Since World War II there has been: (i) a rise in the fraction of time that married households allocate to market work, (ii) an increase in the rate of divorce, and (iii) a decline in the rate of marriage. What can explain this? It is argued here that technological progress in the household...

Social norms are influenced by the technological environment that a society faces. Behavioral modes reflect purposive decision making by individuals, given the environment they live in. Thus, as technology changes, so might social norms. There were big changes in social norms during the 20th...

This paper studies studies the effects of alternative taxation rules when salient demographic features of modern economies are explicitly considered. We build a equilibrium framework in which the formation and dissolution of households, household labor supply decisions at the intensive and...

Marriage has declined since 1960, with the drop being bigger for non-college educated individuals versus college educated ones. Divorce has increased, more so for the non-college educated vis-à-vis the college educated. Additionally, assortative mating has risen; i.e., people are more likely to...

We quantitatively investigate the capacity to collect revenue when the government is constrained to use non-linear (progressive) income taxes. We develop a life-cycle growth model with individual heterogeneity and endogenous labor supply, and explore the degree of tax progressivity that can be...

We analyze the role of optimal income taxation across different locations. Existing federal income tax schedules have a distortionary effect and result in the misallocation of labor across cities of different size. Because of higher productivity in big cities, wages for identically skilled...

Societies socialize children about sex. This is done in the presence of peer-group effects, which may encourage undesirable behavior. Parents want the best for their children. Still, they weigh the marginal gains from socializing their children against its costs. Churches and states may...

We develop a model economy in the spirit of Caucutt, Guner and Knowles (2002). Each period single men and women with various levels of productivity are matched in a marriage market segmented by age and race. They decide whether or not to marry taking into account what their next best option is....