The leading evidence against the unitary household models is that "who gets what" is significantly dependent upon "who earns how much." However, it is difficult to pin down the causal effect of relative earnings on intra-household resource allocation because households jointly decide both labor...

Whether siblings of specific birth order perform differently has been a longstanding open empirical question. We use the family tree structure of the PSID to examine two claims found in the literature: whether being early in the birth order implies a distinct educational advantage, and whether...

We use unique retrospective family background data from the 2003 British Household Panel Survey to explore the degree to which family size and birth order affect a child's subsequent educational attainment. Theory suggests a trade off between child quantity and 'quality'. Family size might...

This paper studies the effects of local marriage markets on South African women’s marital decisions. The analysis is motivated by the low proportion of married among African mothers since 48% are never married. This means that the children of all these never married mothers have no access to...

In this paper we shall examine homeownership trends over the past 3 to 4 decades and discuss differences related to the homeownership gap for women and men, with a focus on most recent trends. We shall compare differences in the US to those in countries with different institutional structures...

There is a growing trend of buying homes among the single population in the U.S. This trend has been referred to as "Going Solo" and is particularly evident among women who are the focus of our study. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that homeownership probabilities can be affected by...

We study the consequences of mothers' and fathers' job loss for parents, families, and children. Rich Swedish register data allow us to identify plant closures and account for non-random selection of workers to closing plants by using propensity score matching and controlling for...

A rich literature in economics and the social sciences has shown that improvements in women's socio-economic status (SES) can also improve the well-being of their children. This chapter identifies several channels for this effect, drawing on both theoretical and empirical work in economics....

This paper shows how a shorter fecundity horizon for females (a biological constraint) leads to age and educational disparities between husbands and wives. Empirical support is based on data from a natural experiment commencing before and ending after China's 1980 one-child law. The results...