We document a negative trend in the leisure of men married to women aged 25-45, relative to that of their wives, and a positive trend in relative housework. We develop a simple bargaining model of marriage, divorce and allocations of leisure-time and housework. Calibration to US data shows the...

It has been shown that women married to men brought up by working mothers are significantly more likely to work than women married to men whose mothers were housewives. Furthermore, shocks to an economy which increase the number of working women (such as WWII), and thereby also increase the...

Approximately four out of ten American children experience the divorce of their parents. This raises concern because studies in sociology, developmental psychology, and economics show that offspring of divorced parents fare worse than offspring of married parents. The belief that a two-parent...

This paper makes five contributions to the modeling of societies organized primarily according to age. First, it models the social rules adhered to by a particular age-group society, the Rendille of Northern Kenya. Second, it shows that their age-group rules are well represented by the standard...

The paper investigates how marriage rates and the gains to marriage are affected by city size in three societies, medieval Tuscany, China in 1980 and the United States in 2000. Internal migration was severely limited in China until the late seventies. Population supplies in each US city were...

Since World War II there has been: (i) a rise in the fraction of time that married households allocate to market work, (ii) an increase in the rate of divorce, and (iii) a decline in the rate of marriage. What can explain this? It is argued here that technological progress in the household...