How much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married? What percentage of a married couple’s expenditures are controlled by the husband? How much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus living apart? We propose and estimate a collective model of household behavior that permits identificati...

There is some controversy in the field of household economics regarding the efficiency of household decisions. We make the point that a flexible specification of spousal preferences and the household production technology precludes the possibility of using revealed preference data on household time allocations to determine the manner in which spouses interact: efficiently or inefficiently. Unde...

A longstanding tradition of patrilocal marriage – living with the parents-in-law affects every generation of Central Asian women and their choices regarding childbearing, employment and education. While anthropological evidence suggests that elder matriarchs (Queen Bees) play a key and often detrimental role in the lives of the junior women in their households, rigorous empirical studies are sc...

Becker Meets Ricardo: Multisector Matching with Social and Cognitive Skills This paper presents a tractable framework for studying frictionless matching in school, work, and marriage when individuals have heterogeneous social and cognitive skills. In the model, there are gains to specialization and team production, but specialization requires communication and coordination between team members,...

The influence of physical appearance in the labour market is examined using longitudinal cohort data covering 11,407 individuals born in Britain in 1958. Results show that physical appearance has a substantial effect on earnings and employment patterns for both men and women. Irrespective of gender, those who are assessed as unattractive or short, experience a significant earnings penalty. Tall...

The Heterogeneous Impact of Pension Income on Elderly Living Arrangements: Evidence from China’s New Rural Pension Scheme This paper investigates the impact of pension income on living arrangements of the elderly. Taking advantage of a unique opportunity due to the recent establishment and expansion of the social pension system in rural China, we explicitly address the endogeneity of pension st...

Labor force outcomes after an involuntary job loss tend to differ systematically between men and women, with women experiencing a lower probability of finding another job, a longer average duration of nonemployment, and larger losses in hours given reemployment. This study examines the role of family structure in such sex differences in postdisplacement outcomes. Data from the Panel Study of In...

The Effect of Benefits on Single Motherhood in Europe This paper uses data from the eight waves of the European Community Household Panel (1994-2001) to estimate the impact of welfare benefits on the incidence of single motherhood and headship among young women across European countries. The regressions include country fixed effects as well as time trends that are allowed to vary by country, to...

Female Migration and Native Marital Stability: Insights from Italy* In this paper, we argue that the size and the composition of the female migrant population in a given area can affect the marital stability of natives. We take Italy as a case-study and we offer discrete-time event history models predicting marital disruption on data from the nationally – representative 2009 Family and Social S...