This paper explores how the relative circumstances of men and women following marital dissolution affect sex-selection behavior within marriages. China's 2001 divorce reform liberalized divorce in favor of women and secured women's property rights after separation. We use this improvement in...

Sex ratios, i.e., relative numbers of men and women, can affect marriage prospects, labor force participation, and other social and economic variables. But the observed association between sex ratios and social and economic conditions may be confounded by omitted variables and reverse causality....

We study the joint impact of gender and marital status on financial decisions. First, we test the hypothesis that marriage represents - in a portfolio framework - a sort of safe asset, and that this effect is stronger for women. Controlling for a number of observable characteristics, we show...

This article analyses the extent to which changes in household composition over the life course affect the gender division of labour. It identifies and analyses cross-country disparities between France, Italy, Sweden and United States, using most recent data available from the Time Use National...

Childcare and women's employment decisions are intimately linked. I develop a dynamic model designed to analyse the effects of childcare subsidies on labour supply, fertility, marriage, and childcare decisions in a collective setting. In the model, children are a household good, produced by both...

This paper aims to shed new light on explanations for the sexual division of labour, within a broader examination of within-household specialisation. We propose a set of indices which we believe are the first direct within-couple measures of specialisation. We use these to present a rich...

The assumption that household income is strongly and positively correlated with a household's real standard of living provides the basis for the joint taxation of families, which has the effect of discriminating against married women as second earners. This paper shows, in the context of a model...

Using German panel data from 1984 to 2007, we analyze the impact of labor division between husband and wife on the risk of divorce. Gary Becker's theory of marriage predicts that specialization in domestic and market work, respectively, reduces the risk of separation. Traditionally, the...

How does a shock to sex ratios affect marriage markets and fertility? I use the drastic change in sex ratios caused by World War II to identify the effects of unbalanced sex ratios on Russian women. Using unique data from the Soviet archives, the results indicate that male scarcity led to lower...

Bertrand et al. (2015) show that among married couples in the US, the distribution of the share of the household income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp drop just to the right of .50. They argue that this drop is consistent with a social norm prescribing that a man should earn more than his...