This paper investigates the likelihood of an unpartnered birth as a function of laws regulating the division of joint property in case of divorce. Based on a rational choice model of marriage and assuming that on average women earn less than men, we predict that women are less likely to have an...

Little is known about why cohabiting couples have fewer children than married couples. We explore the factors that explain the difference in fertility between these two groups using a switching regression analysis, which enables us to quantify the contribution of different factors through a...

Low female schooling attainment, early marriage and low age at first birth are major policy concerns in developing countries. This paper jointly estimated the determinants of educational attainment, marriage age and age of first birth among females 12 to 25 years of age in Madagascar, explicitly...

In a separate-property jurisdiction, marriage may induce domestic cooperation, and enhance efficiency in the production of children, because it may lend credibility to the prospective main earner's promise to compensate the main childcarer when the children will no longer be economically...

Policies to promote marriage are controversial, and it is unclear whether they are successful. To analyze such policies, it is essential to distinguish between a marriage that is created by a marriage-promoting policy (marginal marriage) and a marriage that would have been formed even in the...

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...

Future change in partnerships and fertility are not easy to forecast. However, the fertility of the youngest cohorts will depend on those behaviours. The way young people start a partnership has changed a lot during the past three decades. Many couples are now unmarried, union disruptions and...

A microsimulation of demographic behaviours using the 1997 Insee Survey about Young People and Job Histories (Robert-Bobée 2001) leads to the following results: if demographic behaviours remain the same as the ones observed in 1995-1996, completed fertility may decrease to less than 2 children...

This paper presents a new modelling of demographic events in the microsimulation model Destinie: union formations, union disruptions and births. The previous modelling was based on the 1997 Insee Survey on Young People and Job Histories, whose sample was of limited size (20 000 persons aged 19...

It is likely that the extent of progression in the educational system a effects whether or not one decides to start a family at a given point in time. We estimate the effect of enrolling in college in the year of application on later family formation decisions such as the probability of being a...