We present a theory of the emergence of laws restricting child labor or imposing mandatory education that is consistent with the fact that poor parents tend to oppose such laws. We find that if altruistic parents are unable to commit to educating their children, child-labor laws can increase the...

Are macro-economists mistaken in ignoring bargaining between spouses? The stationarity, since the mid 1970s, of married-menís average weekly hours of paid labor suggests that the inclusion of bargaining between spouses is essential for understanding the labor supply trends of married women....

Is variation by motorist race in the success rate of searches informative about racial bias if police are motivated by crime minimisation rather than success-rate maximisation? We show that the basic idea of extracting information from 'hit rates' may still be valid, provided one can verify some...

State-wide reports on police traffic stops and searches summarize very large populations, making them potentially powerful tools for identifying racial bias, particularly when statistics on search outcomes are included. But when the reported statistics conflate searches involving different...

Low sex ratios are often equated with unfavorable marriage prospects for women, but in France after World War 1, the marriage probability of single females rose 50%, despite a massive drop in the male/female ratio. We conjecture that the war-time birth-rate bust induced an abnormal postwar...

We develop a simple competitive equilibrium model of the marriage market with single mothers and step-families. We then explore the role of trends in relative wages and other observed changes, such as women's wages and contraception technology, in accounting for the evolution of the distribution...

The levels of wealth differ significantly among people who are approaching their retirement both by current marital status as well as by marital histories. We develop an equilibrium model of marriage and divorce and household savings, in which the interplay between endogenous formation and...

We develop a new directed-search model of fertility and marriage, and apply it to two empirical problems: the rise in unmarried women’s share of births since 1970, and the fact that black women have lower marriage rates and higher rates of unmarried births than white women. The premise is that...