Fertility in the United States rose from a low of 2.27 children for women born in 1908 to a peak of 3.21 children for women born in 1932. It dropped to a new low of 1.74 children for women born in 1949, before stabilizing for subsequent cohorts. We propose a novel explanation for this...

Divorce rates in the U.S. have been falling for the past decade, while female labor force participation rates have been rising. Aggregate data for US states show that in 2000, divorce rates across states are negatively correlated with female labor force participation rates, even after...

Until the early decades of the 20th century, women spent more than 60% of their prime- age years either pregnant or nursing. Since then, improved medical knowledge and obstetric practices reduced the time cost associated with women?s reproductive role. The introduction of infant formula also...

This article shows that state control of some industries may have contributed to the increase in European unemployment from the 1970s to the early 1990s. We develop a simple two-sector model, one privately run and one publicly run, that has risk-averse workers directing their search into one of...

Over the past several decades, married women?s hours of market work increased signi?cantly in the US. I argue that changes in behavior by married women with children account for much of this change. In particular, the pattern of married women?s work hours has changed substantially over the...

This paper explores the hypothesis that gender wage differentials arise from the interaction between the intra-household allocation of labor and the contractual relation between firms and workers in the presence of private information on workers’ labor market attachment. In our model,...

We study US divorce rates, which despite the continuing rise in female labor force participation (FLFP), have been falling since the mid-1980s, reversing a two-decade trend. A cross section of U.S. states for the year 2000 displays a negative relationship between the divorce rate and FLFP. We...

This paper explores the hypothesis that gender wage differentials arise from the interaction between the intra-household allocation of labor and the contractual relation between firms and workers in the presence of private information on workers’ labor market attachment. In our model, if firms...