The Health Returns to Education: What Can We Learn from Twins? This paper estimates the health returns to education, using data on identical twins. I adopt a twin-differences strategy in order to obtain estimates that are not biased by unobserved family background and genetic traits that may affect both education and health. I further investigate to what extent within-twin-pair differences in s...

How match-making methods a¤ect marriage outcomes is an understudied topic. Using a survey of Chinese couples in 1991, this paper examines whether parental involvement in match-making a¤ects a couple’s marriage harmony and joint income. We …nd that, compared with those married through self search, couples relying on parental help in match-making have on average less harmony and less income in ru...

Job Turnover, Wage Rates, and Marital Stability: How Are They Related? This study examines the interplay between job stability, wage rates, and marital instability. We use a Dynamic Selection Control model in which young men make sequential choices about work and family. Our empirical estimates derived from the model account for selfselection, simultaneity and unobserved heterogeneity. The resu...

Micro and Macro Determinants of Health: Older Immigrants in Europe We study the health determinants of immigrant men and women over the age of fifty, in Europe, and compare them to natives. We utilize the unique Survey of Health Aging and Retirement (SHARE) and augmented it with macroeconomic information on the 22 home countries and 16 host countries. Using Multilevel Analysis we can best captu...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model of the gender wage gap. The difference in earnings is a consequence of a demographic regularity—that men tend to marry younger women— which may limit women’s labor mobility and, hence, their average earnings. However, couples are always free not to marry, and do so only if it is in each’s self-interest. The intrafamily allocation of resources is d...

Childhood Sexual Abuse and Later-Life Economic Consequences The impact of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) on later-life health outcomes has been studied extensively and links with depression, anxiety and self-harm have been established. However, there has been relatively little research undertaken on the possible impact of CSA on later-life economic outcomes. Here, we explore whether older men who...

How Distance to a Non-Residential Parent Relates to Child Outcomes A substantial and growing fraction of children across Europe and the US live in single parent households. Law practices are evolving to encourage both parents to maintain contact with their children following parental separation/divorce, driven by the belief that such contact is in the best interest of the child. We test this as...

In raw data in the UK, the income loss on separation for women who were cohabiting is less than the loss for those who were married. Cohabitees lose less even after matching on observable characteristics including age and children. This di¤erence is not explained by di¤erences in access to bene…ts or labour supply responses after separation. We show that the di¤erence arises because of di¤erenc...

This paper is concerned with the relation between marriage and higher education. We build up a model with educational assortative matching where individuals decide whether to acquire higher education both for obtaining educational surplus and for increasing the probability to be matched with an educated partner. Education can be either asymmetric or symmetric between genders. The educational ch...

The Consequences of ‘In-Work’ Benefit Reform in Britain: New Evidence from Panel Data In October 1999, the British government enacted the Working Families’ Tax Credit, a generous tax credit aimed at encouraging work among low-income families with children. This paper uses longitudinal data collected between 1991 and 2001 to evaluate the effect of this reform on single mothers. We identify this ...