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...

In recent years, legislatures have imposed several types of guidelines restricting court discretion. Guidelines designed around average cases, however, can lead to problems for nonaverage situations. In the context of divorce, poorly designed child support guidelines may create an opportunity...

In this paper we study the importance of marriage for interstate risk sharing. We find that US states in which married couples account for a higher share of the population are less exposed to state-specific output shocks. Thus, marriages do not just improve the allocation of risk at the...