Divorce, Abortion and Children’s Sex Ratio: The Impact of Divorce Reform in China This paper explores how the relative circumstances of men and women following marital dissolution affect sex-selection behavior within marriages. China’s 2001 divorce reform liberalized divorce in favor of women and secured women’s property rights after separation. We use this improvement in women’s bargaining pow...

Lags and Leads in Life Satisfaction: A Test of the Baseline Hypothesis We look for evidence of habituation in twenty waves of German panel data: do individuals, after life and labour market events, tend to return to some baseline level of wellbeing? Although the strongest life satisfaction effect is often at the time of the event, we find significant lag and lead effects. We conclude that there...

Do labor market opportunities for women affect marriage and fertility decisions? We provided three years of recruiting services to help young women in randomly selected rural Indian villages get jobs in the business process outsourcing industry. Because the industry was so new at the time of the study, there was almost no awareness of these jobs, allowing us in effect to exogenously increase wo...

The phenomenon that married men earn higher average wages than unmarried men, the so-called marriage premium, is well known. However, the robustness of the marriage premium across the wage distribution and the underlying causes of the marriage premium deserve closer scrutiny. Focusing on the entire wage distribution and employing recently developed semi-nonparametric tests for quantile treatmen...

Having a female firstborn child significantly increases the probability that a woman’s first marriage breaks up. Recent work has exploited this exogenous variation to measure the effect of marital breakup on economic outcomes, and has concluded that divorce has little effect on women’s average household income. Employing an Abadie (2003) technique that allows us to look at the impact of marital...

Living Arrangements of the Elderly in China: Evidence from CHARLS Recent increases in Chinese elderly living alone or only with a spouse has raised concerns about elderly support, especially when public support is inadequate. However, using rich information from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, we find that the increasing trend in living alone is accompanied with a rise in li...

Income Transfers, Welfare and Family Decisions This paper studies the effects of different income transfers on individual welfare, in both marriage and divorce situations, and on family decisions. We assume three generations within the family. We develop a sequential game that, in a first stage, determines the optimum level of the transfer within a relationship of one-sided altruism. In the sec...

In contrast to most dowry oriented societies where payments have declined with modernisation, those in India have undergone signi ̄cant in°ation over the last ̄ve decades. This paper explains the di®erence between these two experiences by focusing on the role played by caste. The theoretical model contrasts caste and non-caste based societies: in the former, there exists an inherited component t...

We combine an instrumental variables approach –exploiting genetic variation in polygenic scores and controlling for population stratification– with a stochastic linear bi-dimensional matching model –which allows us to test the validity of the exclusion restriction. Individuals match on an additive index of overall marital attractiveness which has two components: an observable component (educati...

It has been argued that rising dowry payments are caused by population growth. According to that explanation, termed the `marriage squeeze', a population increase leads to an excess supply of brides since men marry younger women. As a result, dowry payments rise in order to clear the marriage market. The explanation is essentially static; unmarried brides do not re-enter the marriage market. Th...