Positive assortative matching in terms of traits like ethnicity, race and personality has been prevalent in marital formation. One possible explanation for this is that husbands and wives in endogamous marriages have complementary skills and tastes that increase marital surplus. This paper aims...

The unilateral divorce reform in the 1970's has been accompanied by a secular decline in marriage. This paper investigates how the homemaking provision in divorce law that gives recognition to homemakers' contribution during marriage in divorce property division affects marital formation and...

I examine John Maynard Keynes’ struggle with the doctrine of the classical forced saving during the period 1924-1936 from when he worked on A Treatise on Money to the completion of his General Theory. The forced saving notion has been developed as a key mechanism of how monetary expansion...

This paper describes the relationship between a youth’s residence at age sixteen and the likelihood he eventually enlists in the military. Data from the NLSY97 show that white youths raised in two parent families are less likely to enlist than those raised in other family structures. Black...

OLS estimates of partner choice equations are biased when the unobservables determining partner choice are correlated with the unobservables determining the likelihood of marriage. This paper presents an example. A theoretical model generates a two-equation empirical model in which...

In this study we use data from rural India to examine the impact of the birth of a boy relative to the birth of a girl (i.e., the "gender shock") on the savings, consumption and income of rural Indian households. We find that the gender shock reduces savings for medium and large farm households,...

Under the tender years doctrine in effect until the 1970's, custody was virtually always awarded to the mother upon divorce. Gender-neutral custody laws introduced beginning in the 1970's provided married fathers, in principle, equal rights to custody. Subsequent marriage-neutral laws extended...