Program meeting on children.

• Position: Program and Working Group Meetings - National Bureau of Economic Research - Conference news

The NBER's Program on Children met in Cambridge on May 2. These papers were discussed:

Anna Aizer, Brown University and NBER, and Pedro Dal Bo, Brown University, "Love, Hate, and Murder: Commitment Devices in Violent Relationships"(NBER Working Paper No. 13492)

Christopher Carpenter, University of California, Irvine and NBER, and Carlos Dobkin, University of California, Santa Cruz and NBER, "The Drinking Age, Alcohol Consumption, and Crime"

Manuela Angelucci, University of Arizona; Giacomo De Giorgi, Stanford University; Marcos A. Rangel, University of Chicago; and Imran Rasul, University College London, "Family Networks and School Enrollment: Evidence from a Randomized Social Experiment"

Jorge M. Aguero and Mindy S. Marks, University of California, Riverside, "Using Infertility Shocks to Estimate the Effect of Family Size on Child Development"

Dan Anderber, Arnaud Chevalier, and Jonathan Wadsworth, Royal Holloway, University of London, "Anatomy of a Health Scare: Education, Income, and the MMR Controversy in the UK"

J Peter Nilsson, Uppsala University, "Does a Pint A Day Affect Your Child's Pay? The Effect of Prenatal Alcohol Exposure on Adult Outcomes"

Many violent relationships are characterized by a high degree of cyclicality: women who are the victims of domestic violence often leave and return multiple times. To explain this, Aizer and Dal Bo develop a model of time-inconsistent preferences in the context of domestic violence. This time inconsistency generates a demand for commitment. The authors present supporting evidence that women in violent relationships display time-inconsistent preferences by examining their demand for commitment devices. They find that "no-drop" policies--which compel the prosecutor to continue with prosecution even if the victim expresses a desire to drop the charges--result in an increase in reporting. No-drop policies also result in a decrease in the number of men murdered by intimates, suggesting that some women in violent relationships move away from an extreme type of commitment device when a less costly one is offered.

Carpenter and Dobkin use the exogenous variation in alcohol consumption induced by the Minimum Legal Drinking Age (MLDA) and data from California to determine how much an increase in drinking increases criminal behavior. They find that individuals just over age 21 are 32 percent more likely to report having consumed alcohol in the previous month and drink on 70 percent more days than...