We need to go beyond the accepted notions relating to the role of women in the economy and society, especially in terms of what is recognized in mainstream theory and policy as "work" done by women. Thus, the traditional gender roles, with the man as the breadwinner and the woman in the role of...

After almost a century-long pattern of rising marital instability, divorce rates leveled off in 1980 and have been declining ever since. The timing of deceleration and decline in the rates of marital disruption interestingly coincides with a period of substantial growth in wage inequality. This...

Policy changes in the United States in the 1990s resulted in sizable increases in employment rates of single mothers. We show that this increase led to a large and abrupt increase in work experience for single mothers with young children. We then examine the economic return to this increase in...

This paper estimates the economic and non-economic returns to volunteering for prime-aged women. A woman's decision to engage in unpaid work, and to marry and have children, is formulated as a forward-looking discrete choice dynamic programming problem. Simulated maximum likelihood estimates of...

In 30% of young American couples the wife is more educated than the husband. Those women are characterized by a substantially higher employment (all else equal), which in turn amplifies income inequality across couples. Using NLSY79, we formulate and structurally estimate a dynamic life-cycle...

We need to go beyond the accepted notions relating to the role of women in the economy and society, especially in terms of what is recognized in mainstream theory and policy as “work” done by women. Thus, the traditional gender roles, with the man as the breadwinner and the woman in the role...

After almost a century-long pattern of rising marital instability, divorce rates leveled off in 1980 and have been declining ever since. The timing of deceleration and decline in the rates of marital disruption interestingly coincides with a period of substantial growth in wage inequality. This...

This paper estimates the economic and non-economic returns to volunteering for prime-aged women. A woman's decision to engage in unpaid work, and to marry and have children, is formulated as a forward-looking discrete choice dynamic programming problem. Simulated maximum likelihood estimates of...

This paper explores the effects of a spouse's personality on earnings. We build on the growing literature spanning economics and psychology that investigates how personality traits affect one's own individual earnings. In particular, several of the big five personality characteristics...

We show that parts of the unexplained wage gap in standard Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions result from the neglect of the role played by the family for individual wages. We present a simple model of dual-earner households facing a trade-off regarding whose career to promote and show analytically...