This paper investigates the links between the socio-economic position of parents and the socio-economic position of their offspring and, through the marriage market, the socioeconomic position of their offspring?s parents-in-law. Using the Goldthorpe-Hope score of occupational prestige as a...

This paper considers the potential impact of welfare benefits on the partnership status of women in the UK. Using recent policy reforms to identify the response rate I find that a £100/week welfare benefit "partnership penalty" reduces the probability of a woman having a partner by seven...

Using a unique data source on marital status, partnership and sexual orientation of academics and administrators at British universities, we estimate the impact of personal relationships upon earnings for men and women. While university data cover a relatively homogeneous group of workers, the...

Societies socialize children about many things, including sex. Socialization is costly. It uses scarce resources, such as time and effort. Parents weigh the marginal gains from socialization against its costs. Those at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale indoctrinate their daughters less...

Does more schooling causes a delay in marriage? Using a nationwide change in the compulsory schooling law in the UK as a source of exogenous variation in education, this paper estimates the causal effect of schooling on age at first marriage. The 1947 reform, which uniquely affected about a half...

This paper uses a particular school exit rule previously in effect in England and Wales that allowed students born within the first five months of the academic year to leave school one term earlier than those born later in the year. Focusing on women, we show that those who were required to stay...

Both in the UK and in the US, we observe puzzling gender asymmetries in the propensity to outmarry: Black men are more likely to have white spouses than Black women, but the opposite is true for Chinese: Chinese men are half less likely to be married to a White person than Chinese women. We...

This study uses the first twelve waves of the British Household Panel Survey covering the period 1991-2002 to investigate the extent of constraints on desired hours of work within jobs and the degree of flexibility of the labour market for a sample of women. Our main findings are as follows....

This paper studies the determinants of partnership dissolution and focuses on the role of child support. We exploit the variation in child support liabilities driven by an important UK policy reform to separately identify the effects of children from the effect of child support liability. We...

The consumption literature uses adult equivalence scales to measure individual level inequality. This practice imposes the assumption that there is no within household inequality. In this paper, we show that ignoring consumption inequality within households produces misleading estimates of...