This paper uses a new data set on domestic child adoption to document the preferences of potential adoptive parents over born and unborn babies relinquished for adoption by their birth mothers. We show that adoptive parents exhibit significant biases in favor of girls and against...

This paper considers family formation and reciprocity-based cooperation in the form of sharing of earnings-risk. While risk sharing is one benefit to marriage it is also limited by divorce risk. With search in the marriage market there may be multiple equilibria diering not only in divorce rates...

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...

In the United States child adoption costs vary considerably, ranging from no out-of-pocket expense to $50,000 or more. What are the underlying causes for the variability in child adoption expenses? While cost variability is widely acknowledged, the sources of the differentials have not been...

Why do some U.S. states have higher levels of marital formation than others? This paper introduces an economic model wherin a state s representative individual may choose to marry in order to diversify his or her idiosyncratic income risk. The paper demonstrates that such a diversification...

This paper explores the importance of housing and mortgage market heterogeneity in 12 European countries for the transmission of monetary policy. We use a panel VAR model which is estimated over the period 19952006 to generate impulse responses of key macroeconomic variables to a monetary policy...

This paper studies the determinants of house prices in eight transition economies of central and eastern Europe (CEE) and 19 OECD countries. The main question addressed is whether the conventional fundamental determinants of house prices, such as GDP per capita, real interest rates, housing...

This paper is mainly concerned with the analysis of regional house price cycles. Based on a newly available data set consisting of the 40 largest U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), we introduce a wavelet transform based metric to study the housing cycle synchronization across MSAs. We...

What risks do asset price bubbles pose for the economy? This paper studies bubbles in housing and equity markets in 17 countries over the past 140 years. History shows that not all bubbles are alike. Some have enormous costs for the economy, while others blow over. We demonstrate that what makes...