Four hundred Danish emerging adults ages 17-29 were surveyed regarding their conceptions of adulthood and their self-assessments of their adult status. A majority of the 17-24-year-olds and nearly half the 25-29-year-olds viewed themselves as being adults in some ways but not others. Participants reported feeling most adult when with co-workers or romantic partners, and least adult with mothers...

According to Laub and Sampson (2003), desistance from crime is made possible by “knifing off”—“offenders desist in response to structurally induced turning points that serve as the catalyst for sustaining long-term behavioral change” (p. 149). What turning points create are new situations that allow individuals to knife off the past, in part, by changing those routine activity patterns that led...

This paper examines marriage market equilibrium when allocation is determined by bargaining in marriage rather than binding agreements between prospective spouses. We view sorting in the marriage market and allocation in marriage as a two-stage game in which prospective spouses, when they meet in the marriage market, foresee the allocation that would emerge from bargaining in marriage, but are ...

Age at first marriage has risen dramatically since the mid-1960s among a wide spectrum of the U.S. population. Researchers have considered many possible explanations for this trend. Few, though, have asked why individuals should want to delay marriage in the first place. One possibility is that early marriage inhibits the career development of one or both individuals in a marriage. We test this...

Israel’s 1994 adoption of free in vitro fertilization (IVF) provides a natural experiment for how fertility time horizons impact women’s marriage timing and other outcomes. We find substantial increase average age at first following the policy change, using both men Arab-Israeli women as comparison groups. This shift appears to be driven by increased marriages older younger delaying marriage. A...