This paper examines the relationship between interethnic marriages and economic assimilation among immigrants in the United States. Two competing hypotheses are evaluated: the productivity hypothesis, according to which immigrants married to native-born spouses assimilate faster than comparable...

This paper investigates the likelihood of an unpartnered birth as a function of laws regulating the division of joint property in case of divorce. Based on a rational choice model of marriage and assuming that on average women earn less than men, we predict that women are less likely to have an...

We model the consequences of parental control over choice of wives for sons, for parental incentives to educate daughters, when the marriage market exhibits competitive dowry payments and altruistic but paternalistic parents benefit from having married sons live with them. By choosing uneducated...

This study examines the extent, duration and timing of employment breaks amongst a large representative sample of Jewish workers in Israel over the 13-year time period, 1983-1995. Work histories are constructed from a new joint database, unique in Israel, which was derived from a linkage of 1995...

This paper examines the effect of one partner’s overseas migration on the other non-migrant partner’s labor force participation and supply behavior. I compare the effect when the migrant partner is male and when she is female. The study uses merged 2003 data sets from the nationally...

Little is known about why cohabiting couples have fewer children than married couples. We explore the factors that explain the difference in fertility between these two groups using a switching regression analysis, which enables us to quantify the contribution of different factors through a...

Is moving to the countryside a credible commitment device for couples? We investigate whether lowering the arrival rate of potential alternative partners by moving to a less populated area lowers the dissolution risk for a sample of Danish couples. We find that of the couples who married in the...

Western countries differ greatly in the extent to which single mothers participate in the labor market. Using LIS data for 15 countries, I propose and estimate a simple structural model of labor supply that incorporates the main variables that influence the work decision for single mothers. The...

This paper presents a model of lifetime utility maximisation in which expectations of future marital transitions play a role in the determination of work hours. Married people with spouses who earn more are predicted to devote additional time to the labour market when they are confronted with a...

Using a sample of mother-child pairs from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and the Young Adults of the NLSY79 we explore the relationship between a woman’s attitudes towards the role of females in the labor market and the attitudes of her children. We also examine...