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...

An important paper by Chiappori et al. (2012) has proposed an elegant and parsimonious model of spousal matching over multi-dimensional characteristics. Importantly, the model suggests specific testable assumptions that allow researchers to uncover marginal rates of substitution (MRS) between...

Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...

Using data from the 1990 and 2000 Swiss Federal Censuses linked to the death records of the years 1990-1995 and 2000-2005, this paper investigates gender differences in mortality differentials by level of educational achievement and by marital status. In both periods, the differential by level...

We analyze the interaction of race with physical and socioeconomic characteristics in the U.S. marriage market, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1999 to 2009 for black, white, and inter-racial couples. We consider the anthropometric characteristics of both spouses, together with...

Arguments about the spread of gender egalitarian values through a population highlight several sources of change. First, structural arguments point to increases in the proportion of women with high education, jobs with good pay, commitment to careers outside the family, and direct interests in...

We develop a matching model on the marriage market, where individuals have preferences over the smoking status of potential mates, and over their socioeconomic quality. Spousal smoking is bad for non-smokers, but it is neutral for smokers, while individuals always prefer high socioeconomic...

We construct a matching model on the marriage market along more than one characteristic, where individuals have preferences over physical attractiveness and socioeconomic characteristics that can be summarized by a one-dimensional index combining these various attributes. We show that under a...

This article studies continued childbearing and union stability among "power couples," or dual-career couples. The determinants of these events are analysed multivariately using longitudinal data on couples from population registers in Sweden, 1991–2005. Power couples are identified using...