marriage market divorce legislation and household labor supply this paper provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the impact of the marriage market and divorce legislation on household labor supply in our approach the sex ratio in the marriage market and the rules governing divorce are examples of distribution factors these factors are defined as variables that affect the household members bargaining position but not preferences or the joint budget set we extend the collective labor supply model developed by chiappori to allow for distribution factors we show that our model imposes new restrictions on the labor supply functions and eases the identification of individual preferences and the intrahousehold decision process the model is estimated using psid data for the year 1988 our results do not reject the restrictions imposed by the model also the sex ratio and divorce laws deemed favorable to women are found to affect labor supply behavior and the decision process in the directions predicted by the theory and to have sizable effects

female labour supply and marital status decisions a life cycle model this paper studies the interdependence between and the determinants of life cycle marital status and labour force participation decisions of women a dynamic utility maximization model is presented and estimated using longitudinal data on women from the panel study of income dynamics the mle method employed involves solving a dynamic programming problem further a minimum distance estimator is proposed which allows for the incorporation of wage data in a computationally simple way the estimates are used to predict changes in the life cycle patterns of employment marriage and divorce due to differences in education race the female s earnings and her potential husband s earnings the estimation results indicate that the utility gains to marriage are decreasing in the female s wage rate and increasing in her potential husband s earnings while the opposite is found for gains to working ignoring the endogeneity of marital status decisions is shown to lead to an underestimation of own and husband s wage effects on female labour supply

how do sex ratios affect marriage and labor markets evidence from america s second generation sex ratios i e relative numbers of men and women can affect marriage prospects labor force participation and other social and economic variables but the observed association between sex ratios and social and economic conditions may be confounded by omitted variables and reverse causality this paper uses variation in immigrant flows as a natural experiment to study the effect of sex ratios on the children and grandchildren of immigrants the flow of immigrants affected the second generation marriage market because second generation marriages were mostly endogamous i e to members of the same ethnic group the empirical results suggest that high sex ratios had a large positive effect on the likelihood of female marriage and a large negative effect on female labor force participation perhaps surprisingly the marriage rates of second generation men appear to be a slightly increasing function of immigrant sex ratios higher sex ratios also appear to have raised male earnings and the incomes of parents with young children the empirical results are broadly consistent with theories where higher sex ratios increase female bargaining power in the marriage market

accounting for the timing of first marriage among first marriages in the united states grooms are on average 1 7 years older than their brides traditionally this fact is explained by sex differences in income we use a general equilibrium overlapping generations search model economy to show instead that sex differences in fecundity are essential to account for the age gap at first marriage whereas sex differences in income play a secondary role our model economy also accounts for other facts on the timing of first marriages that the literature has overlooked

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

accounting for racial differences in marriage and employment what can account for the differences in marriage and employment decisions across blacks and whites to answer this question i develop a dynamic equilibrium model of marriage two explanations for the racial differences in behavior are considered differences in population supplies and wages black white differences in population supplies explain one fifth of the difference in marriage rates and between one fifth and one third of the differences in employment rates across race removing the racial gap in wages eliminates the differences in employment but increases the differences in marriage rates

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

experimental identification of asymmetric information evidence on crop insurance in the philippines abstract i study asymmetric information in crop insurance in the philippines using a two level randomized field experiment and incentivized preference elicitation in this first experimental study of moral hazard in non health insurance preventable damages double on randomly insured plots among farmers with high trust in the insurance provider farmers prefer insurance on plots that are at risk of floods and crop diseases a sign of classic adverse selection and plots that are far away from home a sign of selection on anticipated moral hazard behavior resulting in 72 higher payouts on preferred plots overcoming these challenges requires leveraging new technologies

more on marriage fertility and the distribution of income according to pareto 1896 the distribution of income depends on the nature of the people comprising a society on the organization of the latter and also in part on chance in the model developed here the nature of the people is captured by attitudes toward marriage divorce fertility and children singles search for mates in a marriage market married agents bargain about work and the quantity and quality of children they can divorce social policies such as child support requirements reflect the organization of the society finally chance is modeled by randomness in income marriage opportunities and marital bliss

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

who marries whom and why this paper proposes and estimates a static transferable utility model of the marriage market the model generates a nonparametric marriage matching function with spillover effects it rationalizes the standard interpretation of marriage rate regressions and points out its limitations the model was used to estimate u s marital behavior in 1971 72 and 1981 82 the marriage matching function estimates show that the gains to marriage for young adults fell substantially over the decade unlike contradictory marriage rate regression results the marriage matching function estimates showed that the legalization of abortion had a significant quantitative impact on the fall in the gains to marriage for young men and women

why do minority men earn less a study of wage differentials among the highly educated en in several minority groups in the united states have wages that are substantially lower than those of the benchmark majority group non hispanic white men several generations of labor economists have sought to understand the forces that drive these disparities this research program is potentially important for the purpose of determining whether minority wage gaps are likely to be narrowed more effectively by increasing enforcement of antidiscrimination laws or by implementing policies that reduce inequity in educational opportunity existing work shows large racial and ethnic differences in premarket factors especially formal schooling and suggests that these differences play a key role in shaping wage differences one example is trejo 1997 who finds that third and higher generation mexican american men earn 21 less than non hispanic white men approximately three quarters of the earnings gap is found to be attributable to the mexican americans relative youth and to differences in english language proficiency and years of schooling a second example is neal and johnson 1996 who find that black men earn 24 less than do non hispanic white men differences in schooling account for only about one fifth of this gap when the authors condition on performance on a basic verbal and math skills test the armed forces qualification test afqt though the differential between wages of blacks and whites declines to approximately onethird of its unadjusted level 1 trejo s 1997 study is a nice example of the traditional approach to studying race ethnicity wage gaps traditional in the sense that the explanatory variables in the study are conventional objective measures of human capital such as years of schooling and language ability neal and john

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

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

male incarceration the marriage market and female outcomes abstract this paper studies how rising male incarceration has affected women through its effect on the marriage market variation in marriage market shocks arising from incarceration is isolated using two facts the tendency of people to marry within marriage markets defined by the interaction of race location and age and the fact that increases in incarceration have been very different across these three characteristics using a variety of estimation strategies including difference and fixed effects models and tsls models in which we use policy parameters to instrument for within marriage market changes in incarceration we find evidence that is on the whole consistent with the implications of the standard marriage market model in particular higher male imprisonment appears to have lowered the likelihood that women marry modestly reduced the quality of their spouses when they do marry and shifted the gains from marriage away from women and toward men the evidence suggests that women in affected

how does the marriage market clear an empirical framework the paper surveys the choo and siow 2006a cs marriage matching model and its extensions cs derives a behavioural marriage matching function the collective model of intra household allocations can be integrated into this framework spousal labour supplies respond to changing marriage market conditions marriage market tightness the ratio of unmarried type i men to unmarried type j women is a sufficient statistic for marriage market conditions for those types of individuals the hypothesis that spousal labour supplies vary to equilibrate the marriage market has overidentifying restrictions the framework extends to a dynamic marriage matching environment empirically this paper shows how the famine caused by the great leap forward in sichuan affected the marital behaviour of famine born cohorts marriage market tightness is shown to be a useful statistic for summarizing marriage market conditions in the united states marriage market conditions in the contemporary united states primarily affect spousal labour force participation rather than hours of work ce texte examine le modele de choo et siow et ses extensions ce modele derive une fonction comportemental d arrimage sur le marche du mariage le modele d allocation intra menage des t ches peut s integrer a ce cadre d analyse les offres de travail des epoux repondent aux conditions changeantes du marche du mariage un marche du mariage serre un ratio d hommes celibataires de type i par rapport a un nombre de femmes celibataires de type j constitue une statistique suffisante pour etablir les conditions de marche de ces types d individus l hypothese que les offres de travail des epoux varient pour equilibrer le marche du mariage engendre des restrictions de sur identification le cadre d analyse couvre le cas d un environnement dynamique d arrimage empiriquement ce memoire montre comment la famine causee par le grand saut en avant de sichuan a affecte le comportement de mariage des cohortes qui en sort sorties on montre aussi que le caractere serre du marche du mariage aux etats unis fournit une statistique utile pour prendre le pouls des conditions du marche du mariage ces conditions dans le monde contemporain aux etats unis ont un impact sur la participation des epoux au marche du travail plutot que sur les heures travaillees

estimating social effects in matching markets externalities in spousal search this paper investigates the hypothesis that individuals are less willing to marry when there are more potential partners to search amongst and thus when others are also less prone to marry to do this it develops a reduced form method a variation on manski s 1993 model that allows identification of such spillovers in two sided matching markets estimates from this method are internally consistent unbiased robust to different definitions of the marriage market and large enough to warrant attention additional evidence suggests that the effect works via the proposed search mechanism

on the state of the union an overlapping generations model of marriage and divorce is constructed to analyze family structure and intergenerational mobility agents differ by sex marital status and human capital single agents meet in a marriage market and decide whether to accept or reject proposals to wed married couples must decide whether to separate or not parents invest in their children depending on their wherewithal a simulated version of the theoretical prototype can generate an equilibrium with a significant number of female headed families and a high degree of persistence in income across generations to illustrate the model s mechanics the effects of two antipoverty policies namely child support and welfare are investigated

the effect of male wage inequality on female age at first marriage a model in which women search for husbands characterized by their wages predicts increasing within group male wage inequality raises the expected value of continued marital search and so lowers female marriage propensities using 1970 1980 and 1990 census data i test this hypothesis within geographically racially and educationally defined marriage markets the estimates suggest rising male wage inequality accounted for 7 to 18 of the decline in the propensity to marry between 1970 and 1990 for white women and more educated black women growing wage inequality appears to have had little effect on the marriage behavior of less educated black women

polygyny fertility and savings sub saharan africa has a high incidence of polygyny it is also the poorest region of the world in this paper i ask whether banning polygyny could play any role for development using a quantitative model of polygyny i find that enforcing monogamy lowers fertility shrinks the spousal age gap and reverses the direction of marriage payments polygyny leads to high bride prices to ration women which makes buying wives and selling daughters a good investment thus crowding out investment in physical assets for reasonable parameter values i find that banning polygyny decreases fertility by 40 percent increases savings by 70 percent and increases output per capita by 170 percent

technology learning in a small open economy the systems modelling and exploiting the learning effect abstract this paper reviews the characteristics of technology learning and discusses its application in energy system modelling in a global local perspective its influence on the national energy system exemplified by norway is investigated using a global and national markal model the dynamic nature of the learning system boundary and coupling between the national energy system and the global development and manufacturing system is elaborated some criteria important for modelling of spillover 1 are suggested particularly to ensure balance in global energy demand and supply and accurately reflect alternative global pathways spillover for all technologies as well as energy carrier cost prices should be estimated under the same global scenario the technology composition co 2 emissions and system cost in norway up to 2050 exhibit sensitivity to spillover moreover spillover may reduce both co 2 emissions and total system cost national energy system analysis of low carbon society should therefore consider technology development paths in global policy scenarios without the spillover from international deployment a domestic technology relies only on endogenous national learning however with high but realistic learning rates offshore floating wind may become cost efficient even if initially deployed only in norwegian niche markets