The analysis uses a unique set of data matching mothers and their young adult children to study the impact of family background on young people’s educational attainments. The data is derived from the first five years (1991–5) of the British Household Panel Study. Mother’s education is...

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we make two contributions to the literature on end-of-life transfers. First, we show that unequal bequests are much more common than generally recognized, with one-third of parents with wills planning to divide their estates unequally among...

The United States has a teenage birth rate that is high relative to that of other developed countries, and falling more slowly. Children of teenagers may experience difficult childhoods and hence be more likely to commit crimes subsequently. I assess to what extent lagged teen birth rates can...

More than 80% of Italian men aged 18-30 live with their parents. We argue that one contributing factor to this remarkably high rate of cohabitation is parents’ tastes for co-residence. In order to investigate the role of parental preferences, we estimate the effect of exogenous changes in...

The Paper investigates the relationship of work and family life in Britain. Using hazard regression techniques we estimate a five-equation model, which includes birth events, union formation, union dissolution, employment and non-employment events. The model allows for unobserved heterogeneity...

This paper investigates how the permanent departure of the head from the household, mainly due to death or divorce, affects children’s school enrolment and work participation in rural Colombia. In our empirical specification we use household-level fixed effects to deal with the fact that...

This Paper demonstrates that women search longer for their first or second husband in cities with higher male wage inequality, and analyses several explanations for this result. A causal link is established by showing that the results are robust to the inclusion of city fixed-effects and...

We investigate the importance of economic factors in young Americans’ decisions to form and dissolve households. We adopt a search theoretic framework to analyse the decisions to: leave the parental home; form a marriage or partnership; and dissolve a marriage or partnership. We focus, in...

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...

This Paper looks at the historical evolution of the relationship between an economy’s structure and the corresponding political system, with a focus on the European experience, starting from feudal times. We show why, in an early agricultural phase, aristocratic political systems prevail,...