Families play an important role in providing insurance against adverse shocks, but little is known about how shocks affect the family structure itself. We study the impact of a labor market shock on divorce and intra-household allocation of resources, exploiting a naturalexperimental earthquake...

How marriage interacts with men's earnings is an important public policy issue, given debates over programs to directly encourage healthy marriages. This paper generates new findings about the earnings-marriage relationship by estimating the linkages between marriage, work commitment, and wage...

There is longstanding evidence that children raised by single parents are more likely to perform poorly in school and partake in 'deviant' behaviors such as smoking, sex, substance use and crime at young ages. However, as of yet there is not widespread evidence or agreement as to whether or not...

An early age at first marriage is known to be associated with a high risk of divorce. Yet it has been suggested that beyond a certain point, the relationship between age at marriage and marital instability may become positive, because as unmarried women begin to hear their biological clock tick,...

It has long since been established that children raised by single parents are more likely to become sexually active, commit illegal acts, and use illegal drugs at young ages. What has not been determined is whether or not there is a causal effect associated with the disintegration of the family....

We estimate the effect of plant closure on divorce using a panel data set comprising more than 80,000 married couples in Norway. Plant closure substantially increases the likelihood of marital dissolution of workers in affected plants. The marriages of husbands originally employed in plants that...

This paper uses Danish register-based data for the population of children born in 1990-1997 to investigate the effects on parents of having a child with attention-deficit/hyperactivity-disorder (ADHD). Ten years after birth, parents of children diagnosed with ADHD have a 75% higher probability...

This paper examines a wide variety of forms, and full histories, of family structure to test existing theories of family influences and identify needs for new theories. The focus is on links between childhood family structure and both completed schooling and risk of a nonmarital birth. Using a...

We estimate the effect of plant closure on divorce using a panel data set comprising more than 80,000 married couples in Norway. Plant closure substantially increases the likelihood of marital dissolution of workers in affected plants. The marriages of husbands originally employed in plants that...