The Institute for the study of Religion, Economics, and Society (IRES) is pleased to announce the next seminar of the fall semester. The seminar will take place in Wilkinson Hall, Room 116, on Tuesday, November 8. 

The speaker is Shoshana Grossbard, an economist from San Diego State University who will be presenting her paper “Love and Children”. 

Abstract:
The cost of children includes all monetary outlays, ranging from cribs to college tuition, as well as time costs. These time costs have been measured either in terms of time spent on childcare and related household production or as foregone parental leisure. It has also been documented that children are costly in terms of foregone happiness. In this paper we examine how children affect respondents’ feelings of being loved by their current partners. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey 1997 cohort (hereafter NLSY97) we estimate linear regressions of respondents’ assessments of their partners’ love valued from 0 to 10. Our findings indicate a further sense in which children are costly: their presence appears to be associated with lower levels of spousal love. This appears to hold for women more than for men, and for Whites more than for Blacks.