This paper bridges two distinct areas of inquiry: the economic theory of the family and behavioral research on time-inconsistent preferences. In our model, hyperbolic discounting couples engage in household production activities, thereby accumulating family-specific capital over time. At any...

This paper studies a married couple s dynamic investment and consumption choices under the assumption that the couple cannot commit across time not to renegotiate their decisions. The inefficiencies that can arise are characterized. Efficiency properties of different divorce asset-division...

The formation of economic preferences in childhood and adolescence has long-term consequences for life-time outcomes. We study in an experiment with 525 teenagers how both birth order and siblings' sex composition affect risk, time and social preferences. We find that second born children are...

We study marital sorting on academic qualifications and latent ability in an equilibrium marriage market model using the 1972 UK Raising of the School-Leaving Age (RoSLA) legislation as a natural experiment that induced a sudden, large shift in the distribution of academic qualifications in...

This paper examines if the effect of parental labor market shocks on child development depends on the age of the child at the time of the shock. To address this question, we leverage rich Norwegian population-wide register data and exploit mass layoffs and establishment closures as a source of...

Changing distributions of male and female types affect the measurement of education-based marriage market sorting. We develop a weighting strategy that minimizes the distortion of sorting measures due to changing type distributions. The optimal weights reflect that female type distributions have...

We investigate how job displacement affects whom men marry and study implications for marriage market matching theory. Leveraging quasi-experimental variation from Danish establishment closures, we show that job displacement leads men to break up if matched with low-earning women and to re-match...

Experimental evidence on a range of interventions in developing countries is accumulating rapidly. Is it possible to extrapolate from an experimental evidence base to other locations of policy interest (from "reference" to "target" sites)? And which factors determine the accuracy of such an...

We study whether and how parents interfere paternalistically in their children's intertemporal decision-making. Based on experiments with over 2,000 members of 610 families, we find that parents anticipate their children's present bias and aim to mitigate it. Using a novel method to measure...

Margaret Sanger established the first birth control clinic in New York in 1916. From the mid-1920s, "Sanger clinics" spread over the entire U.S. Combining newly digitized data on the roll-out of these clinics, full-count Census data, and administrative vital statistics, we find that birth...