Are U.S. immigrants' English proficiency and social outcomes the result of their cultural preferences, or of more fundamental constraints? Using 2000 Census microdata, we relate immigrants' English proficiency, marriage, fertility and residential location variables to their age at arrival in the U.S., and in particular whether that age fell within the "critical period" of language acquisition. ...

The Dynamics of Marriage and Divorce We formulate and estimate a dynamic model of marriage, divorce, and remarriage using 27 years of panel data for the entire Danish cohort born in 1960. The marital surplus is identified from the probability of divorce, and the surplus shares of husbands and wives from their willingness to enter marriage. Education and marriage order are complements in generat...

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...

1 Electronic Structure Calculations All electronic structure calculations were carried out with the ORCA program1. Density functional theory calculations on the BP862–6 (methanol and the tripeptide) and BLYP2–4,7 (only tripeptide) level of theory were performed using the def2-SVP basis8 set and the RI approximation with the def2-SVP/J auxilary basis set.9,10 B2PLYP11 computations (n-alkanes) us...

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...