We study marital sorting on academic qualifications and latent ability in an equilibrium marriage market model using the 1972 UK Raising of the School-Leaving Age (RoSLA) legislation as a natural experiment that induced a sudden, large shift in the distribution of academic qualifications in...

We take advantage of recent advances in behavioral genetics to revisit a classic question in economics: how do parents respond to children's endowments and to differences in endowments among siblings? Parental investment decisions depend both on parental preferences regarding inequality in the...

We document that, over the 20th century, age at first marriage followed a U-shaped pattern, while the gender education gap tracked an inverted-U path in the United States. To explain this, we propose a multi-period frictionless matching model where educational and marriage decisions are...

In the 1960 cohort, American men and women graduated from college at the same rate, and this was true for Whites, Blacks and Hispanics. But in more recent cohorts, women graduate at much higher rates than men. To understand the emerging gender education gap, we formulate and estimate a model of...

Numerous papers report a negative association between parental divorce and child outcomes. To provide evidence whether this correlation is driven by a causal effect, we exploit idiosyncratic variation in the extent of sexual integration in fathers' workplaces: Fathers who encounter more women in...

An open question in the literature is whether families compensate or reinforce the impact of child health shocks. Discussions usually focus on one dimension of child investment. This paper examines multiple dimensions using household survey data on Chinese child twins whose average age is 11. We...

We formulate and estimate a dynamic model of marriage, divorce, and remarriage using 27 years of panel data for the entire Danish cohort born in 1960. The marital surplus is identified from the probability of divorce, and the surplus shares of husbands and wives from their willingness to enter...

Every year, a large number of women immigrate as brides from developing countries to developed countries in East Asia. This phenomenon virtually did not exist in the early 1990s, but foreign brides currently comprise 4 to 35 percent of newlyweds in these developed Asian countries. This paper...

Low female schooling attainment, early marriage and low age at first birth are major policy concerns in developing countries. This paper jointly estimated the determinants of educational attainment, marriage age and age of first birth among females 12 to 25 years of age in Madagascar, explicitly...

In 30% of young American couples the wife is more educated than the husband. Those women are characterized by a substantially higher employment (all else equal), which in turn amplifies income inequality across couples. Using NLSY79, we formulate and structurally estimate a dynamic life-cycle...