This study critically reviews quantitative methods that have been employed and evidence that has been gathered to assess the benefits of marriage and consequences of other family structures. The study begins by describing theoretical models of the determinants of different well-being outcomes...

It is well known that children reared in non-intact families on average have less favorable educational outcomes than children reared in two-parent families. Evidence from the United States and Sweden indicates that living in a non-intact family is correlated with lower educational attainment....

This paper examines how marital and fertility patterns have changed along racial and educational lines for men and women. Historically, women with more education have been the least likely to marry and have children, but this marriage gap has eroded as the returns to marriage have changed....

We investigate the effect of immigrants' marriage behavior on dropout from education. To identify the causal effect, we exploit a recent Danish policy reform which generated exogenous variation in marriage behavior by a complete abolishment of spouse import for immigrants below 24 years of age....

This paper examines whether parental marriage confers educational advantages to children relative to cohabitation. We exploit a dramatic marriage boom in Sweden in late 1989 created by a reform of the Widow's Pension System that raised the attractiveness of marriage compared to cohabitation to...

This paper focuses on trends and patterns in educational homogamy over time. A number of previous studies have documented a fairly high level of homogamy in Norway. Most of these studies, however, have been local and ethnographic, or based on national data measuring homogamy within a limited...