We argue that retirement from work may affect marital status according to the predictions of quite standard economic models of marriage and divorce. Retirement may make singles less marriageable as well as impacting negatively marriage stability for married people. We exploit retirement laws in...

This paper presents a model of lifetime utility maximisation in which expectations of future marital transitions play a role in the determination of work hours. Married people with spouses who earn more are predicted to devote additional time to the labour market when they are confronted with a...

The paper develops an equilibrium search and matching model where two-person families as well as singles participate in the labor market. We show that equilibrium entails wage dispersion among equally productive risk-averse workers. Marital status as well as spousal labor market status matter...

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Gary Becker's path-breaking Treatise on the Family provides an occasion to reexamine both the American family and family economics. We begin by discussing how families have changed in recent decades: the separation of sex, marriage, and...

In this paper, we argue that the size and the composition of the female migrant population in a given area can affect the marital stability of natives. We take Italy as a case-study and we offer discrete-time event history models predicting marital disruption on data from the nationally –...

We analyze the tradeoff between child quantity and quality in developing countries by estimating the effect of family size on child education in urban Philippines. To isolate exogenous changes in family size, we exploit a policy shock: in the late 1990s, the mayor of Manila enacted a municipal...

Children can be considered as a marriage-specific investment that increases the value of the marriage, making a divorce more costly. We exploit the richness of pre- and post-marital information from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 79, for the United States, to investigate the relation...

In this study, we used data from the Young Lives study, which investigates teenage childbearing, marriage, and cohabitation by tracking a cohort of individuals from the ages of 8 to 19 years. While the present analysis does not intend to establish causality, the longitudinal nature of the data...

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...

This paper shows how a shorter fecundity horizon for females (a biological constraint) leads to age and educational disparities between husbands and wives. Empirical support is based on data from a natural experiment commencing before and ending after China's 1980 one-child law. The results...