We document key facts about marriage and divorce, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century. Marriage rates have also been falling,...

Zoning regulations that include a maximum housing density sometimes require that houses be quot;clusteredquot; in one section of a subdivision and the rest of the land be left as a common green space. We examine house sales in one county on the fringe of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area...

How do people and communities respond to catastrophes? A natural disaster is a type of external, quasi-random and unexpected catastrophic shock that generates psychological, social and economic implications. Using detailed county level administrative data of charitable contributions, crime and...

Consumer bankruptcy laws, which vary across states and over time, permit debtors to keep assets below a statutory exemption while debts are forgiven. High exemptions distort household portfolio decisions and tempt households to default on debts; but they also provide a crude form of consumption...

We document key facts about marriage and divorce, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century. Marriage rates have also been falling,...

We propose a new approach to analyze economic shocks. Our new procedure identifies economic shocks as exogenous shifts in a function; hence, we call them "functional shocks." We show how to identify such shocks and how to trace their effects in the economy via VARs using "VARs with functional...

We study the effect of the size of the welfare state on family outcomes in OECD member countries. Exploiting exogenous variation in public social spending, due to varying degrees of political fractionalization (i.e. the number of relevant parties involved in the legislative process), we show...

We study the effect of the size of the welfare state on family outcomes in OECD member countries. Exploiting exogenous variation in public social spending, due to varying degrees of political fractionalization (i.e. the number of relevant parties involved in the legislative process), we show...

How do joint-household behavior and taxation impact the formal-informal labor market composition in developing countries? Using data from the Brazilian Monthly Employment Survey and the formalization policy SuperSimples (2007), under a matching difference-in-differences approach, we show that...

In this paper we compare mothers’ preferred leave, anticipated leave, and realised leave toshed light on how well different types of mothers are able to predict the parental leave theywill take, and the factors that drive them to deviate from their plans. We use data from theGrowing Up in New...