Parental divorce is a prevalent childhood event. A long literature attempts to estimate the impact of family dissolution on children's human capital formation. Previous studies applying sibling fixed effects estimators find that the timing of divorce has no direct effects on children's outcomes...

The earned income tax credit (EITC) has become the largest cash transfer program in the United States, distributing nearly $60 billion dollars in credits in 2010. Several studies have evaluated the impact of the EITC on various aspects of behavioral responses. Using the Survey of Income and...

We document key facts about marriage and divorce, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century. Marriage rates have also been falling,...

We document key facts about marriage and divorce, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century. Marriage rates have also been falling,...

Over the past thirty years changes in divorce law have significantly increased access to divorce. The different timing of divorce law reform across states provides a useful quasi-experiment with which to examine the effects of this change. We analyze state panel data to estimate changes in...

A sizable share of marriages in several Asian and African countries are initiated by the man abducting the woman he wishes to wed. In this paper, we use quantitative and qualitative methods to characterize the practice of abduction marriage in Ethiopia. We first present the results from in-depth...

We study the effect of the size of the welfare state on family outcomes in OECD member countries. Exploiting exogenous variation in public social spending, due to varying degrees of political fractionalization (i.e. the number of relevant parties involved in the legislative process), we show...

We study the effect of the size of the welfare state on family outcomes in OECD member countries. Exploiting exogenous variation in public social spending, due to varying degrees of political fractionalization (i.e. the number of relevant parties involved in the legislative process), we show...

This paper is focused on couple households where the wife is the main earner. The economic literature on this subject is particularly scant. According to our estimates, the wife was the main earner in one of every six couple households in France in 2002, including wife-sole-earner households....

We empirically analyze the labor supply choices of married men and women according to their body size (BMI), using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics on anthropometric characteristics of both spouses, and unmarried men and women as comparison group. Heavier husbands are found to work...