The tax regimes applied to couples in many countries including the US, France, and Germany imply either a marriage penalty or a marriage bonus. We study how they affect the decision to get married by considering two potential spouses who play a marriage proposal game. At the end of the game they...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) introduced a premium tax credit to help low-income families purchase insurance and an individual mandate penalty to encourage purchasing insurance, but a couple’s total tax credit and mandate penalty may differ depending on whether they are married. We use a...

Married white men have higher wages and faster wage growth than unmarried white men. Using the NLSY, we examine whether racial differences in intrahousehold specialization and formal training explain married men's faster wage growth, and individual-specific data on cognitive skills, family...

This study examines the interplay between job stability, wage rates, and marital instability. We use a Dynamic Selection Control model in which young men make sequential choices about work and family. Our empirical estimates derived from the model account for self-selection, simultaneity and...

"It is well known that children reared in non-intact families on average have less favorable educational outcomes than children reared in two-parent families. Evidence from the United States and Sweden indicates that living in a non-intact family is correlated with lower educational attainment....

Despite a longstanding belief that education importantly affects the process of immigrant assimilation, little is known about the relative importance of different mechanisms linking these two processes. This paper explores this issue through an examination of the effects of human capital on one...

We study the steady state of an overlapping generations economy where singles search for spouses. In our model economy men and women live for many years and they differ in their fecundity, in their earnings, and in their survival probabilities. These three features are age-dependent and...

Using microdata from the 2000 U.S. Census and from recent years of the Current Population Survey (CPS), we investigate whether selective intermarriage and endogenous ethnic identification interact to hide some of the intergenerational progress achieved by the Mexican-origin population in the...