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...

Many migrants have non-labour motives to migrate and they differ substantially in their migration behaviour. Family migrants main migration motive is to join their future spouse. Thus, when their relation breaks down this influences their return decision. Using administrative panel data on the...

Previous literature has established that unilateral divorce laws may reduce female household work. As shown by Stevenson (2007), unilateral divorce laws may affect overall marital investment. In addition, if unilateral divorce has differential costs by gender, then unilateral divorce may impact...

This paper analyzes a panel of 18 European countries spanning from 1950 to 2003 to examine the extent to which the legal reforms leading to easier divorce that took place during the second half of the 20th century have contributed to the increase in divorce rates across Europe. We use a...

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...

Evidence from the U.S. that couples with daughters are more likely to divorce than couples with sons has not been found for other Western countries. Using 1995–2015 Dutch marriage registry data, we show that daughters are associated with higher divorce risks, but only when they are 13 to 18...

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...

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...

Women can bear own children or adopt them. Extending economic theories of fertility, we provide a first theoretical treatment of the demand for adoption. We show that the propensity to adopt a child increases in the degree of own altruism, infertility, relatedness to the child, costs of own...

This paper analyses the effect of extending equitable property division divorce laws to unmarried cohabiting couples in Australia. Using a triple-difference fixed effects approach we show that existing couples are more likely to make relationshipspecific investments after being exposed to laws...