This paper investigates individual motives to participate in rotating savings and credit associations (roscas). Detailed evidence from roscas in a Kenyan slum (Nairobi) suggests that most roscas are predominantly composed of women, particularly those living in a couple and earning an independent income. To explain this phenomenon, we propose an argument based on con°ictual interactions within t...

Fertility Differences between Married and Cohabiting Couples: A Switching Regression Analysis Little is known about why cohabiting couples have fewer children than married couples. We explore the factors that explain the difference in fertility between these two groups using a switching regression analysis, which enables us to quantify the contribution of different factors through a decompositi...

This article studies the effect of the regime shift to joint custody in custody dispute adjudication in the United States during the 1980s using census data. Relying on cross state and year variation in the timing of adoption, I found the probability of attaining grade 12 or higher at age 18 among children of divorced or separated families to be higher in adoption states, but there was a fall i...

Marital status can both reflect and affect individual preferences. We explore the impact of marriage on corporate CEOs, and find that firms run by single CEOs exhibit higher stock return volatility, pursue more aggressive investment policies, and do not respond to changes in idiosyncratic risk. These effects are weaker for older CEOs. Our findings continue to hold when we use variation in divor...

There is longstanding evidence that youth raised by single parents are more likely to perform poorly in school and partake in ‘deviant’ behaviors such as smoking, sex, substance use and crime. However, there is not widespread agreement as to whether the timing of the marital disruption differentially impacts youth outcomes. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and its Young Adult Sup...