In order to credibly "sell" legitimate children to their spouse, women must forego more attractive mating opportunities. This paper derives the implications of this observation for the pattern of matching in marriage markets, the dynamics of human capital accumulation, and the evolution of the...

The paper estimates how parents adjust bride-prices and land divisions to compensate their sons for differences in their schooling investments in rural China. The main estimate implies that when a son receives one yuan less in schooling investment than his brother, he will obtain 0.7 yuan more...

Since the 1970s almost all states have introduced a form of joint custody after divorce. We analyze the causal effect of these custody law reforms on the incidence of marriage and divorce. Our identification strategy exploits the different timing of reforms across states and the control group of...

We analyse new time diary data from France to explore the relationship between economic variables and husbands' share of housework time. Consistent with both bargaining and specialization models of the family, we find that the greater the husband's share of labor income, the lower his share of...

The paper explores the relationship between religiosity and fertility among Catholics in Spain, thereby answering the question whether the two parallel trends of dramatic drops in fertility and in religiosity are inter-related. It looks at current religiosity as well as exposure to religiosity...

We analyze the impact on schooling outcomes of growing up in a family headed by a single mother. Growing up in a non-intact family in Germany is associated with worse outcomes in models that do not control for possible correlations between common unobserved determinants of family structure and...

Gender differences in labor force participation are exceptionally small in Nordic countries. We investigate how couples emigrating from Denmark self-select and sort into different destinations and whether couples pursue the dual-earner model, in which both partners work, when abroad. Female...

Twin births are often used to instrument fertility to address (negative) selection of women into fertility. However recent work shows positive selection of women into twin birth. Thus, while OLS estimates will tend to be downward biased, twin-IV estimates will tend to be upward biased. This is...

This essay, an entry for the on-line Sloan Work and Family Encyclopedia, provides an overview of work-family challenges in the context of rural America. Among the issues addressed are lack of economic diversification and opportunity; deficits in human capital; the dearth of childcare,...

The body mass index (BMI) is the primary means of classifying obesity and reflects a complex set of interactions related to the institution of marriage and household characteristics. There is an inverse relationship between BMI and height, and height reflects the cumulative price of net...