This study examines if couples time their work hours and how this work timing influences child care demand and the time that spouses jointly spend on leisure, household chores and child care. By using a innovative matching strategy, this studies identifies the timing of work hours that cannot be explained by factors other than the partners’ potential to communicate on the timing of their work. ...

We develop a model of partnership and marriage based upon individual abilities and match-specific returns. A theoretical result is that marriage and same-sex partnership positively select more able individuals, while the effect of unmarried heterosexual partnership is ambiguous. We conduct empirical analysis with a unique new data source on marital status, partnership and sexual orientation of ...

Cross-Nativity Marriages and Human Capital Levels of Children A common perception about immigrant assimilation is that association with natives necessarily speeds the process by which immigrants become indistinguishable from natives. Using 2000 Census data, this paper casts doubt on this presumption by examining the effect of an immigrant’s marriage to a native, a measure of social integration,...

Happiness research in economics takes reported subjective well-being as a proxy measure for utility and has already provided many interesting insights about human well-being and its determinants. We argue that future research on happiness in economics has a lot of potential, but that it needs to be guided more by theory. We propose two ways to test theories of happiness, and illustrate them wit...

Estimates based on couples with dependent children in the first six years of the British Household Panel Study (1991-97) indicate that changes in a couple’s economic circumstances affect the probability that a partnership dissolves. In particular, unexpected improvements in finances substantially reduce the dissolution risk, which strongly supports the importance of new information in decisions...

Laterborns Don’t Give Up: The Effects of Birth Order on Earnings in Europe While it is well known that birth order affects educational attainment, less is known about its effects on earnings. Using data from eleven European countries for males born between 1935 and 1956, we show that firstborns enjoy on average a 13.7 percent premium over laterborns in their wage at labour market entry. However...

This paper presents the results of a randomized study of a home visiting program implemented in Germany for low-income, first-time mothers. A major goal of the program is to improve the participants’ economic self-sufficiency and family planning. I use administrative data from the German social security system and detailed telephone surveys to examine the effects of the intervention on maternal...

Large Demographic Shocks and Small Changes in the Marriage Market This paper provides non-parametric estimates of the total effects of famine in China on marital behavior of famine affected cohorts in rural areas of Sichuan and Anhui. The reduced form estimates incorporate general equilibrium and heterogeneous treatment effects, two important components of equilibrium marital behavior. Next the...

The Impact of Internet Diffusion on Marriage Rates: Evidence from the Broadband Market The Internet has the potential to reduce search frictions by allowing individuals to identify faster a larger set of available options that conform to their preferences. One market that stands to benefit from this process is that of marriage. This paper empirically examines the implications of Internet diffus...

Does the within-household distribution of income influence household consumption patterns? In one attempt to answer this question, Lundberg, Pollak and Wales (1997) exploited the ‘natural experiment’ of a change in family benefits in the UK. They found that the within-household income distribution did have a significant impact on expenditure. This paper exploits a similar natural experiment in ...