TY  - JOUR
AU  - Alesina,Alberto
AU  - Giuliano,Paola
TI  - The Power of the Family
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13051
PY  - 2007
Y2  - April 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13051
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13051.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alberto F. Alesina
Department of Economics
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-8388
Fax: 617/495-7730
E-Mail: aalesina@harvard.edu

Paola Giuliano
UC, Los Angeles
E-Mail: paola.giuliano@anderson.ucla.edu
AB  - The structure of family relationships influences economic behavior and attitudes. We define our measure of family ties using individual responses from the World Value Survey regarding the role of the family and the love and respect that children need to have for their parents for over 70 countries. We show that strong family ties imply more reliance on the family as an economic unit which provides goods and services and less on the market and on the government for social insurance.  With strong family ties home production is higher, labor force participation of women and youngsters, and geographical mobility, lower. Families are larger (higher fertility and higher family size) with strong family ties, which is consistent with the idea of the family as an important economic unit. We present evidence on cross country regressions. To assess causality we look at the behavior of second generation immigrants in the US and we employ a variable based on the grammatical rule of pronoun drop as an instrument for family ties. Our results overall indicate a significant influence of the strength of family ties on economic outcomes.
ER  -