When do we know that the rule of law has failed or been corrupted? Who can we point to as corrupting legal order or the rule of law when most of the parties appear to be one-shotters? One shot players lack the ability to quickly master and more importantly conquer sophisticated legal labyrinths...

This paper shows that globalization has far-reaching implications for the economy's fertility rate and family structure because it influences work-life balance. Employing population register data on all births, marriages, and divorces together with employer-employee linked data for Denmark, we...

I discuss recent books offering differing explanations for persistent U.S. poverty. Desmond (2023) argues that aid to low-income Americans is captured by more powerful market actors. I contextualize this concern as about incidence and consider both policies for changing incidence (by changing...

This paper examines the effect of the introduction of a 1982 maternity benefit program on childbearing, employment and marital stability in the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The program included one year of partially paid leave and a small cash payment at birth. We...

This essay is an updated, expanded and revised version of the second half of Divorce Rates, Marriage Rates, and the Problematic Persistence of Traditional Marital Roles, published in 2000 and also available on SSRN. It draws on demographic studies and comparative research to examine the...

We document the effect of unemployment insurance generosity on divorce and fertility using an identification strategy that leverages state-level changes in maximum benefits over time and comparisons across workers who have been laid off and those that have not been laid off. The results indicate...

This paper provides estimates of the effects of divorce on the lifetime incomes of mothers. This is an issue that is not well explored in most countries, and has been essentially untouched empirically in the Australian context. The paper extends the existing literature, which has generally...

The body mass index (BMI) is the primary means of classifying obesity and reflects a complex set of interactions related to the institution of marriage and household characteristics. There is an inverse relationship between BMI and height, and height reflects the cumulative price of net...

We study empirically whether there is scope for parents to shape the economicpreferences and attitudes of their children through purposeful investments. Weexploit information on the risk and trust attitudes of parents and their children, as well as rich information about parental efforts in the...

Economists increasingly accept that social norms have powerful effects on human behavior and outcomes. In recent history, one norm widely adhered to in most developed nations has been for men to be the primary breadwinner within mixed-gender households. As women have entered the labor market in...