.

Parental Child Care in Single-Parent, Cohabiting, and Married-Couple Families: Time-Diary Evidence from the United Kingdom

The time that parents spend caring for their children is a topic of intense interest among researchers, policymakers, and parents themselves. Parental inputs of time are enormously valuable investments in children’s well-being and development. However, the declining prevalence of two-parent, married-couple families and the steady influx of mothers into the labor market are generally believed to have placed these investments at risk. We use time-diary data from the United Kingdom 2000 Time Use Study (UKTUS) to investigate how parents’ time spent in child care differs with their marital status and other characteristics. Unlike previous economic studies, which have analyzed alternative child-care activities but only among two-parent families (e.g., Peter Kooreman and Arie Kapteyn, 1987; Daniel Hallberg and Anders Klevmarken, 2003), we examine differences among married, cohabiting, and single-parent families. The household production model indicates that single-parent households may differ from married and cohabiting households either because there are fewer time resources or because there are fewer opportunities for economies of scale or specialization in household activities (Gary Becker, 1985). If marital relationships are more stable than cohabiting relationships, the type of union may matter.

Welfare and the Rise in Female-Headed Families

The article provides a bridge between recent marriage market research and studies of welfare incentive effects on U.S. family formation. Estimates from state and county fixed‐effects models indicate significant effects of changing state Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, and Medicaid expenditure levels on county‐level changes in families headed by unmarried mothers. However, neither changing welfare benefit levels nor declining economic and marital opportunities could account for recent increases in female headship. The results imply that large additional cuts in welfare payment levels would lead to only small reductions in the percentage of female‐headed families with children.

Welfare Reform and Female Headship

While much of the focus of recent welfare reforms has been on moving recipients from welfare to work, many reforms were also directed at decisions regarding living arrangements, pregnancy, marriage, and cohabitation. This article assesses the impact of welfare reform waivers and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs on women’s decisions to become unmarried heads of families, controlling for confounding influences from local economic and social conditions. We pooled data from the 1990, 1992, 1993, and 1996 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, which span the period when many states began to adopt welfare waivers and to implement TANF, and estimated logit models of the incidence of female headship and state-stratified, Cox proportional hazard models of the rates of entry into and exit from headship. We found little consistent evidence that waivers affected female headship of families.

The Demand for Welfare Generosity

This paper estimates economic models of the determinants of state benefit levels in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program using 19691992 data. These models have been extensively researched; however, the existing literature has produced an unacceptably wide range of estimates. Using alternative econometric procedures, this paper systematically examines both the specification assumptions underlying previous analyses as well as several additional specification issues. It is, therefore, able to replicate and reconcile estimates from previous studies and to provide updated, consensus estimates of the demand for welfare generosity. It finds that changes in the average level of income within states have small but statistically significant positive effects on benefits with the confidence bounds on the elasticity extending from 0.11 to 0.82. Changes in the effective price of redistribution are found to have, at most, weak negative effects with elasticities in the range of -0.14 to 0.02. These results are used to evaluate the effects of block grant provisions in the recently enacted welfare reform legislation.

FOOD INSECURITY AND INSUFFICIENCY AT LOW LEVELS OF FOOD EXPENDITURES

This study uses data from the December 2003 Food Security Supplement of the CPS to compare the food insufficiency and insecurity measures with objective measures of food expenditures and objective and subjective measures of food needs. The study examines the general relationships between these variables and finds that reports of food hardships are positively associated with food expenditures and negatively associated with needs. The study goes on to examine reports of food hardships at low very levels of food expenditures, where we conjecture that most people should experience food problems. When expenditures are scaled by an objective measure of needs, there is no point along the expenditure distribution where more than half of the survey respondents report experiencing being food insufficient or insecure. However, when expenditures are scaled by a subjective threshold, we observe near-universal reporting of food problems at low levels of expenditures. The findings indicate that the food insufficiency and insecurity measures each incorporate a large subjective component, which limits the usefulness of the measures for comparing the extent of food hardships across populations or over time or evaluating the effects of assistance programs.

A Multinomial Logit Analysis of Teenage Fertility and High School Completion

This paper examines economic, institutional and sociological antecedents of high school completion and adolescent fertility using data on women from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth A multinomial logit model is estimated in which the dependent variable represents combinations of high school completion and early fertility outcomes Benefits from various government assistance programs and earnings differences attributable to high school completion are included as potential economic determinants Of these variables, welfare generosity appears to have a significant positive effect on adolescent childbearing. Other variables including family planning clinic availability, family background, religiousness, physical maturity, race and ethnicity are also found to be important determinants of teenage parenthood and educational attainment.