By reducing the risk of unwanted parenthood, more effective contraception reduces the cost of sex outside of marriage …, increasing the value of single life. Could this explain why marriage and birth rates declined in the U.S. after 1970?. We …, modeling the shotgun-marriage, contraception- method and abortion margins. We use US survey data on contraception, sexual …

Low sex ratios are often equated with unfavorable marriage prospects for women, but in France after World War 1, the … marriage probability of single females rose 50%, despite a massive drop in the male/female ratio. We conjecture that the war …-time birth-rate bust induced an abnormal postwar abundance of singles with relatively high marriage propensities. We compute the …

We develop a new directed-search model of fertility and marriage, and apply it to two empirical problems: the rise in … unmarried women’s share of births since 1970, and the fact that black women have lower marriage rates and higher rates of … unmarried births than white women. The premise is that weaker marriage-market prospects may be strong enough to explain higher …

structure—namely, individual preferences, the decision process, and the resulting intragroup transfers—from the group …

box, by assuming that these are shaped by the attitudes of parents and other role models. Attitudes include fundamental … parents to children; (2) positive assortative mating of parents, which tends to reinforce the impact of parents on the child …

by market work. The trade-off between parents’ time with their own kids and market work, and its dependence on out …-of-home day-care is analyzed in a simultaneous equation framework. Our empirical results suggest that parents’ decisions about … hours influences less the parents’ time with their children than a change in the father’s work hours does. This would imply …