By age 77 a plurality of women in wealthy Western societies are widows. Comparing older (aged 70+) married women to widows in the American Time Use Survey 2003-18 and linking the data to the Current Population Survey allow inferring the short- and longer-term effects of an arguably exogenous...

Losing a partner is a life-changing experience. We draw on numerous datasets to examine differences between widowed and partnered older women and to provide a comprehensive picture of well-being in widowhood. Most importantly, our analysis accounts for time use in widowhood, an aspect which has...

Following early economist Francis Y. Edgeworth's proposal to measure people's hedonic experiences as they go about their daily lives, we use a smartphone app that over eight years randomly asked a panel of 30, 936 UK residents (N = 2, 235, 733) about their momentary feelings and activities to...

Relationships have changed dramatically in the last fifty years. Fewer couples are marrying, more are cohabiting. Reasons for this shift abound, but the shift may have consequences of its own. A number of models predict that those cohabiting will specialize less than those marrying. Panel data...

This paper revisits the standard model of labor supply under two additional assumptions: consumption requires time and some limited amount of work is enjoyable. Whereas introducing each assumption without the other one does not produce novel insights, combining them together does if the wage...

Economists have devoted substantial attention to firms' supply of variety, but little to consumers' demand for variety. Employing the framework of home production, we trace differences in demand to differences in the opportunity costs of activities, which are associated with investments in human...

Daily commuting of workers is a complex phenomenon that has attracted research attention for many years and, despite the significant literature acknowledging differences between morning and evening commuting, commuting to and from work are considered symmetric trips in much of the prior...

Do negative incentives or sticks in education improve student outcomes? Since the late 1980s, several U.S. states have introduced No Pass No Drive (NPND) laws that set minimum academic requirements for teenagers to obtain driving licenses. Using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and...