There is a large empirical literature that demonstrates the importance of economic factors in the decision to marry. Taxes, however, have been largely overlooked as a determinant of marriage, even though the tax system in the United States is not marriage-neutral; that is, when two individuals...

This paper presents an empirical test of two contrasting models of contracting in marital relationships. The major distinction between the two models concerns the role of information. The first model assumes that ex post information about the value of opportunities outside the relationship is...

This paper characterizes the patterns of intergenerational mobility in the United States using data for matched parent/child pairs from the National Longitudinal Surveys. In general, what is found is far from the extremes of either perfect mobility or perfect immobility. Parents' log income...

This paper studies the linkage between the expected financial consequences of divorce and the decision to become divorced. A standard choice-theoretic model predicts that the probability of divorce will be negatively related to the financial opportunity cost of divorce. This opportunity cost is...

When external effects are important, markets will be inefficient, and economists have considered several broad classes of economic instruments to correct these inefficiencies. However, the standard economic analysis has tended to neglect important distinctions and interactions between the...