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The first chapter looks at the effects of delaying marriage on individual's wage in the labor market. Delaying marriage is a key feature of demographic transition in most countries. Thus, many economists and sociologists have given this trend much attention. While many theories have been advanced, few empirical examinations of the benefits from delay of marriage have been implemented. In this paper, we examine whether delaying marriage actually pays off. To achieve this goal, we first devise a measure of marital delay, which incorporates, but is not solely a function of, age at first marriage. We then analyze the impact of delay, accounting for the fact that delay is likely endogenous, using an instrumental variable (IV) technique proposed in Lewbel (1997). Our findings are striking. First, when analyzing either marital delay or age at first marriage separately, we find positive effects of both on female wages and negative effects on male wages. However, when we condition on marital delay and age at first marriage simultaneously, we find a negative effect of marital delay and a positive effect of age at first marriage on female wages; there is no effect of either variable on male wages. Thus, contrary to the previous literature, this suggests that "marital delay" is not synonymous with age at first marriage. Second, we find that delaying marriage by one year reduces women's wages by about 28 percent on average. Finally, we find larger effects on women's wage of age at first marriage after accounting for selection based on unobservables and conditioning on an individual's expected age at first marriage. Thus, previous estimates based upon fixed effect methods may underestimate the effects, implying the timing of first marriage may be negatively correlated with unobservables not captured by the fixed effects. The second chapter investigates the relationship between employment and fertility choice. For OECD countries there is an intriguing variety of combinations between total fertility rate (TFR) and female labor force participation rate (FPR) suggesting the existence of multiple equilibria. This paper provides a differential game framework where the employment choices by husband and wife affect a familys fertility. The model has multiple open-loop equilibria characterized by different combinations of FPR and TFR that are consistent with the empirical cross-country evidence. The dynamic trajectory from one equilibrium point to another also sheds lights on possible demographic transition of individual countries as displayed in their time series data. The model stresses that the husbands employment decisions are as important as wifes in determining family size. The third chapter studies the quality-quantity trade-off. Although the theoretical trade-off between the quantity and quality of children is well-established, empirical evidence supporting such a causal relationship is limited. Moreover, empirical studies that have been undertaken typically focus on education to measure of child quality and focus on the average effect of the quantity of children. In contrast, this paper uses two measures of child health to assess the quantity-quality trade-off across the distribution. Using data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey and controlling for the potential endogeneity of child quantity, we find little evidence of a causal trade-off for anyone.
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