Thomas Baudin

The Optimal Trade-Off Between Quality and Quantity with Unknown Number of Survivors

In a model of endogenous fertility where individuals know the probability of child survival but not the final number of survivors, parents do not always formulate a precautionary demand for children. For some utility functions, parents have fewer children than what they would have in a situation in which the number of survivors is known earlier. The properties of the optimal economic policy depend on the degree to which the social welfare function takes ignorance into account. If social welfare is evaluated after parents know how many children survived, the parental response to uncertainty is socially inefficient. Individual decisions then should be corrected through tax or transfer on both births and education. This property helps determine the optimal public response to mortality crisis in the presence of educational externalities.

Cultural transmission and the evolution of gender roles

Investigating how gender roles evolve over time is crucial to understand gender inequalities and their dynamics. We propose a cultural transmission model in which parents may socialize their sons and daughters differently and we derive gender specific cultural dynamics. We show how interactions between socialization behaviors and household’s economic decisions shape these dynamics and the long-run definition of gender roles. We apply our theory to cultural traits related to the prescribed role of men and women within the society. Multiple equilibria may arise and an economy may be trapped in a situation in which males and females share inegalitarian views about gender roles. Institutional changes as a greater availability of child care facilities may help to reach another equilibrium in which a large proportion of individuals hold more egalitarian views about these roles.