Brides for Sale: Cross-Border Marriages and Female Immigration Every year, a large number of women immigrate as brides from developing countries to developed countries in East Asia. This phenomenon virtually did not exist in the early 1990s, but foreign brides currently comprise 4 to 35 percent of newlyweds in these developed Asian countries. This paper argues that two factors account for this ...

We leverage non-linearities in Danish child support guidelines and rich administrative data to provide causal estimates of parental behavioral responses to child support obligations. We estimate that a 1, 000 DKK ($160) increase in a father’s obligation is associated with a 273 DKK ($45) increase in his payment. A higher obligation reduces father-child co-residence, pointing to substitution bet...

This paper argues that the evolution of male preferences contributed to the dramatic increase in the proportion of working and educated women in the population over time. Male preferences evolved because some men experienced a different family model—one in which their mother was skilled and/or worked. These men, we hypothesize, were more inclined to marry women who themselves were skilled or wo...

Back to Baseline in Britain: Adaptation in the BHPS We look for evidence of adaptation in well-being to major life events using eighteen waves of British panel data. Adaptation to marriage, divorce, birth of a child and widowhood appears to be rapid and complete, whereas this is not the case for unemployment. These findings are remarkably similar to those in previous work on German panel data. ...

This paper looks at the historical evolution of the relationship between an economy's structure and the corresponding political system, starting from feudal times. We show why, in an early agricultural phase, aristocratic political systems prevail, while democracies tend to emerge with the industrial phase, while at the same time the legal system regulating the intergenerational transfers of pr...

Marriage, Partnership and Sexual Orientation: A Study of British University Academics and Administrators Using a unique data source on marital status, partnership and sexual orientation of academics and administrators at British universities, we estimate the impact of personal relationships upon earnings for men and women. While university data cover a relatively homogeneous group of workers, t...

In standard cross-sectional wage regressions, married men appear to earn 10 to 20 percent more than comparable never-married men. One proposed explanation for this male marriage premium is that men may be selected into marriage on the basis of characteristics valued by employers as well as by spouses or because they earn high wages. This paper examines the selection hypothesis using a “natural ...

The structural consumer demand methods used to estimate the parameters of collective household models are typically either very restrictive and easy to implement or very general and dif cult to estimate. In this paper, we provide a middle ground. We adapt the very general framework of Browning, Chiappori and Lewbel (2007) by adding a simple restriction that recasts the empirical model from a hi...

Pooling microdata from five Australian censuses, I explore the relationship between child gender and divorce. By contrast with the United States, I find no evidence that the gender of the first child has a significant impact on the decision to marry or divorce. However, among two-child families, parents with two children of the same sex are 1.7 percentage points less likely to be married than p...

Cooperative models of household decision-making are proving inadequate in an increasing number of contexts. We argue that altruism among family members can, in fact, inhibit cooperation by increasing the utility that players expect to receive in a non-cooperative equilibrium. To test this, we examine agricultural productivity in polygynous households in West Africa. We find that cooperation is ...