This project is the result of a search on labour market participation of Swiss married women. We want to analyze why most of these women are part of the labor force. The result is that most of the examined women are not part of the Swiss labor force because they have an high no-labor income,...

Cohabitation among single women has risen over many years. Aside from the well-known increase in premarital cohabitation, state welfare policies may encourage low-income women to coreside with other adults. Using the 1990 Census, I test for evidence that state welfare policies - including...

In 1957 the state of Mississippi amended its marriage law. Changes included raising the minimum age for men and women, parental consent requirements, compulsory blood tests and proof of age. As a result, the number of marriages performed in Mississippi fell by more than 60 percent in 2 years....

An aspect of the Covid-19 pandemic that merits attention is its effects on marriage and childbirth. Although the direct fertility effects of peo- ple getting the virus may be minor, the impact of delayed marriages due to the first preventive lockdown, such as that imposed in Pakistan from March...

Identifying the factors that influence labor force participation could elucidate how individuals arrive at their labor supply decisions, whose understanding is, in turn, of crucial importance in analyzing how the supply side of the labor market functions. This paper investigates the effect of...

We develop a rational choice model of sexual exchange that unifies marriage and paid sex, explaining two key facts: the gendered segregation of sex markets and the decline in sexual activity and fertility. Individuals choose whether to engage in paid or unpaid sex based on income, human capital,...

Using data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), we construct two measures of the longevity of older wives and husbands. For definiteness, we focus on couples in which the wife was 60 and the husband 62 in 1988. Our first measure utilizes a 4 x 4 "longevity matrix" in which the bins...

We propose a unified economic model of sexual exchanges that treats both unpaid and paid sex as outcomes of individual time allocation decisions. Departing from existing literature that separates sex into marital relations or specialized markets, the model incorporates relational skills, gender...

Childcare arrangements are key in women's ability to juggle motherhood and working outside the home. As such, the study of the access to childcare and its use is of great policy relevance. We focus on a particular kind of informal childcare, the one provided by grandparents. Empirically,...

Recent literature shows the puzzling result of a positive and significant cross-country correlation between the total fertility rate and the female labour force participation rate across Western European countries. The present paper shows that this cross-country correlation becomes negative and...