Since the 1970s almost all states have introduced a form of joint custody after divorce. We analyze the causal effect of these custody law reforms on the incidence of marriage and divorce. Our identification strategy exploits the different timing of reforms across states and the control group of...

Using a dataset of 15,000 subjects from 32 western countries, the current study examines individuals who were raised in a certain religion and at some stage of their lives left it. Currently, they define their religious affiliation as 'no religion'. A battery of explanatory variables...

Numerous papers report a negative association between parental divorce and child outcomes. To provide evidence whether this correlation is driven by a causal effect, we exploit idiosyncratic variation in the extent of sexual integration in fathers' workplaces: Fathers who encounter more women in...

While divorce laws are known to influence family behavior, empirical evidence of their effects on children remains scarce. I shed more light on this by evaluating the Swedish divorce law reform of 1974, which i) liberalized the existing divorce laws and ii) implemented a 6-month parental...

Social insurance is often linked to marriage. I model how such linkage affects the marriage market, and exploit Sweden's elimination of survivors insurance to demonstrate economically important responses along several behavioral margins in this market. Entry into marriage reflects a demand for...

This paper estimates the effect of female economic empowerment on domestic violence. I use individual level data from high-quality Swedish administrative registers on women's earnings and hospital visits relating to assault. With this third-party reported violence measure, I overcome the issue...

This paper investigates the time allocation of women in Ghana as a trade-off between domestic chores and market-oriented activities when households are provided with water and electricity infrastructure. Using the Ghana Living Standards Survey, Round Four, we find that the time spent on...

This paper includes couples on the demand side and analyses their implications on the problem of adverse selection in the annuity market. First, we examine the pooling equilibrium for individual-life annuities and show that in the presence of couples the rate of return on individuallife...

This paper evaluates the impact of the 2007 expansion of the Bolsa Família programme to families with youths aged 16 to 17 years (Benefício Variável Jovem) on the time allocation of youths and on the labour supply of adults. The differences-in-difference estimator was used to compare...

Why do the poor have so many economic activities? According to one theory the poor do not specialize because relying on one income source is risky. I test the theory by measuring the response of Thai rice farmers to conditional volatility in the international rice price. Households expecting a...