paper we develop a new duration model that allows for unobserved persistent individual-specific health shocks and provides … explanatory power in predicting future mortality and is therefore a useful measure of morbidity. Finally, we suggest that the … duration model developed in this paper is a useful tool when analyzing a wide-range of single-spell durations where individual …

Children can be considered as a marriage-specific investment that increases the value of the marriage, making a divorce … children conceived during first marriage. Our results indicate that the presence of children significantly reduces the … probability of marital disruption. In addition, the younger the children, the greater the deterrent effect. In contrast, we …

commodities to investment in children. For some, these changes meant that marriage was no longer worth the costs of limited … different functions among different groups. The poor and less educated are much more likely to rear children in cohabitating … relationships. The college educated typically cohabit before marriage, but they marry before conceiving children and their marriages …

In this paper we examine how children affect happiness and relationships within a family by analyzing two unique … questions in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth's 1997 cohort. We find that (a) presence of children is associated with a … loss of spousal love; (b) loss of spousal love is associated with loss of overall happiness; but (c) presence of children …