Research

This paper establishes how couples' inherited family fertility norms, proxied by exposure to the fertility of parents and the extended family, jointly determine household fertility through intra-household bargaining. Using comprehensive Swedish administrative data, I show that both partners' extended family fertility outcomes significantly influence household fertility decisions, with relative influence determined by bargaining power. Results reveal three key findings. First, women exert 24-28% stronger influence on fertility decisions than men. Second, this gender gap substantially widens to 39-52% when women have above-average earning potential relative to partners, directly supporting the hypothesis that bargaining power mediates family norm transmission. Third, the intergenerational correlation extends to childlessness: a 1 pp increase in extended family childlessness raises household childlessness by 0.008 pp (women's family) and 0.003 pp (men's family) relative to a sample mean of 2.59%.

We provide a theoretical micro foundation for how much pollution (negative externalities) a firm will internalize based on the ownership distribution of its shareholders. Small shareholders, compared to large ones, want the firm to spend more on avoiding pollution since they suffer less profit loss for the same environmental benefit. In particular, if a shareholder holds a share of 1/N, where N is the population in society, that shareholder’s preferences align with a social planner's. Three theoretical predictions arise. First, small shareholders will systematically vote for a greener corporate profile. Second, firms with a smaller weighted median shareholder will pollute less. Third, countries with concentrated corporate wealth holdings and/or more individualized firm ownership pollute more. This implies that standard models of externalities in environmental economics and macroeconomics containing representative agents are either internally inconsistent or not fully specified.