Even in countries where there is a male-biased sex ratio, it is still possible for the marriage market to be balanced if men marry younger women and population is growing. We define a missing Brides Index to reflect the intensity of the possible imbalance at steady state, taking into account the...

Cet article montre que les ménages utilisent le retrait des enfants du système éducatif comme stratégie ex-post de gestion des chocs de revenu qu’il subissent. L’analyse souligne également qu’un grand nombre d’enfants dans un ménage affecte négativement la probabilité de...

When dealing with labour supply, the classical microeconomic theory does not investigate cautiously the way consumer-workers allocate time. The non-working time (more often called "leisure") is assumed to be a normal good on which the individual preferences are defined. This paper is based on...

In this paper, the unilateral divorce law is modelled trough the combination of exclusive rights on the marriage dissolution and alternative compensation rules benefiting to the parent having custody of the children. Their influence are studied both in the short run (probability and efficiency...

Consider an economy populated by males and females, both rich and poor. The society has to choose one of the following marriage institutions: polygyny, strict monogamy, and serial monogamy (divorce and remarriage). After having identified the conditions under which each of these equilibria...

Virtue is modelled as an asset that women can use in the marriage market: since men value virginity in prospective mates, preserving her virtue increases a woman’s chances of marrying a high-status husband, and therefore allows for upward social mobility. Consistent with some historical and...

This paper examines how domestic violence may be used as an instrument to extract large transfers from a spouse's family. It is based on a case-study of three villages in Southern India, conducted by the authors, that combines qualitative and survey data. Based on the ethnographic evidence, we...

Consumer boycott campaigns against goods produced using child labour are becoming increasingly popular. Notwithstanding, there is no consensus on which are the effects of such type of activism on child labour. If some agreement is to be found in the recent economic literature, it is that the...

Parental time with children increases with the education of both the mother and the father. As the education of parents increases, the gap between childcare supplied by mothers relative to that supplied by fathers decreases. A two steps semi-cooperative marital decision model is proposed to...

We revisit the question of why fertility behaviors and educational decisions appear to vary systematically across ethnic groups. We assess the possibility that fertility differentials across groups remain even though their socio-economic characteristics are similar. More specifically, we...