We consider a society where parents prefer boys to girls, but also value grandchildren. Parental sex selection results in a biased sex ratio that is socially inefficient, due to a congestion externality in the marriage market. Improvements in selection techniques aggravate the inefficiency....

Public policies often target individuals but within-family externalities of such interventions are understudied. Using a regression discontinuity design, we document how a third grade retention policy affects both the target children and their younger siblings. The policy improves test scores of...

During the 1970s the US underwent an important change in its divorce laws, switching from mutual consent to a unilateral divorce regime. Who benefited and who lost from this change? To answer this question we develop a dynamic life-cycle model in which agents make consumption, saving, labor...

This chapter surveys the voluminous literature on household formation and marriage markets in developing countries. We begin by discussing the many social and economic factors that incite individuals to live together in households. Many of these factors are particularly important in poor...

This paper studies the determinants of women's welfare outcome in microcredit programs. These determinants are in the form of different types of characteristics of women: their own characteristics (age, schooling etc) or the characteristics of the household or village they live in. Observed...

This paper studies the determinants of women's welfare outcome in microcredit programs. These determinants are in the form of different types of characteristics of women: their own characteristics (age, schooling etc) or the characteristics of the household or village they live in. Observed...