This paper studies the effect of child care provision on family structure. We present a model of a marriage market with …

In most Western economies, the flourishing of the Welfare State has coincided with a decline of the role of the family … the informal safety net in a period when social protection was provided by the family. Once the State started offering … suitable alternatives, the taboo was no longer expedient, and was dropped. For the same reasons, marriage has become less …

This paper presents an inter-temporal model of individual behavior with uncertainty about marriage and divorce and … which accommodates the possible presence of economies or diseconomies of scale from marriage. We show that a scenario of … higher marriage rates and higher divorce rates will be associated with higher savings rates in the presence of economies of …

women. Historically, women with more education have been the least likely to marry and have children, but this marriage gap … has eroded as the returns to marriage have changed. Marriage and remarriage rates have risen for women with a college … degree relative to women with fewer years of education. However, the patterns of, and reasons for, marriage have changed …

long lasting institutions like religion, legal traditions, and family practices, also matter. This paper provides an …. Besides data on legal and religious traditions of countries, we also employ lesser known data on family systems in the …

crafted in empirical studies of the marriage problem can easily be adapted to the roommate problem. …