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...

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.

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...

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...

Family composition has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. Divorce rates increased and remarriage rates declined. While considerable research established a link between marriage and earnings, far less is empirically understood about the effect of marriage on wealth although wealth is an...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of a theoretical model of the marriage market. In the model, women are valued more for their ability to bear children and men are valued more for their ability to make money. Men connot reveal their labor market ability to potential spouses until...

Transfer payments to poor families are increasingly conditioned on work, either via wage subsidies available only to workers or via work requirements in more traditional welfare programs. Although the effects of such programs on employment are fairly well understood, relatively little is known...

The goal of this paper is to analyze a model to explain consumption by couples. It is an extension fo the model for singles by Yaari (1195), and therefore emphasizes the role of mortality risk. It also allows for what I call a "true" bequest motive, bequeathing by a couple to the next...