Abstract This paper evaluates if same-sex marriage (SSM) laws, approved in several European Union countries over the past decades, have contributed to favor gay-friendly opinions among people depending on their social interactions. We propose a dyadic model which individuals learn about norm conveyed by law through strong and weak ties. show that relative importance of these ties shaping indivi...

We study the effect of unemployment on child maltreatment in the United States for the period 2004-12, at the county level. We use a new administrative dataset containing every report of child abuse and neglect made to the Child Protective Services, and identify the effect using a Bartik instrument. A one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate causes a 20 percent increase in neglect...

This paper analyzes how preferences for a noneconomic characteristic (e.g., caste) can affect equilibrium patterns of matching, and empirically evaluates this in the context of middle-class Indian arranged marriages. We show theoretically how the equilibrium consequences of caste depend on whether preferences are towards one’s own group or for “marrying up.” We then estimate actual preferences ...

We examine the effect of single motherhood on children’s secondary school track choice using 12-year-old children drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel. In line with previous studies for the U.S., the U.K. and Sweden, we find a negative correlation between single motherhood and children’s educational attainment. Looking for alternative explanations for this correlation, we use probit regre...

This paper presents a new framework to analyze the effects of some economics factors on the U.S. distribution of wages. The paper seeks to specifically find the contributing factors of wage inequality and show how differently these factors influence wage dynamics at various points of the distribution. This paper provides valuable information of where in the wage distribution dynamics these fact...

I examine the effect of marriage penalties in the US income tax system on marital status. I construct a simulated instrument that exploits variation in the tax code over time and between US states to deal with potential endogeneity between the marriage penalty a couple faces and their marital status. I find that a $1000 increase in the marriage penalty faced reduces the probability of marriage ...

Substitution Effects in Parental Investments The paper estimates how parents adjust bride-prices and land divisions to compensate their sons for differences in their schooling investments in rural China. The main estimate implies that when a son receives one yuan less in schooling investment than his brother, he will obtain 0.7 yuan more in observable marital and post-marital transfers as parti...

We study the alternating-offers bargaining problem of assigning an indivisible and commonly valued object to one of two players in return for some payment to the other. The players are asymmetrically and imperfectly informed about the object’s value and have veto power over any settlement. There is no depreciation during the bargaining process which involves signalling of private information on...

In a polygamous society, all monogamous women are virtually at risk of polygamy. However, both the anthropological and economic literature are silent on the potential impact of the risk of polygamy on economic decisions of monogamous wives. We explore this issue for Senegal using individual panel data. We first estimate a Cox model for the probability of transition to polygamy. Second, we estim...

Hypergamy, Cross-Boundary Marriages, and Family Behavior We study the rise in marriages between residents of HK and China following the handover of HK to China in 1997. Cross-boundary marriages accounted for almost half the marriages registered in HK in 2006. Because of large differences in male income between China and HK, marriages of HK men with Mainland women outnumbered those of HK women w...