Since 1972, the General Social Survey has periodically asked whether people are happy with Yes, Maybe or No type answers. Here I use a net "happiness" measure, which is percentage Yes less percentage No with Maybe treated as zero. Average happiness is around +20 on this scale for all respondents...

This study investigates the determinants of the U.S. divorce rate from 1929 to 2006, with particular emphasis on explaining its surge in the mid-1960s. The main finding is that the divorce rate and female labor-force participation, or equivalently female participation in higher education, are...

In this paper, we examine the pure exchange motive for intergenerational transfers within the family. We consider a model where a selfish parent offers a financial transfer in exchange for the services of the child. Using a Stackelberg game, we study the optimal attention-money contract between...

This paper presents preliminary results of statistical analysis of the Tansŏng County household registers for 1678. We focus on identifying the social class of county residents and on identifying marriages. We use a multivariate LOGIT model to estimate probabilities of marriage, both within and...

This study proposed, first, to carry out, based on archive documents, an incursion as regards matrimonial relationships of XVIIIth century with all legal, economic and social connotations involved. The marriage contracts studied fall into a typology more closely of what was happening in the same...

This paper studies children as a risky asset associated to an investment option. Children provide utility but have a stochastic maintenance cost. We obtain several new results relative to models where children are deterministic goods, among which: i) Higher child risks diminish fertility and...

Since 1972 the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked a representative sample of US adults "[are] you very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?" Overall, the population is reasonably happy even after a mild recent decline. I focus on differences along standard socio demographic dimensions: age,...

This paper examines how marital and fertility patterns have changed along racial and educational lines for men and women. Historically, women with more education have been the least likely to marry and have children, but this marriage gap has eroded as the returns to marriage have changed....

This paper uses 23 waves of German panel data and investigates if individuals who decide to marry become permanently happier. Following the same persons over several years we show that they do, thereby challenging a number of recent longitudinal studies in psychology and economics which suggest...

In this paper we use microdata from population and housing census and the National Labor Force Survey in order to study the behavior of people in the marriage market of the Dominican Republic, with emphasis in the evolution of the patterns of educational assortative matching. We explore the...