Between 1968 and 2013, two striking changes occurred in the characteristics of US parents. First, the share of households headed by a single parent grew from 19% to 40%. Second, the share of households in which at least one parent has a fouryear college degree grew from 17% to 45%, with most of the increase coming from dual parent households. We first conduct simple accounting exercises to show...

Is Marriage Poisonous? Are Relationships Taxing? An Analysis of the Male Marital Wage Differential in Denmark The word for ‘married’ in Danish is the same as the word for ‘poison’. The word for ‘sweetheart’ in Danish is the same as the word for ‘tax’. In this paper we expand upon the literature documenting a significant marital wage premium for men in the United States to see if a similar diffe...

This paper examines how skills are shaped by social interactions in schools and families. We focus on critical course choices in high school and naturally occurring peer groups. We overcome the identification challenges of estimating peer effects in education by exploiting exogenous variation in choice sets. First, we analyze a universal free-choice reform causing a fall in math-science skills....

Estimation of the causal effect of parental migration on children's educational attainment is complicated by the fact that migrants and non-migrants are likely to differ in unobservable ways that also affect children's educational outcomes. This paper suggests a novel way of addressing this selection problem by looking within the family to exploit variation in siblings' ages at the time of pare...

The influence of parental income on the choice of young adults to leave the parents’ home is still an open question. This paper suggests a model in which either more parental income increases the independent child’s consumption and encourages leaving (standard altruism) or increases more his consumption when co-residing (proximity altruism) and induces to stay. Besides, housing is a distinct no...

This paper focusses on the insurance role of religion in buffering the well-being impact of stressful life events, and the ensuing economic and social implications. Using two large-scale European data sets, we show that the religious enjoy higher levels of life satisfaction, and that religion does insure against some adverse life events. All denominations suffer less psychological harm from une...

Joint Decisions on Household Membership and Human Capital Accumulation of Youths The role of expected earnings and local markets This paper analyses the effects of expected earnings and local markets conditions on the behaviour of young adults with high school diplomas. Decisions to either remain in the parental home or form a new household are modelled jointly with those of either gaining work...

October 2008 Preliminary version Please do not quote! Abstract. This paper examines the patterns of educational assortative mating in East and West Germany. In the literature it is well known that individuals do not mate randomly according to social and cultural traits. Marrying within a socio-economic group can lead to polarization and exacerbating economic inequality. In the US, there is a co...

The happiness literature provides evidence on various factors, other than money, that do seem to contribute to individual happiness. As one explores the produced “happiness economics” literature, it is direct to understand the difficulty to find proper information on developing countries reality. In our analysis we investigate the relationship between income, family composition, health and reli...

Until 2004, divorce in Chile was illegal and separated individuals were unable to remarry. This paper examines who benefits or looses from the option of exiting a marriage and remarrying. Using longitudinal survey data, we first document the effects of the reform on couples formation and separation. We then use this variation in the data to structurally estimate and validate a dynamic equilibri...