This paper formulates a simple model of female labor force decisions which embeds an in-work benefit reform and explicitly allows for announcement and implementation effects. We explore several mechanisms through which women can respond to the announcement of a reform that increases in-work...

The level of trust inherent in a society is important for a wide range of microeconomic and macroeconomic outcomes. This paper investigates how individuals' attitudes toward social and institutional trust are shaped by the political regime in which they live. The German reunification is a unique...

In most industrialized countries, more people than ever are having to cope with the burden of caring for elderly parents. This paper formulates a model to explain how parental care responsibilities and family structure interact in affecting children's mobility characteristics. A key insight we...

This paper criticizes the view that discrimination limits the disadvantaged sex to undertaking housework and thus ensures that gains from specialization at the household level are not wasted. Our framework gives attention to causal links between labor market discrimination and the strategic...

When a marriage dissolves, a couple usually divides all marital assets according to the division rule imposed upon them by the state. The present paper uses incomplete contract theory to study the interplay between the state�s division rule and a married couple�s investment in...

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 recognised, with one-third of parents with wills planning to divide their estates unequally among...

Using large longitudinal survey data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, this paper estimates the effec of maternal time inputs on early child development. We find that maternal time is a quantitatively important determinant of skill formation and that its effect declines with child age. There...

We estimate the effect of binge drinking on accident and emergency attendances, road accidents, arrests and the number of police officers on duty using a variety of unique data from Britain and a two-sample minimum distance estimation procedure. Our estimates, which reveal sizeable effects of...

Much empirical evidence shows that female and male partners look alike along a variety of attributes. It is however unclear how this positive sorting comes about, because marriage is an equilibrium outcome arising from a process that entails searching, meeting and choosing one another. This...

This paper presents an overlapping generations model to explain why humans live in families rather than in other pair groupings. Since most non-human species are not familial, something special must be behind the family. It is shown that the two necessary features that explain the origin of the...