Donald Cox

• Professor (Full) at Boston College

What can evolutionary biology tell us about male-female differences in preferences concerning family matters? Might mothers be more solicitous toward offspring than fathers, for example? The economics literature has documented gender differences-children benefit more from money put in the hands of mothers rather than fathers, for example-and these...

Recent work on the evolution of utility has brought the blunt instrument of kin selection closer to the cluttered scalpel kit of social science. The concept of diminishing marginal utility can help streamline the latter. Reconciling ultimate causes with proximate inclinations, however, will be easier for the case of assistance from grandparents tha...

Why might spouses cheat on one another? How might demographic or economic variables be implicated in sexual behavior and marital infidelity? Do patterns of infidelity differ depending on whether the cheating spouse in question is the husband or wife? How much might cheating matter for the economics of marriage and divorce? Answers to these question...

What do we know about the role of extended families and kinship networks for redistributing resources? What gaps in our knowledge most need to be filled? How can we best organize current work and identify priorities for future research? These questions are important for several reasons: households in developing countries depend on friends and relat...

Many economic models of the family are based on a generic "person 1–person 2" household or "parent–child" family, rather than their anatomically correct counterparts: sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, and grandfathers and grandmothers. These economic models can offer powerful insights into family behavior, but also can leave certain patterns...

Despite being well recognized by economists as an important social and economic force, private transfers are still little understood, and considerable debate surrounds basic questions, such as whether or how private and public transfers might interact. Nearly all empirical work to date has proceeded in piecemeal fashion, with evidence accruing from...

It is argued that parents provide help with housing downpayments in order to encourage the production of grandchildren, and that such a subsidization emanates from the “demonstration effect:” a child's propensity to furnish parents with attention and care can be conditioned by parental example. Parents who desire such transfers in the future have a...

Do "family traditions" influence bequest behavior? If an individual receives an inheritance from his parents, is he more likely to give a bequest to his children, even after controlling the boost in wealth conferred by the inheritance? Family traditions are pertinent to a host of issues connected with intergenerational transfers: Ricardian equivale...

In recent years there has been burgeoning interest in how private transfers respond to household income, or “transfer derivatives”. Much of it is fueled by the specter of “crowding out”: the more responsive are private transfers, the more likely they could be supplanted by expansions in public transfers, weakening or destroying the latter's distrib...

When adult children provide care for their aging parents, they often do so at great expense to themselves incurring psychic, monetary, emotional, and even physical costs, in conjunction with care that is labor intensive and, at the extreme, unrelenting. While the nature of parent care and the profile of care giving children are well described in th...

This paper investigates how information affect voting behaviour. There exist a large literature suggesting that uninformed voters can use informational shortcuts or cues to vote as if they were informed. This paper tests this hypothesis using unique Swedish individual survey data on the preferences of both politicians and voters. I find that uninfo...

Cox uses date from the 1992-93 and 1997-98 Vietnam Living Standards Survey (VLSS) to describe patterns of money transfers between households. Rapid economic growth during the 1990s did little to diminish the importance of private transfers in Vietnam. Private transfers are large and widespread in both surveys, and are much larger than public transf...

This chapter uses data from the 1992/93 and 1997/98 Vietnam Living Standards Surveys (VLSS) to describe patterns of money transfers between households. Rapid economic growth during the 1990's did little to diminish the importance of private transfers in Vietnam. Private transfers are large and widespread in both surveys,and they are much larger tha...

Despite recent advances in data collection and the growing number of empirical studies that examine private intergenerational transfers, there still exist significant gaps in our knowledge. Who transfers what to whom, and why do they it? I argue that some of these gaps could be filled by departing from the standard parent-child framework and concen...

One of the reasons why there is so little evidence concerning urban risk sharing is that the urban counterparts of data sets used by economists to study the rural sector are scarce. This article uses a data set from Colombia that contains extensive information about private transfers, household networks, and intra-annual earnings fluctuations that...

Can Eastern European families most severely impoverished during the transition to capitalism rely on private family safety nets? This question is likely critical for the transition's success, but little is known about family networks in Eastern Europe. The authors analyze newly available Polish household surveys, conducted both before and after Pol...

How can parents secure old-age support in the form of care, attention or financial transfers from their children? We explore the enforcement of implicit intergenerational agreements from a fresh angle by studying the possibility that the child's conduct is conditioned by the parents' example. Parents can take advantage of this learning potential by...

Jim Davies argues that we have learned enough about empirical patterns in intergenerational transfers to start making assessments about their motives. He reviews the main “stylized facts” and proceeds to see how they square with predictions of alternate models of transfer behavior-altruism versus exchange. Further, he advances some intriguing new a...

This paper uses the Viet Nam Living Standards Survey (VNLSS) to provide a snapshot of private transfer activity. We investigate private transfer patterns along a variety of dimensions, such as age, household resources, demographic make-up of the household and characteristics of the region of residence. We find that private transfers are substantial...

This paper investigates the anti-poverty effectiveness of public transfers taking private-transfer responses into account. Widespread, altruistically motivated private transfers would neutralize the distributional impact of public transfers. But exchange-motivated transfers can reinforce the effects of public transfers on the distribution of econom...

The surge of interest in intergenerational transfers in the past decade has sparked a debate over the motivation for them. Are transfers given out of altruism or part of an exchange? While each motive is probably at work to some extent, we know little about whether one motive predominates. The question is relevant for issues concerning public incom...

Incl. abstract, bibliographical references

Private, inter-household income transfers in the Philippines are large and widespread. They are responsive to the economic status of households. Transfers are targeted to households headed by the non-employed and those without access to retirement pensions. Among the very poorest households, decreases in their pre-transfer income appear to prompt l...

This paper explores the liquidity constraint on consumer liabilities. While much empirical evidence attests to the importance of liquidity constraints in the U.S. economy, evidence about the effects of borrowing constraints on consumer balance sheets is scarce. Using the 1983 Survey of Consumer Finances data we estimate desired borrowing for uncons...

This paper tests for the motives for private income transfers. We consider two motives: altruism and exchange. The question of private-transfer motives is important because such motivation can influence the effects of public income transfers on the distribution of income. Using a household survey for Peru, we find that transfer amounts received inc...

We test for the motivation for private inter-household transfers of income by modeling transfer behavior under two alternative hypotheses: altruistic and exchange-motivated transfers. Knowing the underlying motivation for private income transfers is important because such motivation determines household responses to public income redistribution pro...

The surge of interest in intergenerational transfers in the past decade has sparked a debate over the motivation for them. Are transfers given out of altruism or part of an exchange? While each motive is probably at work to some extent, they know little about whether one motive predominates. The question is relevant for issues concerning public inc...

Do social security systems "crowd out" private transfers from younger to older generations? This question has generated much theoretical discussion, but little empirical work exists to confirm or refute this crowding-out hypothesis. The authors investigate the connection between social security and private transfers in Peru, using the Peruvian Livi...

We estimate quality differences between private and public secondary schools in two developing countries: Colombia and Tanzania. Quality is measured by student performance on standardized achievement tests. We focus on the sample selection aspects of making quality comparisons. Estimated sample selection effects suggest that Colombian student sort...

Private interhousehold cash transfers are an important source of income in many developing countries. Among the countries whose experience is reviewed in the article, the proportion of all households receiving private transfers ranges from a fifth to a half. The amounts received are large, particularly when compared with the incomes of the poorest...

A growing body of evidence indicates that liquidity constraints could affect a substantial proportion of U. S. consumers, but little is known about why these constraints might exist. An important, but little-explored, issue is the relationship between inter vivos intergenerational transfers and liquidity constraints. These transfers can ease borrow...

This paper investigates the connection between credit rationing and private intergenerational transfers. The research is motivated by the idea that private transfers may be a source of funds for consumers who have difficulty borrowing from financial intermediaries. This idea has important implications for consumer behavior, and economists have begu...

Private interhousehold cash transfers are an important source of income in many developing countries. Although precise transfer patterns are only beginning to be researched, the authors review the preliminary evidence from other studies and conduct original analysis based on the recent Peru Living Standards Survey. The paper reveals that private tr...

Traditional male-female wage discrimination measures rely on residuals from earnings functions that standardize for observable characteristics. But many productivity determinants are unobservable, and existing proxies for them are often difficult to interpret. Instead of using the earnings-function approach, we estimate production functions, using...

Private income transfers are becoming increasingly recognized as a key aspect of the U.S. economy. The majority of private income transfers occur inter vivos (i.e., between living persons), but very little is known about this type of transfer behavior. This paper tests alternative hypotheses concerning motivation for inter vivos transfers. Two moti...

Abstract Can Eastern European families most severely impoverished,during the transition to capitalism rely on private family safety nets? This question is likely critical for the transition's success, but little is known about family networks in Eastern Europe. We analyze newly available Polish household surveys, conducted both before and after Pol...

Typescript. Vita. Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 1980. Bibliography: leaves 172-176.