This paper studies the role played by caste, education and other social and economic attributes in arranged marriages among middle-class Indians. We use a unique data set on individuals who placed matrimonial advertisements in a major newspaper, the responses they received, how they ranked them,...

This paper documents how the structure of extended family networks in rural Mexico relates to the poverty and inequality of the village of residence. Using the Hispanic naming convention, we construct within-village extended family networks in 504 poor rural villages. Family networks are larger...

Recently, economists have established that culture defined as a common set of preferences and beliefs—affects economic outcomes, including the levels of female labor force participation. Although this literature has argued that culture is transmitted from parents to children, it has also...

Transfers to women may affect their bargaining power within the household and consequently their well-being. We analyze the effects of a pension reform in Argentina that resulted in an unexpected and substantial increase in permanent income for around 1.8 million senior women (women 60 years and...

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...

We examine causes and consequences of relative income within households. We show the distribution of the share of income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp drop to the right of 1/2, where the wife's income exceeds the husbands income. We argue that this pattern is best explained by gender...

The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. We use occupational statistics from Protestant marriage registers of historical Kampala to investigate the hypothesis that African gender inequality and female disempowerment are rooted in colonial times. We...

Norwegian registry data is used to investigate the location decisions of a full population cohort of young adults as they complete their education, establish separate households and form their own families. We find that the labor market opportunities and family ties of both partners affect these...

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....

Societies are characterized by customs governing the allocation of non-market goods such as marital partnerships. We explore how such customs affect the educational investment decisions of young singles and the subsequent joint labour supply decisions of partnered couples. We consider two...