We develop a new directed-search model of fertility and marriage, and apply it to two empirical problems: the rise in unmarried women’s share of births since 1970, and the fact that black women have lower marriage rates and higher rates of unmarried births than white women. The premise is that...

By reducing the risk of unwanted parenthood, more effective contraception reduces the cost of sex outside of marriage, increasing the value of single life. Could this explain why marriage and birth rates declined in the U.S. after 1970?. We illustrate our hypothesis with a one-period example. We...

Low sex ratios are often equated with unfavorable marriage prospects for women, but in France after World War 1, the marriage probability of single females rose 50%, despite a massive drop in the male/female ratio. We conjecture that the war-time birth-rate bust induced an abnormal postwar...

Elderly women are much more likely to be poor than the elderly men. In 1992, 15.7 percent of elderly females, those over age 65, were in poverty, in contrast to 8.9 percent of elderly males. A nonmarried women who is on the verge of retirement has about 20 percent less wealth than a nonmarried...

State-wide reports on police traffic stops and searches summarize very large populations, making them potentially powerful tools for identifying racial bias, particularly when statistics on search outcomes are included. But when the reported statistics conflate searches involving different...