This Paper presents new evidence on the determinants of unemployment duration for men and women in Britain in the 1990s, using a nationally representative data set. It examines the impact of individual and local labour market characteristics on the probability of unemployment spells ending with...

Decomposing wages into worker and firm wage components, we find that firm-fixed components (firm rents) are sizeable parts of workers' wages. If workers can only imperfectly observe the extent of firm rents in their wages, they might be mislead about the overall wage distribution. Such...

Policies to promote marriage are controversial, and it is unclear whether they are successful. To analyze such policies, it is essential to distinguish between a marriage that is created by a marriage-promoting policy (marginal marriage) and a marriage that would have been formed even in the...

Extreme-right-wing (ERW) parties are on the rise in many countries. Moreover, there is an alarmingly high cross-country correlation between the election success of ERW parties and immigration. Motivated by this evidence, we explore one potentially important channel through which immigration may...

This paper estimates a model of dynamic intrahousehold investment behavior which incorporates family fixed effects and child endowment heterogeneity. This framework is applied to large American and British survey data on birth outcomes, with focus on the effects of antenatal parental smoking and...

This Paper develops a model of child custody based on an incomplete-contract approach to the allocation of property rights. Because of the presence of transaction costs in marriage, altruistic parents cannot contract upon the investments they make into their children, but can reduce the...

Marriage data show a strong degree of positive assortative mating along a variety of attributes. But since marriage is an equilibrium outcome, it is unclear whether positive sorting is the result of preferences rather than opportunities. We assess the relative importance of preferences and...

This paper develops a theory of the allocation of authority between two parties that produce impure public goods. We show that the optimal allocation depends on technological factors, the parties' valuations of the goods produced, and the degree of impurity of these goods. When the degree of...

This paper presents an overlapping generations model to explain why humans live in families rather than in other pair groupings. Since most non-human species are not familial, something special must be behind the family. It is shown that the two necessary features that explain the origin of the...

This paper formulates a model to examine the effects of changes in tax-benefit policy on the behavior of divorced parents and the well-being of children in single-parent households. Noncustodial parents choose the level of a child support payment to transfer to custodians. These, in turn, decide...