Jennifer Ward-Batts

Assistant Professor, Wayne State University

Jennifer Ward-Batts is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Claremont McKenna College. From 1999 – 2001 she was a Research Fellow, funded by the National Institute on Aging, at the Population Studies Center of the University of Michigan. Ward-Batts is a labor economist who received her Ph.D. at the University of Washington (1999). She specializes in economic decision-making in families and households. Her work examines the effects of factors which influence individuals’ relative household bargaining power on both household and individual decision outcomes, such as household expenditure and saving patterns, net worth, labor supply, and private income transfers. Part of her dissertation work on intra-household allocation showed that household expenditures shifted away from men’s goods and toward children’s goods when a change in the Child Benefit policy in the United Kingdom shifted income from husbands to wives in intact families. More recent work includes a project examining effects of household bargaining on net worth and retirement timing, and a project examining the effects on labor supply, asset income allocation, and expenditure patterns in households affected by the UK switch from joint to independent taxation of husbands and wives. More information about Ward-Batts, including access to some working papers, is available on her website.