A great paper title from Michele Tertilt and Alice Schoonbroodt; "Who owns Children and Does it Matter?".
It looks like a pretty interesting paper:
It looks like a pretty interesting paper:
Further, we show that the lack of property rights that parents have over children today may indeed lead to inefficiently low fertility levels. This is an interesting break-down of Coase's theorem, and we provide a detailed analysis of the mechanism responsible for the break-down.Tertilt is very good economist and a prolific researcher in the macroeconomics of family structure. I've done some RA work in this area myself, and besides being interesting, I think it has great potential to explain some key macroeconomic facts (e.g. What has the dual income household done to household income and wealth inequality?).
Thanks for making a post on this, Jason. I just flipped through the paper this morning when I saw that Alice Schoonbroodt was presenting it today at a UT Austin seminar. I was interested in the comment after the one you quoted in the abstract that has to do with some more general applications, both theory and policy.
"First, we relate our efficiency results to previous efficiency results in OLG models with and without altruism and with and without fertility choice and argue that property rights are key. Second, potential policy options, preserving the sovereignty of children, are analyzed. These include government debt and a PAYG social security system, both of which need to be designed not to distort fertility decisions."
I work a lot with OLG models with varying levels of heterogeneity, and this paper says that the definition of property rights is key.