Essays on the Economics of Family Interactions

This dissertation consists of two papers that address issues of interactions within households. The first paper develops and tests a bargaining framework for explaining recidivism in domestic violence. It predicts that the decision to recidivate is influenced by beliefs about whether the abused partner will leave if the violence continues, level of satisfaction with the relationship, and marginal utility of violence. Using victim interview data, I find limited evidence to support the hypothesis that some of the characteristics of a woman can have an impact on recidivism. Instead, I find strong evidence that the characteristics of the man are much more important. The evidence also supports the hypothesis that education increases the likelihood that a woman is a "leaving" type and that high relationship capital decreases the likelihood she is a "staying" type.The second paper uses propensity score matching to estimate the impact that living in a multigenerational household (including the child's mother and at least one maternal grandparent) has on test scores for children of the NLSY79. If the addition of a grandparent adds more resources (for example: income and care) to the household than s/he uses, child test scores will increase. If grandparents use more resources than they add, household resources will be diluted and child test scores will decrease. After using propensity score matching and child-level fixed effects, I find evidence that children living in these households score lower on tests than those who do not.