Divorce law changes made in the 1970s affected marital formation, dissolution, and bargaining within marriage. By altering the terms of the marital contract these legal changes impacted the incentives for women to enter and remain in the labor force. Whereas earlier work had suggested that the...

Social norms can mitigate the effectiveness of formal institutions, in particular the way legal reforms may affect women's autonomy. We examine this question in the context of ethnic variation in traditional post-marital cohabitation, i.e. matrilocality versus patrilocality. We use...

Economists increasingly connect legal changes to behavioral responses that many family-law experts fail to see. Incentives matter in families, which respond to changes in legal regulation. Changing incentive structures linked to family law have largely affected marriage, cohabitation and...

Between 2008 and 2017, Mexican states implemented no-fault unilateral divorce. Using an event-study design, we exploit state-level variation in the timing of the reforms to investigate the consequences of more liberalized divorce laws. Our results suggest that no-fault divorce dramatically in-...

This chapter demonstrates that the extent of recent reform to Irish family law and the prospects for more in the immediate future are little short of remarkable. It begins with an account of the recognition of horizontal relationships between opposite-sex and same-sex couples who wish to...

Administrative divorce is an optional divorce procedure which allows couples to bypass the court system and dissolve their marriages in a streamlined, uncontested process. The lack of court involvement renders the administrative divorce faster and less expensive than the conventional divorce. In...

If participation in the labor market helps to secure women's outside options in the case of divorce/separation, an increase in the perceived risk of marital dissolution may accelerate the increase in female labor supply. This simple prediction has been tested in the literature using time and/or...

The Anglo-Saxon literature regarding the positive relation between 'making divorce easier' and divorce rates has mainly focused on the introduction of no-fault and unilateral divorce grounds. This approach was mimicked to analyse the impact of more lenient divorce legislation in Europe. Using...

This paper examines the effect of economic incentives generated by U.S. divorce and custody law on a range of child health and human capital measures. State laws vary widely in the treatment of child support under joint custody. While some states require no child support in joint custody cases,...

The essay deals with the hypothesis of artificial intelligence that, by increasing its capabilities to an unprecedented scale, could be eventually considered “adult”: a gradual and evolutionary solution is therefore hypothesized, following the model already used for human minors in the main...