A preference in parents for a son is thought to affect their fertility. However, even if parents do not have a preference for a son, the people who surround them possibly have a preference for a son. In this case, social pressure can influence parents’ behavior and fertility. This study...

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we make two contributions to the literature on end-of-life transfers. First, we show that unequal bequests are much more common than generally recognized, with one-third of parents with wills planning to divide their estates unequally among...

Labor market investigations attribute the weak labor force participation of German women to traditional role patterns. This article explores whether this interpretation can be confirmed by an alternate indicator--the proportion of female household-heads. Using PSID-GSOEP panel data, changes in...

The United States has a teenage birth rate that is high relative to that of other developed countries, and falling more slowly. Children of teenagers may experience difficult childhoods and hence be more likely to commit crimes subsequently. I assess to what extent lagged teen birth rates can...

More than 80% of Italian men aged 18-30 live with their parents. We argue that one contributing factor to this remarkably high rate of cohabitation is parents’ tastes for co-residence. In order to investigate the role of parental preferences, we estimate the effect of exogenous changes in...

The analysis uses a unique set of data matching mothers and their young adult children to study the impact of family background on young people’s educational attainments. The data is derived from the first five years (1991–5) of the British Household Panel Study. Mother’s education is...

Wealth accumulation has important implications for the relative well-being of households. This article describes how household wealth in the United States varies by gender and family type. Evidence is found of large differences in observed wealth between single-female-headed households and...

This paper examines whether an important cultural institution in India - dowry - can enable male migration by increasing the liquidity available to young men after marriage. We hypothesize that one cost of migration is the disruption of traditional elderly support structures, where sons live...

In this paper we investigate the effect of relative income on marital status. We develop an identity model based on Akerlof and Kranton (2000) and apply it to the marriage decision. The empirical evidence is consistent with the idea that people are more likely to marry when their incomes...