I examine the response of husbands' and wives' earnings to a tax reform in which husbands' and wives' tax rates changed independently, allowing me to examine the effect of both spouses' incentives on each spouse's behavior. I analyze the large Swedish tax reform of 1990–1991 and find that in...

We develop an equilibrium lifecycle model of education, marriage and labor supply and consumption in a transferable utility context. Individuals start by choosing their investments in education anticipating returns in the marriage market and the labor market. They then match based on the...

Using the Progresa data from Mexico, we investigate intrahousehold decision making using a variety of outcomes. We exploit both the experimental nature and the (short) panel dimension of the data to measure the impact of exogenous changes in the intrahousehold distribution of resources on...

We study the incentives of parents to invest in their children when these investments improve their marriage prospects, in a frictionless marriage market with non-transferable utility. Stochastic returns to investment eliminate the multiplicity of equilibria that plagues models with...

We evaluate reforms to the U.S. tax system in a dynamic setup with heterogeneous married and single households, and with an operative extensive margin in labour supply. We restrict our model with observations on gender and skill premia, labour force participation of married females across skill...

Political survey data for nine West European countries show that women have become increasingly left-wing compared to men, and that this trend is positively correlated with the decline in marriage in these countries. This pattern is mirrored in German longitudinal data (GSOEP), where transitions...

Although the tax system is not marriage neutral in many countries, it has been found to be only slightly significant in determining marriage decisions (Buffeteau and Echevin, 2003; Alm and Whittington, 1995). This paper tests whether the tax system can alter the decision to contract a civil union,...

Based on three large panel surveys, this paper shows that happiness gaps between spouses are a good predictor of future divorce. The effect of happiness gaps is asymmetric: couples are more likely to break-up when the woman is the less happy partner. De facto, divorces appear to be initiated...

Many government programs have implicit penalties or subsidies for marriage. For example, many couples pay higher income taxes when married than their combined tax liabilities as single filers, while many other couples receive a marriage subsidy because their joint taxes fall with marriage....