Jennifer Ward-Batts

Faculty Profile

dz2660@wayne.edu

Fax

313-577-9564

Office

 FAB 2097

Biography

 Prof. Jennifer Ward-Batts is assistant professor of Economics at Wayne State University in Detroit. She obtained her PhD in economics from the University of Washington in Seattle, and her Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from the University of North Carolina at Asheville. She did postdoctoral study at the University of Michigan in economic demography and the economics of aging. She received a Sloan Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship to fund her dissertation work examining intrahousehold allocation in the UK before and after a policy change affecting government benefits to families with children. She was also awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institute on Aging (1999-2001), and a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey (2008-09). She has taught at University of Washington, University of Michigan, Claremont McKenna College, and Wayne State University. Her research focuses on individual and household decision-making about outcomes that affect welfare of individuals and families, especially women, and children, including household spending patterns, saving for retirement, inter-household transfers, time allocation, residence location choice, educational investments, and labor supply. She has published papers in Cuestiones Economicas, the Journal of Human Resources, the Journal of Public Economics, and the American Economic Review. She contributed a book chapter to How Do We Spend Our Time? Evidence from the American Time Use Survey. She has presented work at numerous conferences and at universities in the US, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Turkey.

Research Description

My research interests are in Labor and Demographic Economics, specifically individual and household decision-making, bargaining between family members, labor supply and time allocation. I'm also interested in the effects of child gender on various outcomes. Some of my former and current research examines the following topics: (1) The effect of household spending patterns of who controls income in the household, (2) the effect of changes in government cash transfers on voluntary private transfers received by single parents, (3) the effect of a shift to independent taxation of spouses on allocation of assets between spouses, (4) the effect of child gender on how parents allocate time, including effect on market work, leisure time, and time investments in children, (5) the effect of an increase in compulsory schooling on the gender gap in schooling attainment in Turkey, (6) the relationship between spousal bargaining and wealth in married couples near retirement age, (7) the differential impact of changes in health of husbands and wives on household wealth of married couples, and (8) how time allocation of men and women change as they transition into post-retirement ages.

Affiliated Departments

Tags