find that a higher satisfaction gap, even in the first year of marriage, increases the likelihood of a future separation … divorce. We use three panel databases to explore this question. Controlling for the level of life satisfaction of spouses, we … in the effect of happiness gaps: couples are more likely to break-up when the difference in life satisfaction is …

non-marital fertility. This paper posits that if one role of marriage is to insure one partner's investment in children … the family home, post-separation has remained unique to marriage.We provide a model where husbands can "ante up" the … of marriage will invest more in children and have greater labor specialization, while policy changes that eroded marriage …

We find a strong association between family status and labor market outcomes for recent cohorts of West German men in …-invariant unobservables that affect both family and work outcomes. Child gender also matters - a first son increases fathers' work hours by … supply model reveals that men who remain with female children are strongly positively selected (in terms of their work hours …

We investigate how the marital age gap affects the evolution of marital satisfaction over the duration of marriage … older husbands. Marital satisfaction declines with marital duration for both men and women in differently-aged couples … relative to those in similarly-aged couples. These relative declines erase the initial higher levels of marital satisfaction …

In this paper we examine how children affect happiness and relationships within a family by analyzing two unique … questions in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth's 1997 cohort. We find that (a) presence of children is associated with a … loss of spousal love; (b) loss of spousal love is associated with loss of overall happiness; but (c) presence of children …

there is a causal effect of partnership on subjective well-being. Our data allow us to distinguish between marriage and … orientation. The well-being gains of marriage are larger than those of cohabitation. Investigating partnership formation and … disruption, we discover that the well-being effects are symmetric. Finally, we find that marriage improves well-being for both …

the household. Using a sample of PSID-CDS children, we investigate whether the birth order effects in their outcomes are …

and noncognitive development is weaker, and is restricted to children of less educated mothers. We conclude that …This paper uses propensity score matching methods to investigate the relationship between breastfeeding and children … interventions which increase breastfeeding rates would improve not only children's health, but also their cognitive skills, and …