The prevalence and stability of marriage has declined in the United States as the economic lives of men and women have … childbearing between socioeconomic groups raise concerns about child wellbeing in poor families and future inequality. This paper …

In this paper we discuss the importance of families for understanding economic inequality. Family structure can in … principle be an amplifier or mitigator of economic inequality. We describe three channels on how families shape economic … inequality. First, how people match to form families matters for inequality across families. Second, parental investments in …

In this paper we discuss the importance of families for understanding economic inequality. Family structure can in … principle be an amplifier or mitigator of economic inequality. We describe three channels on how families shape economic … inequality. First, how people match to form families matters for inequality across families. Second, parental investments in …

any significant advantage of legal marriage among young mothers. …

well as members of adjacent generations linked by marriage (in-laws) are modeled as self-interested agents offering or … and happiness of in-family caregivers could be enriched by taking account of material in-marriage transfers that the … their counterparts in the South. Their families are also likely to pay lower dowries at the time of marriage, which is …

Marriage used to be practically universal, but now persists as an institution for only some groups, while others choose … non-marital fertility. This paper posits that if one role of marriage is to insure one partner's investment in children … enforcement outside of marriage have reduced the relative strength of the marital contract, the division of assets, particularly …

to custody. Subsequent marriage-neutral laws extended the rights to unmarried fathers. We develop a theoretical model of … the effect of custody regime on marriage and test the model's predictions using a unique data set that merges custody law … data with data from the Current Population Survey and Vital Statistics. We find that, under marriage non-neutrality, the …