In this paper we study the importance of marriage for interstate risk sharing. We find that US states in which married … more aggregated state-level. Quantitatively, the impact of marriage on interstate risk sharing varies over divorce regimes. …

of these custody law reforms on the incidence of marriage and divorce. Our identification strategy exploits the different … data suggest that the introduction of joint custody led to a long-run increase in marriage rates. There is no convincing … dampened the persistent downturn in marriage. Our empirical evidence is fully consistent with the supposition that these …

to custody. Subsequent marriage-neutral laws extended the rights to unmarried fathers. We develop a theoretical model of … the effect of custody regime on marriage and test the model's predictions using a unique data set that merges custody law … data with data from the Current Population Survey and Vital Statistics. We find that, under marriage non-neutrality, the …

Does availability of common law marriage (CLM henceforth) in the U.S help explain variation in the labor force … legal protection to household producers at the margin between single status and marriage, we expect it to discourage labor …

Children can be considered as a marriage-specific investment that increases the value of the marriage, making a divorce …, for the United States, to investigate the relation between fertility and marriage instability. In our model of marriage … children conceived during first marriage. Our results indicate that the presence of children significantly reduces the …

The prevalence and stability of marriage has declined in the United States as the economic lives of men and women have …

Since 1950 the sources of the gains from marriage have changed radically. As the educational attainment of women … specialization in work weakened. The primary source of the gains to marriage shifted from the production of household services and … commodities to investment in children. For some, these changes meant that marriage was no longer worth the costs of limited …