Recent research on household behavior suggests that, ceteris paribus, a woman's "power" within a household influences consumption and time allocation choices. From an empirical point of view, a central stumbling block in this line of inquiry has been identification of sources of "power" that can...

This paper relies on the variation of terror attacks across time and space as an instrument to identify the causal effects of terrorism on the preferences of the Israeli electorate. The authors find that the occurrence of a terror attack within three months of the elections is associated with a...

Social scientists and commentators disagree on how much of the association between parental divorce and child well-being is causal. This paper reexamines the claim that parental divorce is detrimental to children's emotional well-being, measured in terms of behavior problems. The author analyzed...

This paper explores the relationship between household type and asset accumulation. Householders are distinguished principally along standard demographic lines--whether they marry, divorce, separate, or become widowed. Recently, new data have become available that place far more emphasis on the...

The authors use data from the earlier and later cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to estimate the effect of marriage and childbearing on wages. Their estimates imply that marriage lowers female wages by between two and four percent in the year of marriage. Marriage also lowers...

Female age at first marriage and male wage inequality have increased steadily since the late 1960s in the United States. This paper uses a model of female marital search to demonstrate why these two trends could be related. Elementary job search theory, under risk-neutrality, predicts search...

When estimating earnings equations for men in the United States, a dichotomous variable for whether or not the man is currently married is often included as a regressor. The coefficient estimate for this variable is most usually large and significant. However, there is rarely much discussion of...