Interethnic Marriages and their Economic Effects Immigrants who marry outside of their ethnicity tend to have better economic outcomes than those who marry within ethnicity. It is difficult, however, to interpret this relationship because individuals with stronger preferences for ethnic endogamy are likely to differ in unobserved ways from those with weaker preferences. To clarify some of the c...

There is extensive evidence that married people are, on average, healthier than their unmarried counterparts. It is unclear how much this positive correlation can be explained by the selection of healthier people into marriage. In this paper, I estimate the effect of marriage relative to cohabitation on health and disability. I control for selection into marriage by instrumenting marital status...

We make the point that a flexible specification of spousal preferences and household production technology precludes the possibility of using revealed preference data on household time allocations to determine the manner in which spouses interact. Under strong, but standard, assumptions regarding marriage market equilibria, marital sorting patterns can be used essentially as “out of sample” inf...

Concern over the distributional effects of policies which induce changes in peer group structure, or ‘associational redistributions’ (Durlauf, 1996c), motivates a substantial body of theoretical and empirical research in economics, sociology, psychology, and education. A growing collection of econometric methods for characterizing the effects of such policies are now available. This chapter sur...

Women can bear own children or adopt them. Extending economic theories of fertility, we provide a fi rst theoretical treatment of the demand for adoption. We show that the propensity to adopt a child increases in the degree of own altruism, infertility, relatedness to the child, costs of own child birth, and any adoption-specifi c monetary return that is received net of the costs of adopting th...

This paper investigates the impact of demographic shocks on optimal decisions about saving, life insurance, and, most centrally, asset allocation. The analysis indicates that marital-status transitions can have important effects on optimal household decisions, particularly in the cases of widowhood and divorce. Children also play a fundamental role in portfolio choice; in addition to leading to...

Unravelling Secularization: An International Study The current study examines individuals who were raised in a certain religion and at some stage of their life left it. Currently, they define their religious affiliation as ‘no religion’. A battery of explanatory variables (country-specific ones, personal attributes and marriage variables) was employed to test for the determinants of this decisi...

In this note, we correct an error from Halliday (2010) in which we explored the degree to which household size is measured with errors. After our correction, we find that an upper bound on the variance of these measurement errors increases by a factor of four. In fact, our calculations suggest that these errors could be as high as 20% of the total variation in household size. However, ∗E-mail: ...

We study the alternating-offers bargaining problem of assigning an indivisible and commonly valued object to one of two players who jointly own this object. The players are asymmetrically 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. We characterise the perfect B...

This paper analyzes the causal relationships between marriage and subjective well-being in a longitudinal data set spanning 17 years. We find evidence that happier singles opt more likely for marriage and that there are large differences in the benefits from marriage between couples. Potential, as well as actual, division of labor seems to contribute to spouses’ well-being, especially for women...