Marriage, Partnership and Sexual Orientation: A Study of British University Academics and Administrators Using a unique data source on marital status, partnership and sexual orientation of academics and administrators at British universities, we estimate the impact of personal relationships upon earnings for men and women. While university data cover a relatively homogeneous group of workers, t...

In standard cross-sectional wage regressions, married men appear to earn 10 to 20 percent more than comparable never-married men. One proposed explanation for this male marriage premium is that men may be selected into marriage on the basis of characteristics valued by employers as well as by spouses or because they earn high wages. This paper examines the selection hypothesis using a “natural ...

The structural consumer demand methods used to estimate the parameters of collective household models are typically either very restrictive and easy to implement or very general and dif cult to estimate. In this paper, we provide a middle ground. We adapt the very general framework of Browning, Chiappori and Lewbel (2007) by adding a simple restriction that recasts the empirical model from a hi...

Pooling microdata from five Australian censuses, I explore the relationship between child gender and divorce. By contrast with the United States, I find no evidence that the gender of the first child has a significant impact on the decision to marry or divorce. However, among two-child families, parents with two children of the same sex are 1.7 percentage points less likely to be married than p...

Cooperative models of household decision-making are proving inadequate in an increasing number of contexts. We argue that altruism among family members can, in fact, inhibit cooperation by increasing the utility that players expect to receive in a non-cooperative equilibrium. To test this, we examine agricultural productivity in polygynous households in West Africa. We find that cooperation is ...

In light of the current economic crisis, we estimate hazard models of divorce to determine how state and national unemployment rates affect the likelihood of a divorce or separation. With data in the United States over the 1978–2008 period from the 1979 NLSY, we find some evidence indicating that a higher unemployment rate increases the risk of a marriage ending for couples in years 6–10 of mar...

The aim of this paper is to identify the sources of time use differences between married and cohabiting couples and to answer the question whether there is a “selection into specialization”, i.e. whether cohabiting partners who agree on a (traditional) division of work simply have a higher probability of getting married. In a non-parametric matching approach, we compare couples who get married ...