We analyse 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...

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we make two contributions to the literature on end-of-life transfers. First, we show that unequal bequests are much more common than generally recognized, with one-third of parents with wills planning to divide their estates unequally among...

We empirically study the determinants of intra-household decision power with respect to economic and financial choices using a suitable direct measure provided in the 1989-2010 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth. Focusing on a sample of couples, we evaluate the effect of each...

During the 1970s the US underwent an important change in its divorce laws, switching from mutual consent to a unilateral divorce regime. Who benefited and who lost from this change? To answer this question we develop a dynamic life-cycle model in which agents make consumption, saving, labor...

The current study examines individuals who were raised in a certain religion and at some stage of their life left it. Currently, they define their religious affiliation as ‘no religion’. A battery of explanatory variables (country-specific ones, personal attributes and marriage variables)...

Our paper is concerned with the impact of tax reductions on the demand for services in the home. For that purpose, we consider the particular case of the French legislation voted in 1991. This law allows households employing paid help in the home to deduct from their income tax 50% of the sums...

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...

We present identification and estimation results for the 'collective' model of labour supply in which there are discrete choices, censoring of hours and non-participation in employment. We derive the collective restrictions on labour supply functions and contrast them with restrictions implied...

Two of the earliest inventions of a human capital-intensive technology were for the production of personal internal goods that enabled humans to derive more pleasure out of leisure, namely dance and music. I model the incentives to invent hobbies and to acquire hobby skills, and its implications...

Consider a model with two types of jobs. The profitability of promoting a worker to a fast-track job depends not only on his or her observable talent, but also on incontractible effort. We investigate whether self-fulfilling expectations may lead to women meeting tougher promotion standards than...