From an economic perspective, marriage and long-term partnership can be seen as a risk-pooling device. This informal insurance contract is, however, not fully enforceable. Each partner is free to leave when his or her support is needed in case of an adverse life event. An adverse health shock is...

We study the effect of a policy change that exogenously shifted bargaining power from mothers to fathers on intimate partner violence. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment based on a series of reforms in Spain that shifted the custody decision from being unilaterally determined by the mother to...

Childcare and women's employment decisions are intimately linked. I develop a dynamic model designed to analyse the effects of childcare subsidies on labour supply, fertility, marriage, and childcare decisions in a collective setting. In the model, children are a household good, produced by both...

Increasing women's empowerment is a key objective of many development programs, both as a principal goal and as a path to economic development. We propose and test a novel economic intervention that relies on intra-household transfers of productive assets to increase womenââ'¬â"¢s...

Do individuals marry and divorce for economic reasons? Can we measure the economic attractiveness of a person's marriage market? We answer these questions using a structural model of consumer-producer households that is applied to rich data from Malawi. Using revealed preference conditions for a...

We analyse the marriage decisions of men and women in rural India, focusing on the added attractiveness of sanitation within the marital living arrangement. We demonstrate that the Government's Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) changed marriage market outcomes for both men and women. To decompose...

This paper provides insights into the gains of forming a couple by estimating how much of the difference in housework between single and married individuals is causal and how much is due to selection. Permanent unobserved heterogeneity explains about half of the observed differences in housework...

This paper estimates the effect of female economic empowerment on domestic violence. I use individual level data from high-quality Swedish administrative registers on women's earnings and hospital visits relating to assault. With this third-party reported violence measure, I overcome the issue...

Many countries have enacted legislation over the past few decades making divorce easier. Some countries have legalized divorce where it had previously been banned, and many have eased the conditions required for a divorce, such as allowing unilateral divorce (both spouses do not have to agree on...

We study how weather shocks interact with cultural norms biased against women to affect female poverty within the household. Using expenditure on female assignable clothing per adult woman as a measure of women's intra-household access to consumption, we document that spending on female...