59 Introduction The family has been described as the cornerstone of society. It is the basic unit of social organization, and it is extremely difficult to conceive how human society could function without this institution. In fact, anthropological studies have indicated that the family has existed in every known society. George Peter Murdock, for example, in a study entitled “Social Structure,”...

BACKGROUND Adolescents' problem behavior is considered as a syndrome and has been recognized in academic literature for a long time. Problem behavior consists of adolescents' harmful health habits and elements of psychological well-being. The frequent appearance of harmful health habits during adolescence might lead to problem behavior. Thus, problem behavior includes and describes the co-occur...

We develop and estimate an empirical collective model with endogenous marriage formation, participation, and family labor supply. Intrahousehold transfers arise endogenously as the transfers that clear the marriage market. The intra-household allocation can be recovered from observations on marriage decisions. Introducing the marriage market in the collective model allows us to independently es...

Widening gaps in marriage rates have received a great deal of attention in recent years, focusing on the availability of marriageable men in the local marriage market. At the same time, cohabitation has increased in prevalence, playing a role in declining marriage rates. This paper extends marriage market arguments to the formation of both cohabiting and marital unions, using contextual data at...

—This paper explores new roles that traditionally rural kinship networks organized around the marriage institution might play in improving labor market outcomes in urban Africa. Using new data from Kisumu, Kenya, and controlling for selection into marriage, we find that marriage significantly increases employment levels and incomes in our sample of migrants. At the same time, marriage increases...

The American Family and Family Economics The twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Gary Becker’s path-breaking Treatise on the Family provides an occasion to reexamine both the American family and family economics. We begin by discussing how families have changed in recent decades: the separation of sex, marriage, and childbearing; fewer children and smaller households; converging work...

The landscape of union formation has been shifting; Americans are now marrying at the highest ages on record and the majority of young adults have cohabited. Yet little attention has been paid to the timing of cohabitation relative to marriage. Using the National Survey of Families and Households and 4 cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth, the authors examined the timing of marriage, ...

This article focuses on lesbian and gay couples and families and the politics of same-sex marriage. Drawing from the literature on same-sex couples, same-sex marriage, and queer theory’s concept of heteronormativity, we argue that gay and lesbian couples and families both affirm and challenge heterosexual and gendered family forms. First, we review literature that discusses how same-sex relatio...