Dirk Bethmann

Drawing upon county‐level census data for the German state of Bavaria in 1939 and 1946, we use World War II (WWII) as a natural experiment to study the effects of changes in the adult sex ratio on out of wedlock fertility. Our findings show that war‐induced shortfalls of men significantly increased the non‐marital fertility ratio in the middle of the century. Furthermore, we find that the regional magnitude of this effect varies with the county‐level share of prisoners of war (POWs) in an invers

In spring 2015, the South Korean province of South Gyeongsang stopped providing free school lunches to primary and secondary school students while large portions of schools in other provinces continued to provide free lunches at school. After the provincial government faced strong opposition, South Gyeongsang reintroduced the free-school-lunch program the very next year. Using a difference-in-differences design, we exploit these policy changes to evaluate their impact on students' body mass inde

Abstract In belligerent countries, male‐to‐female sex ratios at birth increased during and shortly after the two world wars. These rises occurred amidst dramatically changed marriage‐market conditions caused by war‐related declines in adult sex ratios, and still defy explanation. Based on county‐level census data for the German state of Bavaria in the years just before and immediately after World War II, we explore the reduced‐form relationship between changes in marriage‐market tightness (the a

Almost all South Korean men serve in the country's armed forces for two years. In this paper, we investigate whether the military service affects the health of draftees. Using an event study design, we use the conscription years to identify the effect the military service has on soldiers' physical health as well as on their smoking and drinking behavior. Our results show that the compulsory military service has a strong and long-lasting negative effect on physical health. Moreover, people who ar

In a stylised R obinson C rusoe economy, we illustrate basic dynamic programing techniques. In a first step, we define state‐like and control‐like variables. In a second step, we introduce the value‐function‐like function. While the former step reduces the number of variables that have to be considered when solving the model, the latter step reduces the dimensionality of the Bellman equation associated with the optimisation problem. The model's solution is shown to be saddle‐path stable, such th

This paper provides a first microeconomic foundation for the institution of marriage. Based on a model of reproduction, mating, and parental investment in children, we argue that marriage serves the purpose of attenuating the risk of mating market failure that arises from incomplete information on individual paternity. Raising the costs of mating to individuals, marriage circumscribes female infidelity and mate poaching among men, which reduces average levels of paternal uncertainty in society.

Using a rich longitudinal data set of married couples from the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS), this article seeks to uncover the relationship between intrahousehold bargaining and the distribution of experienced utility within marriage. Providing an empirical test of the cooperative bargaining model, we confirm both substantial gains from marriage and the importance of the exogenous threat point in the distribution of happiness within the household. In particular, we find that the h

We introduce an easy way of analyzing the transitional dynamics of the Uzawa-Lucas endogenous growth model. We use the value function approach to solve both the social planner’s optimization problem and the representative agent’s optimization problem in the decentralized economy. The complexity of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation is significantly reduced to a one-dimensional initial value problem for an ordinary differential equation. This approach allows us to find the optimal controls for