This paper examines the transmission of human capital from parents to children using variation in parental influence due to parental death, divorce, and the increasing specialization of parental roles in larger families. All three sources of variation yield strikingly similar patterns that show that the strong parent-child correlation in human capital is largely causal. In each case, the parent-child correlation in education is stronger with the parent who spends more time with the child and weaker with the parent who spends relatively less time parenting. These findings help us understand why educated parents spend more time with their children.

We analyze the effect of a shared brand name, such as geographically designated agricultural brands, on incentives of otherwise autonomous firms of the same type to establish a collective reputation for product quality. When firms of the same type share the same brand name, consumers have more observations of past quality and are able to predict quality with greater precision than if brands are private. This effect increases firms’ incentive to invest in quality. On the other hand, a shared brand name may motivate free riding on the group’s reputation, reducing incentives to invest. We identify conditions under which the former effect is dominant and leads to higher quality than stand alone firms can achieve.

Prior to 1996, Israelis in collective communities (kibbutzim) shared the costs of raising children equally. This article examines the impact of privatising costs of children on the fertility behaviour of young couples. Exploiting variation in parental cost-sharing across kibbutzim, we estimate that lifetime fertility declined by 0.65 children. We also examine the exit decisions of members, and find that couples were most likely to leave the kibbutz if they were either higher income or lower fertility. This pattern is also observed among Israeli emigrants, in which higher educated and lower fertility couples are more likely to leave Israel.

Does advertising make markets more or less competitive? This paper lays out an econometric strategy for estimating the effect of advertising on prices that exploits seasonal demand and imperfect targeting of consumers. We find mostly negligible effects of advertising on prices at monthly frequency: among the 35 (of 131) product categories with sufficient advertising seasonality to justify second-stage estimation, only nine have a significant effect, and those are typically small. This finding is essentially the result of the much greater seasonality in advertising than price.