In quot;Unpacking the Household: Informal Property Rights Around the Hearthquot; (Yale Law Journal, 2006) Robert Ellickson argues that as long as members of a household expect their relationship to continue, norms, rather than law, will determine allocations among them. More specifically,...

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Gary Becker's path-breaking quot;Treatise on the Familyquot; 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,...

In this paper, we use a two-stage bargaining model to analyze the living arrangement of a disabled elderly parent and the assistance provided to the parent by her adult children. The first stage determines the living arrangement: the parent can live in a nursing home, live alone in the...

Comparisons of individual life expectancies over time and across demographic groups provide information for individuals making retirement decisions and for policy makers. For couples, analogous measures are the expected years both spouses will be alive (joint life expectancy) and the expected...

Fathers' multiple-partner fertility (MPF) is associated with substantially worse educational outcomes for children. We focus on children in fathers' “second families” when the second families are nuclear families – households consisting of a man, a woman, their joint children, and no other...

This paper investigates marriage market equilibrium under the assumption that Bargaining In Marriage (BIM) determines allocation within marriage. Prospective spouses, when they meet in the marriage market, are assumed to foresee the outcome of BIM and rank prospective spouses on the basis of the...

We study the impact of a medical breakthrough (HAART) on domestic violence and illicit drug use among low-income women infected with HIV. To identify causal effects, we assume that variation in women's immune system health when HAART was introduced affected how strongly their experience of...

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we make two contributions to the literature on end-of-life transfers. First, we show that unequal bequests are much more common than generally recognized, with one-third of parents with wills planning to divide their estates unequally among...

The last 60 years have seen the emergence of a dramatic socioeconomic gradient in marriage, divorce, cohabitation, and childbearing. The divide is between college graduates and others: those without four-year degrees have family patterns and trajectories very similar to those of high school...

The standard Beckerian analysis of marriage market equilibrium assumes that allocation within marriage implements agreements made in the marriage market. This paper investigates marriage market equilibrium when allocation within marriage is determined by bargaining in marriage and compares that...