The custom of bride price involves the payment of goods or cash from the groom's family to the bride's family at the time of marriage. We present a theory that views bride price as a payment in hedonic markets for marital fidelity. Data from a household survey in Uganda are used to test the...

We analyze the impact of an increase in the risk of divorce on the saving behaviour of married couples. From a theoretical perspective, the expected sign of the effect is ambiguous. We take advantage of the legalization of divorce in Ireland in 1996 as an exogenous increase in the likelihood of...

This paper analyzes the determinants of interethnic marriages among immigrants in the United States. The dependent variable is intermarriage across ethnic groups and the inclusion of the explanatory variables is justified by a simple rational choice economic model. A binomial logistic regression...

In this paper we study the importance of marriage for interstate risk sharing. We find that US states in which married couples account for a higher share of the population are less exposed to state-specific output shocks. Thus, marriages do not just improve the allocation of risk at the...

In spite of there being few elements of tax or cash benefit systems in developed countries that are any longer explicitly gender-biased in a discriminatory sense, it is well recognised that they have significant gender effects. To the extent that women earn less than men on average under...

The allocation of Moluccan immigrants across towns and villages at arrival in the Netherlands and the subsequent formation of interethnic marriages resemble a natural experiment. The exogenous variation in marriage formation allows us to estimate the causal effect of interethnic marriages on the...

Since World War II there has been: (i) a rise in the fraction of time that married households allocate to market work, (ii) an increase in the rate of divorce, and (iii) a decline in the rate of marriage. It is argued here that labor-saving technological progress in the household sector can...

Little is known about why cohabiting couples have fewer children than married couples. We explore the factors that explain the difference in fertility between these two groups using a switching regression analysis, which enables us to quantify the contribution of different factors through a...

We model the consequences of parental control over choice of wives for sons, for parental incentives to educate daughters, when the marriage market exhibits competitive dowry payments and altruistic but paternalistic parents benefit from having married sons live with them. By choosing uneducated...

Using U.S. Census data for the years 1960-1980, we study the impact of unilateral divorce on outcomes of children (age 6-15) and their mothers. We find that the reform increased mothers' divorce, decreased family income and increased the fraction of mothers below the poverty line. For children,...