In present day Germany, one in seven children is raised in a single parent household. We investigate the effect of single parenthood on children’s educational attainment, measured by the school track at the age 14, using ordered probit models. We study whether the effect of living in single parenthood during early or late childhood differs. Finally, we ask whether the family effect operates thr...

The Measurement of Child Costs: Evidence from Ireland We apply an extension of the Rothbarth approach to estimate the share of household resources accruing to children (i.e., the cost of children) in Ireland. The method also allows us to identify the economies of scale in the household and indifference scales in Lewbel (2003)’s sense. A practical aspect of the present approach is that it does n...

Do husbands and wives have the same view of the family’s financial situation? This research shows that when couples are asked separately about finances, very different views emerge of income and wealth. Quantifying the gap between husbands’ and wives’ financial statements shows half of all couples provide family income values that differ by more than 10% and net worth values that differ by more...

Why do some men father children outside of marriage without providing support? Why do some women have children outside of marriage when they receive little support from fathers? Why is this behavior more common among blacks than whites? We estimate a dynamic equilibrium model of marriage, employment, fertility, and child support decisions. We consider the extent to which low earnings, marriage ...

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...

In this paper we study the semiclassical asymptotics of the 6j symbols for the representation theory of the quantized enveloping algebra Uq(sl2) for q a primitive root of unity. Because of the work of Finkelberg [7], these 6j symbols can also be defined in terms of fusion product of representations of the affine Lie algebra ŝl2, defined using Wess-Zumino-Witten conformal field theory. This asso...