We offer a rationale for the decision to extend the franchise to women within a politico-economic model where men are richer than women, women display a higher preference for public goods, and women's disenfranchisement carries a societal cost. We first derive the tax rate chosen by the male...

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 examines the effect of economic incentives generated by U.S. divorce and custody law on a range of child health and human capital measures. State laws vary widely in the treatment of child support under joint custody. While some states require no child support in joint custody cases,...

We use data on a large sample of Swedish-born adoptees and their biological and adopting parents to decompose the persistence in health inequality across generations into pre-birth and post-birth components. We use three sets of measures for health outcomes in the second generation: mortality,...

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...

By allowing people to obtain divorce without the consent of their spouse, Unilateral Divorce Laws (UDLs) increase the risk of divorce. Using the staggered introduction of UDLs across European countries, we show that households exposed to UDLs for longer time accumulate more savings. This effect...

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...

Under the tender years doctrine in effect until the 1970's, custody was virtually always awarded to the mother upon divorce. Gender-neutral custody laws introduced beginning in the 1970's provided married fathers, in principle, equal rights to custody. Subsequent marriage-neutral laws extended...

Wealth is highly correlated between parents and their children; however, little is known about the extent to which these relationships are genetic or determined by environmental factors. We use administrative data on the net wealth of a large sample of Swedish adoptees merged with similar...

Administrative divorce is an optional divorce procedure which allows couples to bypass the court system and dissolve their marriages in a streamlined, uncontested process. The lack of court involvement renders the administrative divorce faster and less expensive than the conventional divorce. In...