Why Are Married Men Working So Much? Home Production, Household Bargaining and Per-Capita Hours Empirical patterns of labor supply at the micro level tend to reject the unitary model assumption implicit in most macro theories, where households are the deemed to be rational agents. This paper examines the rise in per-capita labor since 1975 and asks how the inclusion of bargaining between spouse...

In belligerent countries, male-to-female sex ratios at birth increased during and shortly after the two world wars. These rises still defy explanation. Several causes have been suggested (but not tested) in the literature. Many of these causes are proximate in nature, refl ecting behavioral responses to the dramatically changed marriage market conditions for women and men that were induced by w...

Female Breadwinner Families: Their Existence, Persistence and Sources We develop a typology for understanding couple households where the female is the major earner – what we term female breadwinner households – and test it using data from the first two waves of the HILDA Survey. We distinguish temporary from persistent female breadwinner households and hypothesise, and confirm, that these two ...

Interethnic Marriages and Economic Assimilation of Immigrants This paper examines the relationship between interethnic marriages and economic assimilation among immigrants in the United States. Two competing hypotheses are evaluated: the productivity hypothesis, according to which immigrants married to native-born spouses assimilate faster than comparable immigrants married to foreign-born spou...

Entrepreneurial Couples We study possible motivations for co-entrepreneurial couples to start up a joint firm, using a sample of 1,069 Danish couples that established a joint enterprise between 2001 and 2010. We compare their pre-entry characteristics, firm performance and post-dissolution private and financial outcomes with a selected set of comparable firms and couples. We find evidence that ...

Brides for Sale: Cross-Border Marriages and Female Immigration Every year, a large number of women immigrate as brides from developing countries to developed countries in East Asia. This phenomenon virtually did not exist in the early 1990s, but foreign brides currently comprise 4 to 35 percent of newlyweds in these developed Asian countries. This paper argues that two factors account for this ...

We leverage non-linearities in Danish child support guidelines and rich administrative data to provide causal estimates of parental behavioral responses to child support obligations. We estimate that a 1, 000 DKK ($160) increase in a father’s obligation is associated with a 273 DKK ($45) increase in his payment. A higher obligation reduces father-child co-residence, pointing to substitution bet...

This paper argues that the evolution of male preferences contributed to the dramatic increase in the proportion of working and educated women in the population over time. Male preferences evolved because some men experienced a different family model—one in which their mother was skilled and/or worked. These men, we hypothesize, were more inclined to marry women who themselves were skilled or wo...

Back to Baseline in Britain: Adaptation in the BHPS We look for evidence of adaptation in well-being to major life events using eighteen waves of British panel data. Adaptation to marriage, divorce, birth of a child and widowhood appears to be rapid and complete, whereas this is not the case for unemployment. These findings are remarkably similar to those in previous work on German panel data. ...

This paper looks at the historical evolution of the relationship between an economy's structure and the corresponding political system, starting from feudal times. We show why, in an early agricultural phase, aristocratic political systems prevail, while democracies tend to emerge with the industrial phase, while at the same time the legal system regulating the intergenerational transfers of pr...