Marriage, partnership and cohabitation

The extent to which like-with like marry is particularly important for inequality as well as for the outcomes of children that result from the union.

This research project received financial support from the Amsterdam Institute for International Development (AIID), the Economic and Social Research Council via the Network for Integrated Behavioural Sciences (award no. ES/K002201/1), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research NWO (grant no. 451-10-002), the African Study Centre Leiden, the Tinbergen Institute, and the University of East Anglia. We are grateful to the AIID and PharmAccess Foundation for sharing their survey data and supporting the research. We very much appreciate the comments from Simon Gächter, John Gathergood, and Markus Goldstein. We are very thankful for the excellent assistance in the field by Tanimola Akande, Ameen Hafsat, Marijn van der List, and the interviewer team.

Rajasthani women typically leave school early and marry young. We develop a novel discrete choice methodology using hypothetical vignettes to elicit average parental preferences over a daughter’s education and age of marriage, and subjective beliefs about the evolution of her marriage market prospects.

Marriage and physical capability at mid to later life in England and the USA

We study how parental leave benefit levels affect household labor supply, family income, and child outcomes, exploiting the Speed Premium (SP) in the Swedish leave system.

In this paper, we develop an equilibrium lifecycle model of education, marriage and labor supply and consumption in a transferable utility context.

Trajectories of obesity by spousal diabetes status in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing.

We study theoretically and empirically the demand for microcredit under different liability arrangements and risk environments.

In a new CSAE working paper, IFS researcher Dr Rachel Cassidy uses a randomised controlled trial to examine the link between intra-household bargaining and use of new contraceptive technologies in Mozambique.

We present a dynamic lifecycle model of women’s choices with respect to partnership status, labour supply and fertility when a male partner’s true tendency for abusive behaviour is unobserved.

The 1996 PRWORA reform introduced time limits on the receipt of welfare in the United States.

Despite some convergence, the gender pay gap remains large. In this study, we use BHPS-USoc data to document the evolution of the gender pay gap in the UK over the past 25 years and its association with fertility. We also investigate the potential role of various differences in career patterns between men and women and how they change with the arrival of the rst child.

Association of social support and cognitive aging modified by sex and relationship type: a prospective investigation in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing

Using recall and diary food expenditure data from Canada, we compare estimates of the household size elasticity of per capita food expenditure.

There is substantial evidence of a significant relationship between parents’ income and sons’ earnings in the UK, and that this relationship has strengthened over time. We extend this by exploring a broader measure of net family income as an outcome.

In this paper we analyze the role of expected labor and marriage market returns as determinants of the college enrollment decisions of Mexican high school graduates. Moreover, we investigate whether the (relative) weights of these factors differ by gender. We use data on individuals’ expectations regarding future labor market outcomes which we directly elicited from the youths, and two different measures of marriage market returns. First, marriage market returns are proxied by the (net-)supply of potential partners in the youths’ local marriage markets. Second, we use data which elicits youths’ beliefs about their future spouse's earnings conditional on their own education level. We find that labor market as well as marriage market returns are important determinants of the college enrollment decision. However, boys’ and girls’ preferences differ in terms of the relative role of the two determinants, in that the relative weight of labor market versus marriage market returns is larger for boys than for girls.

We study a general model of occupational choice and optimal income taxation where agents have private cost of work that differ across occupations and have both deterministic and random components. We apply our framework to study the work decisions of couples in an extensive set up and give necessary and sufficient conditions under which joint-working households should be subsidized compared to single-worker households.