The authors study labor supply of elderly couples by means of a collective model. The model allows individuals to enjoy leisure more (or less) in company of their spouse (complementarity/ externalities in leisure). Preferences and the intra-household bargaining process are identified by using...

The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the Asset and Health Dynamics Study (AHEAD) are large nationally representative panel surveys of individuals aged 51-61 and 70 or over respectively at baseline and their spouses. The objective of this paper is to find evidence about anchoring and...

Research has shown that financial illiteracy is widespread among women, and that many women are unfamiliar with even the most basic economic concepts needed to make saving and investment decisions. This gender gap in financial literacy may contribute to the differential levels of retirement...

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...

Grandparent caregiving has received increased attention in recent years, and grandparent-grandchild families have generated several public policy concerns, including whether grandparent-led families face barriers to obtaining public assistance. The authors address this question by comparing the...

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...

Both men and women appear to benefit from being married. This article uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the extent to which three key factors- financial well-being, living arrangements and marital history - account for this relationship.