The paper develops an equilibrium search and matching model where two-person families as well as singles participate in the labor market. We show that equilibrium entails wage dispersion among equally productive risk-averse workers. Marital status as well as spousal labor market status matter...

Leaving the parental home is often a decision made together by two people. In this paper we present a theoretical model analyzing moving out as a joint decision and then test its implications using a new dataset of university graduates collected in the southern Spanish region of Murcia in...

Neither marriage nor a legally enforceable contract serves any useful purpose if the parties have access to a perfect credit market. In the presence of credit rationing, efficiency and utility equalization are guaranteed only by a legally enforceable contract. Separate-property marriage may...

We demonstrate that the notion of a "family constitution" (self-enforcing, renegotiation-proof family norm) requiring adults to provide attention for elderly parents carries over from a world where sexually indifferentiated individuals reproduce by cell separation, to one where individuals...

A large fraction of domestically abused women report that their partners interfere with their participation in education and employment. As of yet, mainstream economics has not dealt in any systematic way with this phenomenon and its implications for welfare policy. This paper puts forward a...

We present a theory on migration of dual-earner couples, and test it in the context of international migration. Our model predicts that the probability that a couple emigrates increases in the earnings of the primary earner. The effect of the earnings of the secondary earner may go either way....

We analyze equally competitive spouses competing for promotion in their respective workplaces and show that an asymmetric equilibrium featuring household specialization can arise. Examples where the asymmetric equilibrium is welfare-superior to the symmetric equilibrium are highlighted. By...

Previous work shows that higher male wage inequality decreases the share of ever married women in their 20s, consistent with the theoretical prediction that greater male wage dispersion increases the return to marital search. Consequently, male wage inequality should be associated with higher...

Robots have radically changed the demand for skills and the role of workers in production. This phenomenon has replaced routine and mostly physical work of blue collar workers, but it has also created positive employment spillovers in other occupations and sectors that require more social...

Married couples often face a different tax burden than cohabitating couples with the same income. I study the effect of joint income taxation of married couples on the marriage rate in Switzerland, where tax differentials between married and cohabitating couples vary considerably across cantons....