the ant or the grasshopper the long term consequences of unilateral divorce laws on savings of european households abstract unilateral divorce laws udls allow people to obtain divorce without the consent of their spouse using the staggered introduction of udls across european countries we show that households exposed to udls for a longer period of time accumulate more savings this effect holds for both financial and total wealth and is stronger at higher quantiles of the wealth distribution consistent with a precautionary motive for savings we also find that exposure to udls increases female labour supply numeracy trust in others and dispositional optimism

marriage meets the joneses relative income identity and marital status abstract this paper investigates the effect of relative income on marriage accounting flexibly for absolute income the ratio between a man s income and a local reference group median is a strong predictor of marital status but only for low income men relative income affects marriage even among those living with a partner a 10 percent higher reference group income is associated with a 2 percent reduction in marriage we propose an identity model to explain the results

marriage and other risky assets a portfolio approach we study the joint impact of gender and marital status on financial decisions first we test the hypothesis that marriage represents in a portfolio framework a sort of safe asset and that this effect is stronger for women controlling for a number of observable characteristics we show that single women have a lower propensity to invest in risky assets than married females and males second we show that the differential behavior of single women evolves over time reflecting the increasing incidence of divorce and the expansion of female labor market participation in particular towards the end of our sample period we observe a reduction in the gap between women with different family status which can be attributed to the gradual erosion of the perception of marriage as a sort of safe asset our results therefore suggest that the differential behavior of single vs married women can be explained by the evolution of gender roles in society even after controlling for differential risk attitudes our empirical investigation is based on a dataset drawn from the 1989 2006 bank of italy survey of household income and wealth

did unilateral divorce laws raise divorce rates a reconciliation and new results application of the coase theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from a consent divorce regime to no fault unilateral divorce laws should not affect divorce rates each iteration of the empirical literature examining the evolution of divorce rates across us states has yielded different conclusions about the effects of divorce law liberalization i show that these results reflect a failure to jointly consider both the political endogeneity of these divorce laws and the dynamic response of divorce rates to a shock to the political regime taking explicit account of the dynamic response of divorce rates to the policy shock i find that liberalized divorce laws caused a discernible rise in divorce rates for about a decade but that this increase was substantially reversed over the next decade that said this increase explains very little of the rise in the divorce rate over the past half century both administrative data on the flow of new divorces and measures of the stock of divorcees from the census support this conclusion these results are suggestive of spouses bargaining within marriage with an eye to their partner s divorce threat

when labor s lost health family life incarceration and education in a time of declining economic opportunity for low skilled men the economic progress of us men has stagnated in recent decades the labor force participation rate of men ages 25 54 peaked in the mid 1960s and has declined since then according to the bureau of labor statistics while men s real median earnings have been flat since the early 1970s these population averages mask considerably larger declines in participation among less educated and non white men as well as substantial increases in wage inequality in this paper we seek to illuminate the broader context in which prime age men are experiencing economic stagnation we explore changes for prime age men over time in education mortality morbidity disability program receipt family structure and incarceration rates we focus on prime age men namely those ages 25 54 and on the years 1980 2016 or 2017 when possible encompassing much of the period of reduced economic progress for low skilled men

when it rains it pours under what circumstances does job loss lead to divorce much of the previous research that has examined the effect of job loss on the probability of divorce either rely on data from the 1970s 80s data from european countries or focus on aggregate divorce rates this study uses u s micro data from 2000 to 2012 thus including effects of the great recession to examine how displacement i e exogenous job loss affects the probability of divorce the author finds displacement significantly increases the probability of divorce but only if the husband is the spouse that is displaced and his earnings represented approximately half or less of the household s earnings prior to displacement similarly results show that the probability of divorce increases if the wife is employed and as her earnings increase while the mechanism behind these asymmetric results remains unclear these results are consistent with recent research that finds a destabilizing effect on marriages when a wife earns more than her husband

the impact of divorce laws on marriage specific capital this article considers how divorce law alters the incentives for couples to invest in their marriage focusing on the impact of unilateral divorce laws on investments in new marriages differences across states between 1970 and 1980 provide useful quasi experimental variation with which to consider incentives to invest in several types of marriagespecific capital spouse s education children household specialization and home ownership i find that adoption of unilateral divorce regardless of the prevailing property division laws reduces investment in all types of marriage specific capital considered except home ownership in contrast results for home ownership depend on the underlying property division laws

partner choice investment in children and the marital college premium abstract we construct a model of household decision making in which agents consume a private and a public good interpreted as children s welfare children s utility depends on their human capital

sex preferences marital dissolution and the economic status of women author s bedard kelly deschenes olivier abstract the rise in the divorce rate over the past 40 years is one of the fundamental changes in american society a seemingly ever increasing number of women and children spend some fraction of their life in single female headed households leading many to be concerned about the economic circumstances of these women their and children estimating the cause to effect relationship between marital dissolution and female economic status is complicated because the same factors that increase marital instability may also affect the economic status and labor market behavior of women we propose an instrumental variables solution to this problem based on the sex of the firstborn child this strategy exploits the fact that the sex of the firstborn child is random and the fact that marriages are less likely to survive following the birth of girls as opposed to boys our iv estimates cast doubt on the contention that marital instability causes large declines in woman s economic status once the negative selection into divorce is accounted for we find that women who have experienced marital dissolution have considerably higher levels of personal income and annual wages than women who remain married at the same time we find little evidence of differential poverty rates and equivalized household incomes among ever divorced women and never divorced women we further show that the higher wages of ever divorced women mostly reflect increased labor supply intensity hours and weeks of work of woman who experienced marital dissolution

cohabitation marriage and divorce in a model of match quality the objective of this research is to further our understanding of how and why individuals enter and leave coresidential relationships we develop and estimate an economic model of nonmarital cohabitation marriage and divorce that is consistent with current data on the formation and dissolution of relationships jovanovic s journal of political economy 87 1979 972 90 theoretical matching model is extended to help explain household formation and dissolution behavior implications of the model reveal what factors influence the decision to start a relationship what form this relationship will take and the relative stability of the various types of unions the structural parameters of the model are estimated using longitudinal data from a sample of female high school seniors from the united states new numerical methods are developed to reduce computational costs associated with estimation the empirical results have interesting interpretations given the structural model they show that a significant cause of cohabitation is the need to learn about potential partners and to hedge against future bad shocks the estimated parameters are used to conduct several comparative dynamic experiments for example we show that policy experiments changing the cost of divorce have little effect on relationship choices

bargaining in the shadow of the law divorce laws and family distress this paper exploits the variation occurring from the different timing of divorce law reforms across the united states to evaluate how unilateral divorce changed family violence and whether the option provided by unilateral divorce reduced suicide and spousal homicide unilateral divorce both potentially increases the likelihood that a domestic violence relationship ends and acts to transfer bargaining power toward the abused thereby potentially stopping the abuse in extant relationships in states that introduced unilateral divorce we find a 8 16 percent decline in female suicide roughly a 30 percent decline in domestic violence for both men and women and a 10 percent decline in females murdered by their partners

marriage and divorce reply in the popular press and among policymakers the effect of no fault divorce laws on divorce rates remains an issue see e g new york times 23 july 1991 in my 1986 article in this review i show that the adoption of one form of no fault divorceunilateral divorce does not lead to a significant increase in divorce rates the theoretical model that is consistent with this empirical evidence would imply that the new law does not decrease the costs of divorce it merely redefines which party has the right to terminate the marriage

the revival of communism or the effect of institutions the 1993 polish parliamentary elections in several eastern european countries the breakdown of communism in 1989 was followed by a surprising return to power of post communist parties yet some electoral victories of post communists look puzzling when contrasted with a small size of a shift in voters preferences that has led to them such is the case of the 1993 polish parliamentary elections using partition function form games and results of simulated elections we estimate the impact of three factors that were blamed in addition to the shift to the left in voters preferences for the 1993 victory of the post communists in poland we show that the shift to the left was insufficient to assure post communists an electoral victory and that this victory would not have happened under the old electoral law or under a unified coalition of the right our results show the high sensitivity of emerging democracies to the details of their institutional backbones

household formation female labor supply and savings in this paper we aim to quantify the impact of changing family structures on labor supply and savings in western societies our dynamic general equilibrium model features both genders and it takes into account changes in marital status as a stochastic process the numerical results indicate that changes in household formation can partly explain the reallocation of male and female labor supply observed during the last decades in germany we also find a negative impact on capital accumulation and we show that a combination of higher marital risk and a narrowing gender wage gap can explain the changes in hours ratios between single and married men and women

engines of liberation electricity was born at the dawn of the last century households were inundated with a flood of new consumer durables what was the impact of this consumer durable goods revolution it is argued here that the consumer goods revolution was conducive to liberating women from the home to analyse this hypothesis a beckerian model of household production is developed households must decide whether or not to adopt the new technologies and whether a married woman should work can such a model help to explain the rise in married female labour force participation that occurred in the last century yes the housewife of the future will be neither a slave to servants nor herself a drudge she will give less attention to the home because the home will need less she will be rather a domestic engineer than a domestic labourer with the greatest of all handmaidens electricity at her service this and other mechanical forces will so revolutionize the woman s world that a large portion of the aggregate of woman s energy will be conserved for use in broader more constructive fields thomas alva edison as interviewed in good housekeeping magazine lv no 4 october 1912 p 436

the effect of joint custody on family outcomes since the 1970s almost all us states have introduced a form of joint custody after divorce i analyze the causal effect of these custody law reforms on different family outcomes my identification strategy exploits the different timing of reforms across the us states estimations based on state panel data suggest that the introduction of joint custody led to an increase in marriage rates an increase in overall fertility including a shift from nonmarital to marital fertility and an increase in divorce rates for older couples accordingly female labor market participation decreased further male suicide rates and domestic violence fell in treated states the empirical evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that joint custody increased the relative bargaining power of men within marriage

does the welfare state destroy the family evidence from oecd member countries we study the effect of the size of the welfare state on family outcomes in oecd member countries exploiting exogenous variation in public social spending due to varying degrees of political fractionalization i e the number of relevant parties involved in the legislative process we show that an expansion in the welfare state increases the fertility marriage and divorce rates with a quantitatively stronger effect on the marriage rate we conclude that the welfare state supports family formation nevertheless we also find that the welfare state decouples marriage and fertility and therefore alters the organization of the family authors abstract

did unilateral divorce raise divorce rates evidence from panel data since early 1996 at least eight states have begun to consider rolling back unilateral and no fault divorce a major reversal of the liberalizing trend in divorce laws which began around 1970 the proponents of tightening the divorce regime often argue that making divorce more difficult will strengthen families however both theoretical and empirical evidence is decidedly mixed over whether the no fault revolution actually contributed to the sharp increase in divorce rates in the united states observed over the last 30 years in this paper i address the dispute by using a panel of state level divorce rates including state specific trends allows unobserved state divorce propensities to trend linearly and even quadratically over time and reveals that unilateral divorce raised divorce rates significantly and strongly excerpt

symbolism matters the effect of same sex marriage legalization on partnership stability abstract registered partnership rp and marriage in the netherlands are identical in terms of rights and obligations but may differ in symbolism exploiting same sex marriage legalization ssml in the netherlands as a policy shock we investigate the effect of marital symbolism on partnership stability applying a mixed competing risks model to administrative micro data we disentangle selectivity into marriage from the effect of getting married our main finding is that partnerships that transformed into marriage had a substantially lower separation rate we take this result as evidence of the symbolic effect of marriage stabilizing partnerships we discuss economic mechanisms of marital symbolism related to marriage premiums

the dynamics of marriage and divorce we formulate and estimate a dynamic model of marriage divorce and remarriage using panel data on two cohorts of danish men and women the marital surplus is identified from the probability of divorce and the surplus shares of husbands and wives from their willingness to enter marriage we find that the educations of husbands and wives are complements education raises the share of the marital surplus for men but not for women as men and women get older husbands receive a larger share of the marital surplus the estimated costs of divorce are high both early and late in marriage

yours mine and ours do divorce laws affect the intertemporal behavior of married couples divorce laws establish spouses individual property rights over household resources and determine when divorce is allowed this paper examines how such laws inuence the intertemporal behavior and the welfare of u s married couples i build a model of household choice about consumption labor supply and divorce under multiple divorce law regimes and i estimate it using exogenous variation in u s divorce laws from the 1970s to the 1990s couples responded to equal division of property and unilateral divorce by increasing tangible assets up to 19 which suggests the presence of a strong income eect for the primary earner and by reducing female employment by over 5 percentage points because the threat of divorce granted additional bargaining power to married woman the bargaining weight of women implied by these responses in the model corresponds to a third of the weight of men this indicates that equal division of assets beneted women when it was

frustrated freedom the effects of agency and wealth on wellbeing in rural mozambique in sen s capability view of poverty wellbeing is threatened by both deficits of wealth and deficits of individual agency sen further predicts that unfreedom or low levels of agency will suppress the wellbeing effects of higher levels of wealth the current paper extends sen s view to include a condition labeled frustrated freedom in which relatively higher levels of agency can heighten the poverty effects of relatively low levels of material wealth applying data from a large scale population study of female heads of household in rural mozambique the paper empirically tests sen s view and the proposed extension as predicted agency is found to moderate the relationship between agency wealth and wellbeing uncovering evidence of both unfreedom and frustrated freedom in the population further research into the complex dynamics of wellbeing and poverty are called for by the authors

marriage and divorce changes and their driving forces the family is not a static institution in recent decades marriage rates have fallen divorce rates have risen and the defining characteristics of marriage have changed the economic approach to the family seeks to explain these trends by reference to models that can also explain how and why families form gary becker s 1981 treatise on the family proposed a theory based on production complementarities in which husband and wife specialize in the market and domestic spheres respectively production complementarities also arise in the production and rearing of one s own children however production complementarities at least as initially described are decreasingly central to modern family life increased longevity and declining fertility mean that most of one s adult life is spent without one s own children in the household also the rise in marital formation at older ages including remarriage means that many families form with no intention of producing children moreover increases in female labor force participation suggest that household specialization has either declined or at least taken on a different meaning these changes have come about as what is produced in the home has been dramatically altered both by the emergence of labor saving technology in the home and by the development of service industries that allow much of what was once provided by specialized homemakers to be purchased in the market the availabil

housing decision with divorce risk we build a realistically calibrated life cycle model of housing decisions under divorce risk as observed in the data our model predicts the recent increase in divorce rates leads to reduced homeownership rates the event of a divorce negatively affects homeownership and this effect is long lasting the risk of a divorce triggers a precautionary savings motive however this motive is weaker when individuals can invest in owner occupied homes because homeowners higher savings partially substitute for precautionary savings when young the larger asset accumulation due to divorce risk induced precautionary savings enables households to buy homes earlier whereas the presence of transaction costs leads to reduced homeownership for middle aged and older households when divorce risk goes up

exploring the present through the past claudia goldin is one of the world s leading economists and economic historians and has made a series of outstanding and original contributions particularly to the cliometric or the new economic history literature in this interview professor goldin discusses with brian snowdon who first provides a background introduction several important issues relating to her research on economic history and cliometrics the economics of slavery us economic history corruption in america the role of human capital and education in us economic development wage inequality female labour force participation and the quiet revolution the influence of the contraceptive pill women s surnames the reversal of the college gender gap and women in the economics profession

taxation and the earnings of husbands and wives evidence from sweden i examine the response of husbands and wives earnings to a tax reform in which husbands and wives tax rates changed independently allowing me to examine the effect of both spouses incentives on each spouse s behavior i analyze the large swedish tax reform of 1990 1991 and find that in response to a compensated fall in one spouse s tax rate each spouse s earnings rise i compare these results to those of simplified econometric models used in the typical setting in which independent variation in each spouse s tax rate is unavailable i find that standard econometric specifications may produce substantially biased estimates

do you have time to take a walk together private and joint time within the household we develop a theoretical model for the intra household allocation of time and consumption the model distinguishes between the partners joint and private leisure time we estimate the parameters of our model on a danish time use survey with information on time allocation and expenditures the empirical estimation leads to four main conclusions first we fi nd that assignable expenditures vary with female and male wage rates consistent with the collective model and we can assign this variation to the pareto weight being sensitive to relative wages second we fi nd that men put more weight on both their own private expenditure and composite leisure than women third we fi nd that joint leisure and individual leisure are not perfect substitutes for partners fourth we observe that both joint and private leisure are independent of the wage distribution thus togetherness is not a substitute for economic factors fifth we find that when the female wage goes up all else equal her child care hours increase while her husband s child care hours decrease

will you civil union me although the tax system is not marriage neutral in many countries it has been found to be only slightly significant in determining marriage decisions buffeteau and echevin 2003 alm and whittington 1995 this paper tests whether the tax system can alter the decision to contract a civil union which is less binding than a marital contract in 1999 france introduced civil union pacs as an alternative legal union to marriage i assess the impact of taxation on the decision to contract a pacs using a difference in differences evaluation of the 2005 income tax reform for newly pacsed couples as the control group is contaminated by the reform i propose an original estimation method based on a difference in differences in differences setting to estimate bounds to the impact of the reform my results find a positive and increasing impact of taxation on pacs rates but also a change in the timing of pacs unions suggesting that taxation alters the decision to contract a pacs in addition i find a slightly significant impact of taxation on the decision to terminate a pacs

can women have children and a career iv evidence from ivf treatments this paper introduces a new iv strategy based on ivf in vitro fertilization induced fertility variation among childless women to estimate the causal effect of having children on their career for this purpose we use administrative data on ivf treated women in denmark because observed chances of ivf success do not depend on labor market histories ivf treatment success provides a plausible instrument for childbearing our iv estimates indicate that fertility effects on earnings are i negative large and long lasting ii driven by fertility effects on hourly earnings and not so much on labor supply and iii much stronger at the extensive margin than at the intensive margin

unemployment marriage and divorce in this paper we examine whether the business cycle plays a role in marriage and divorce we use data on spain since the differences between recession and expansion periods across regions are quite pronounced in that country we find that the unemployment rate is negatively associated with the marriage rate pointing to a pro cyclical evolution of marriage however the response of the divorce rate to the business cycle is mixed results show the existence of different patterns depending on geography divorce rates in coastal regions are pro cyclical while in inland regions divorces react to unemployment in a counter cyclical way

male wage inequality and marital dissolution is there a link after almost a century long pattern of rising marital instability divorce rates leveled off in 1980 and have been declining ever since the timing of deceleration and decline in the rates of marital disruption interestingly coincides with a period of substantial growth in wage inequality this paper establishes a connection between the two phenomena and explores potential explanations for the underlying link using individual data on female marital histories in a duration analysis framework combined with regional and temporal variation in the pattern of male wage dispersion i show that inequality has a significant stabilizing effect on the marital relationship quantitatively increases in male wage dispersion can roughly explain up to 30 of the fall in the mean separation probability between 1979 and 1990 several plausible explanations for this relationship are assessed changes in spousal labor supplies female wage inequality income uncertainty social capital as well as a hypothesis of on the marriage search the results are most supportive of the search interpretation no strong quantitative support was found for the remaining mechanisms

an analysis of out of wedlock childbearing in the united states this paper relates the erosion of the custom of shotgun marriage to the legalization of abortion and the increased availability of contraception to unmarried women in the united states the decline in shotgun marriage accounts for a significant fraction of the increase in out of wedlock first births several models illustrate the analogy between women who do not adopt either birth control or abortion and the hand loom weavers both victims of changing technology mechanisms causing female immiseration are modeled and historically described this technology shock hypothesis is an alternative to welfare and job shortage theories of the feminization of poverty excerpt

specialization then and now marriage children and the gender earnings gap across cohorts in this paper we examine the evolution of the gender gap associated with marriage and parental status comparing cohorts born between 1936 and 1985 the model of household specialization and division of labor introduced by becker posits that when forming households couples will exploit the gains from trade by having one spouse specialize in market work while the other specializes in household work given the historical advantage of men in the labor market the model predicts specialization by gender and therefore an earnings advantage for married men and an earnings disadvantage for married women is this model of specialization useful for understanding the evolution of the gender gap across generations of women and what about children academic papers have shown that wages of mothers are significantly lower than those of non mothers with similar human capital characteristics we do not attempt to build a structural model here but rather document how changing associations between marriage and earnings and between children and earnings have contributed to the gender gap in an accounting sense

broadband internet an information superhighway to sex crime does internet use trigger sex crime we use unique norwegian data on crime and internet adoption to shed light on this question a public program with limited funding rolled out broadband access points in 2000 2008 and provides plausibly exogenous variation in internet use our instrumental variables and fixed effect estimates show that internet use is associated with a substantial increase in reported incidences of rape and other sex crimes we present a theoretical framework that highlights three mechanisms for how internet use may affect reported sex crime namely a reporting effect a matching effect on potential offenders and victims and a direct effect on crime propensity our results indicate that the direct effect is non negligible and positive plausibly as a result of increased consumption of pornography

why have divorce rates fallen the role of women s age at marriage american divorce rates rose from the 1950s to the 1970s peaked around 1980 and have fallen ever since the mean age at marriage also substantially increased after 1970 i explore the extent to which the rise in age at marriage can explain the decrease in divorce rates for cohorts marrying after 1980 using data from the survey of income and program participation 1979 national longitudinal survey of youth and national survey of family growth three different empirical approaches suggest that the increase in women s age at marriage is the main proximate cause of the fall in divorce rates

what determines family structure i introduction the most prevalent type of family structure in which children in the united states are raised today is the traditional one in which both biological parents are present in the home and married but in the past 30 40 years it has become increasingly common for children to experience alternative family structures such as living with the mother with no father present the mother and a stepfather and cohabiting parents children who grow up in a family with married biological parents have better education employment marriage childbearing and psychological outcomes on average than their counterparts who spend substantial parts of childhood living in alternative family structures 1 these differences are generally quite large and dwarf the effects of income and maternal employment the evidence suggests that at least part of the association between family structure and child outcomes is causal there is much still to be learned about the consequences of growing up in alternative family structures but there is a consensus that family structure matters for child development in contrast there is much less known about the determinants of family structure the proximate determinants of family structure are well studied demographic behaviors union formation and dissolution transition from cohabitation to marriage and fertility both in and outside of unions but the implications of adult demographic behaviors for the family structure experiences of children depend crucially on interactions among these behaviors for example the impact on a child of being born out of wedlock is likely to depend on whether the mother and biological father subsequently marry or cohabit and if so how soon after the birth of the child the impact on a child of the dissolution of a union may depend on whether the man in the union was the child s biological father or a stepfather and on the duration of the union economic theories of family formation and dissolution suggest a number of observable factors that affect the demographic behaviors that determine family structure 2 these include the wage rates available to men and women the tax and transfer incentives to cohabit marry and bear children the legal environment governing divorce and child support provided by absent parents and the state of the marriage market many studies have examined the effects of these factors on the family structure experiences of children but most have taken a narrow approach for example a typical study examines the impact of changes over time in one or two determinants of family structure without considering the implications of simultaneous changes in other factors most studies examine only one or two of the key demographic behaviors that determine the family structure experienced by children for example one study might focus only on entry to cohabitation and marriage whereas another study examines childbearing while single and a third study analyzes marital dissolution in this article we propose a new approach to analyze the determinants of the family structure experiences of children our approach has four distinguishing features first we jointly model union formation union dissolution and childbearing decisions previous analyses have integrated some of these behaviors in a single model but none has integrated the full range of behaviors needed for a thorough analysis of family structure a major feature of change in recent years has been de linking of marriage and childbearing decisions hence it is crucial to recognize as emphasized by ellwood and jencks 2004 that marriage and childbearing are in fact distinct decisions and that treating single parenthood as one decision rather than the consequence of related but distinct union and childbearing decisions misses key elements of changes in behavior furthermore bumpass and lu 2000 point out that a substantial part of the increase in single parenthood in the last three decades can be accounted for by a rise in the presence of children with cohabiting parents but child outcomes are worse in cohabitation than marriage other things equal

does simplifying divorce and marriage registration matter evidence from china abstractthis article evaluates the marital consequences of easier access to divorce and marriage by exploiting a major policy change in china that simplifies both i first use a regression discontinuity design to examine the short run effect and find that simplified registration immediately triggered more and faster divorces and marriages in estimating the long run effect i adopt a difference in differences strategy that further exploits cross sectional variation in urbanization rate results indicate that the positive effect on marital outcomes especially on marriage rate persisted in the medium run for 4 years

waiting for mr right rising inequality and declining marriage rates abstract this paper demonstrates that women search longer for their first or second husband in cities with higher male wage inequality and examines several alternative explanations a causal link is established by controlling for city fixed effects and city specific time trends and by using inequality in the woman s state of birth as a proxy for local male inequality increasing inequality explains about 25 of the marriage rate decline over the last few decades and this is not due to the endogenous moving or labor force decisions of women nor to the marital decisions of men in reaction to changes in their own wages

who marries whom in a surging housing market abstract this paper investigates the impact of a surging housing market on marital sorting our empirical analysis shows that there is increasing assortativeness on original family background in response to housing price appreciation that is for husbands when the down payment doubles one more year of paternal schooling predicts a marriage in which the father in law s schooling is 0 057 year greater than in a scenario in which the down payment does not increase the rising assortativeness could exacerbate the already expanding inequality caused by the booming housing market in addition to the benchmark analysis we find that a divorce reform which awards assets proportionate to the shares the spouses paid for the initial down payment rather than awarding equal shares upon divorce alleviates assortativeness the evidence suggests that joint investment in housing is likely to be a significant consideration in marital sorting

the enfranchisement of women and the welfare state abstract we offer a rationale for the decision to extend the franchise to women within a politico economic model where men are richer than women women display a higher preference for public goods and women s disenfranchisement carries a societal cost men and women are matched within households which are the center of the decision process we derive the optimal tax rate under two alternative regimes a males only enfranchisement regime and a universal enfranchisement regime the latter is associated with a higher tax rate but as industrialization raises the reward to intellectual labor relative to physical labor women s relative wage increases thus decreasing the difference between the tax rates when the cost of disenfranchisement becomes higher than the cost of the higher tax rate which applies under universal enfranchisement the male median voter is better off extending the franchise to women a consequent expansion of the size of government is only to be expected in societies with a relatively high cost of disenfranchisement we empirically test the implications of the model over the 1870 1930 period we proxy the gender wage gap with the level of per capita income and the cost of disenfranchisement with the presence of catholicism which is associated with a more traditional view of women s role and thus a lower cost the gender gap in the preferences for public goods is proxied by the availability of divorce which implies marital instability and a more vulnerable economic position for women consistently with the model s predictions women s suffrage is correlated positively with per capita income and negatively with the presence of catholicism and the availability of divorce while women s suffrage increases the size of government only in non catholic countries

a quantitative review of marriage markets how inequality is remaking the american family by carbone and cahn june carbone and naomi cahn argue that growing earnings inequality and the increased educational attainment of women relative to men have led to declining marriage rates for less educated women and an increase in positive assortative matching since the 1970s these trends have negatively affected the welfare of children as they increase the proportion of poor single female headed households using data on marriage markets defined by state race and time and the choo siow marriage matching function this review provides a quantitative assessment of these claims we show that changes in earnings inequality had a qualitatively consistent but modest quantitative impact on marriage rates and positive assortative matching neither changes in the wage distributions nor educational attainments can explain the large decline in marriage rates over this period

accounting for the gender gap in college attainment i introduction one striking phenomenon in the u s labor market is the reversal of the gender gap in college attainment in 1980 57 of young men aged 25 34 compared with 46 of young women had some college education by age 34 by 1996 however female college attainment had reached 64 5 percentage points higher than that of the males in the same cohort in tact females overtook males in college attainment in 1987 and have led ever since a large body of empirical research emphasizes the role of the earnings premium as a key explanatory variable for the determination of education outcomes see e g becket 1967 mincer 1974 willis and rosen 1979 in addition an extensive literature shows that family background is an important determinant of the schooling decision see among others cameron and heckman 1998 2001 eckstein and wolpin 1999 ge 2008 kane 1994 recently several papers have argued empirically and theoretically that expected marriage is important in determining the schooling decision e g chiappori iyigun and weiss 2006 ge 2008 iyigun and walsh 2007 on the basis of this literature we construct a life cycle model that includes potential costs and benefits from the labor market and marriage market which determine individual college decisions in our model individuals with differing learning abilities first decide whether or not to enter college then they might get married and have children parents are altruistic and value their children s learning ability which increases with the parents education forward looking individuals take into account the impact of their own schooling on their children s learning ability other factors that affect an individual s decision on whether to pursue higher education include the expected direct labor market returns to college over one s lifetime the expected marriage market returns to college and the financial and effort costs of attending college these costs and benefits can differ by gender we calculate from panel study of income dynamics psid and current population survey cps parents education distributions the life cycle profiles of single marriage and divorce probabilities by education and the lifecycle profiles of earnings by education and marital status as exogenous inputs of the model we observe that the number of college educated parents increases over time in the marriage market a substantial increase of single probabilities and an increase of divorce probabilities has occurred for both genders regardless of college attainment status lifetime earnings by cohort are decreasing slowly for males of all marital statuses especially for married males lifetime earnings for married and divorced females are increasing gradually whereas those for single females are decreasing slightly to formally endogenize those changes is beyond the scope of our paper we instead focus on the mechanism in which under perfect foresight these changes affect education decisions we estimate the parameters of the model by matching data on college attainment by gender from the psid we present evidence on how well the model fits the data we then use the parameter estimates to simulate counterfactual experiments which break down the sources of changes in college attainment into the effects of changes in relative earnings changes in parental education and changes in the marriage market what accounts for the increase in college attainment over the past few decades we find that the increasing gap in earnings between college and high school graduates has important effects on the increase in college attainment for both genders when earnings are fixed at 1946 cohort levels attainment rates in 1996 drop by 15 5 and 14 2 percentage points for males and females respectively we also emphasize the importance of intergenerational persistence in schooling on the increase in college attainment for both genders

marriage and divorce informational constraints and private contracting the relationship between divorce rates in the united states and laws regulating divorce are analyzed using data from a special current population survey undertaken in 1979 with particular reference to the adoption by many states of no fault divorce laws the author utilizes a contract theoretic framework to examine the impact of both legal and informational constraints on several aspects of the marriage relationship 1 the probability of divorce 2 compensation at divorce i e the terms of the divorce settlement 3 the probability of entering marriage and 4 incentives for investment in marriage specific capital two different models are developed the first assumes that ex post information about the value of each spouses opportunites at divorce is symmetric and that since divorce would only occur if the joint benefits outweigh the joint costs the law has no effect on the divorce rate the second model asserts that the existence of asymmetric information results in a fixed wage marriage contract and that divorce would be higher in states that allow unilateral divorce the evidence supports the first of these hypotheses excerpt

canadian contributions to family economics canadian scholars have made substantial contributions to the relatively new field of family economics these include new models of how men and women match in marriage markets and of how decisions are made in multi person households several were early contributors to the literature on married women s labour supply and labour supply in a family context and helped to develop empirical methods in this area a particular focus has been on the impacts of policy relevant parameters such childcare costs on family labour supply and child well being new work on child development the impact of early life conditions and the processes of intergenerational transmission also highlight the importance of family context in determining economic well being

evolution of the marriage earnings gap for women abstract using survey of income and program participation sipp panels linked to social security earnings records we examine the earnings gap associated with marriage for cohorts of women born between 1936 and 1975 we compare ordinary least squares and fixed effect estimates we find that among women who work the marital earnings gap has all but disappeared in fixed effects estimates for recent birth cohorts in fact among women without children married women earn more than single women implying a diminished role for specialization when children are not present in contrast the motherhood earnings gap remains large even for recent birth cohorts

money work and marital stability assessing change in the gendered determinants of divorce despite a large literature investigating how spouses earnings and division of labor relate to their risk of divorce findings remain mixed and conclusions elusive core unresolved questions are 1 whether marital stability is primarily associated with the economic gains to marriage or with the gendered lens through which spouses earnings and employment are interpreted and 2 whether the determinants of marital stability have changed over time using data from the 1968 to 2013 waves of the panel study of income dynamics i consider how spouses division of labor their overall financial resources and a wife s ability to support herself in the event of divorce are associated with the risk of divorce and how these associations have changed between couples married before and after 1975 financial considerations wives economic independence and total household income are not predictive of divorce in either cohort time use however is associated with divorce risk in both cohorts for marriages formed af

marriage markets and assortative mating with household public goods theoretical results and empirical implications this paper analyzes marriage market equilibria when the gains from marriage result from joint consumption of household public goods assuming transferable utility within marriage the paper proves that marriage markets will be characterized by positive assortative mating on wealth when spouses differ only in endowments and the gains to marriage result only from public goods when spouses differ in wages and household public goods are produced at home the results imply offsetting effects with public good economies creating an incentive for positive assortative mating on wages and gains from specialization creating an incentive for negative assortative mating on wages the results help explain the persistent lack of empirical support for becker s prediction of negative assortative mating on wages and have implications for empirical analysis of all joint living arrangement decisions

pink work same sex marriage employment and discrimination abstract this paper analyzes how the legalization of same sex marriage in the u s affected same sex couples in the labor market by using data from the american community survey access to marriage led to amendments in tax health insurance and adoption laws that could have encouraged some same sex partners to specialize in household production and decrease their labor supply nevertheless estimates from a difference in difference model show that the individual and joint probabilities of being employed increased among same sex couples additional evidence suggests that these changes in employment were driven by improvements in attitudes and lower discrimination against sexual minorities following the introduction of marriage equality

marriage labor supply and home production we extend the search matching model of the marriage market of shimer and smith 2000 to allow for labor supply home production match specific shocks and endogenous divorce we study nonparametric identification using panel data on marital status education family values wages and market and non market hours and we develop a semiparametric estimator we estimate how much sorting results from time use specialization or homophilic preferences we estimate how equilibrium marriage formation affects the wage elasticities of market and non market hours we estimate individuals willingness to pay for marriage and quantify the redistributive effect of intra household resource sharing

job displacement disability and divorce earnings shocks should affect divorce probability by changing a couple s expected gains from marriage we find that the divorce hazard rises after a spouse s job displacement but does not change after a spousal disability this difference casts doubt on a purely pecuniary motivation for divorce following earnings shocks since both types of shocks exhibit similar long run economic consequences furthermore the increase in divorce is found only for layoffs and not for plant closings suggesting that information conveyed about a partner s noneconomic suitability as a mate due to a job loss may be more important than financial losses in precipitating divorce

marriage and divorce comment the author comments on an article by h elizabeth peters concerning the impact of state laws particularly no fault divorce laws on divorce rates in the united states a reply by peters is included pp 686 93 annotation

the impact of economic conditions on participation in disability programs evidence from the coal boom and bust abstract we examine the impact of the coal boom of the 1970 s and the coal bust of the 1980 s on disability program participation these shocks provide clear evidence that as the value of labor market participation increases disability program participation falls for the disability insurance program the elasticity of payments with respect to local earnings is between 0 3 and 0 4 and for supplemental security income the elasticity is between 0 4 and 0 7 consistent with a model where qualifying for disability programs is costly the relationship between economic conditions and program participation is much stronger for permanent than for transitory economic shocks

the american family and family economics abstract gary becker s path breaking treatise on the family 1981 subjected individuals decisions about sex marriage childbearing and childrearing to rational choice analysis the american family has changed radically in recent decades we survey these changes as well as the ongoing effort to understand partnering parenting and care of the elderly as results of maximizing choices made by individuals first we describe the recent changes in the american family the separation of sex marriage and childbearing fewer children and smaller households converging work and education patterns for men and women class divergence in partnering and parenting strategies and the replacement of family functions and home production by government programs and market transactions second we examine recent work in family economics that attempts to explain these changes third we point out some challenging areas for further analysis and highlight issues of commitment in two primary family relationships those b

labor supply and marital separation panel data are used to estimate the effect of marital separation on labor supply female labor supply increases substantially and male labor supply declines marginally lending support to the theory of specialization within the household the most interesting finding is that women began to increase their labor supply well before the actualsplit occurs suggesting either that shocks to labor supply change divorce probabilities or that women with a higher likelihood of divorcework more this argument is pursued by constructing and estimating a simultaneous model of labor supply and divorce risk copyright 1986 by american economic association

from polygyny to serial monogamy a unified theory of marriage institutions consider an economy populated by males and females both rich and poor the society has to choose one of the following marriage institutions polygyny strict monogamy and serial monogamy divorce and remarriage after having identified the conditions under which each of these equilibria exists we show that a rise in the share of rich males can explain a change of regime from polygyny to monogamy the introduction of serial monogamy follows from a further rise in either the proportion of rich males or an increase in the proportion of rich females strict monogamy is a prerequisite to serial monogamy as it promotes the upward social mobility of females more than polygyny we also show that polygyny is compatible with democracy

dynamic marriage matching an empirical framework the paper proposes a dynamic version of the frictionless becker shapley shubik marriage matching model with transferable utility its primary objective is to develop a tractable model that rationalizes the marriage distribution of who marries whom by age this behavioral dynamic model rationalizes a new marriage matching function an empirical methodology that relies on the equilibrium outcomes of the model identies the marital preferences over spouses this framework also allows the inverse problem of computing the vector of aggregate marriages given a new distribution of available single individuals and estimated preferences to be solved the solution to this inverse problem has been shown to exist under mild conditions this paper also develops a simple test of the model s empirical validity using aggregate data of new marriages and available single men and women in the us in 1970 1980 and 1990 i investigate the changes in the gains to marriage over this period

marriage divorce and interstate risk sharing in this paper we study the importance of marriage for interstate risk sharing in the us we find that us federal states in which married couples account for a higher share of the population are less exposed to state specific output shocks thus in addition to improving the allocation of risk at the individual level marriage also has implications for risk sharing at the more aggregated state level quantitatively the impact of marriage on interstate risk sharing varies over divorce regimes

hiv breakthroughs and risky sexual behavior recent hiv treatment breakthroughs have lowered hiv mortality in the united states but have also coincided with increased hiv incidence the authors argue that these trends are causally linked because new treatments have improved health and survival for the hiv increased their sexual activity and thus facilitated hiv s spread