American divorce rates rose from the 1950s to the 1970s, peaked around 1980, and have fallen ever since. The mean age at marriage also substantially increased after 1970. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I explore...

The safety net provided by the African extended family has traditionally been the basis for the assertion that “there is no such thing as an orphan in Africa” (Foster 2000). The assumption is that even families lacking sufficient resources to properly care for existing members are...

This chapter traces the evolution of the study of gender in the labor market, focusing on how academic thinking on this topic has evolved alongside real world developments in gender inequality from the 1980s to the present. We present a simple model of female labor supply to illustrate how...

Women earn less than men, and that is especially true of mothers relative to fathers. Much of the widening occurs after family formation when mothers reduce their hours of work. But what happens when the kids grow up? To answer that question, we estimate three earning gaps: the "motherhood...

Drawing on original fieldwork in the slums of Ndola in Northern Zambia we isolate those features of a child's nuclear and extended family that put him most at risk of ending up on the streets. We find that older, male children and particularly orphaned children are more likely to wind up on the...