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"Familienrecht."
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LGBTQ Economics
Public attitudes and policies toward LGBTQ individuals have improved substantially in recent decades. Economists are actively shaping the discourse around these policies and contributing to our understanding of the economic lives of LGBTQ individuals. In this paper, we present the most up-to-date estimates of the size, location, demographic characteristics, and family structures of LGBTQ individuals in the United States. We describe an emerging literature on the effects of legal access to same-sex marriage on family and socioeconomic outcomes. We also summarize what is known about the size, direction, and sources of wage differentials related to variation in sexual orientation and gender identity. We conclude by describing a range of open questions in LGBTQ economics.
Journal Article
Did Unilateral Divorce Laws Raise Divorce Rates? A Reconciliation and New Results
Applying the Coase Theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from consent to unilateral divorce laws will not affect divorce rates. I show that existing evidence suggesting large effects of divorce laws on divorce rates reflect a failure to explicitly model the dynamic response of divorce rates to a shock to the legal regime. When accounting for these dynamics, I find that unilateral divorce spiked following the adoption of unilateral divorce laws, but that this rise largely reversed itself within a decade. Overall, these changes in family law explain very little of the rise in divorce over the past half-century.
Journal Article
The Rise in Divorce and Cohabitation: Is There a Link?
Over the past decades, divorce and cohabitation have increased dramatically throughout Europe. Divorce has fundamentally altered the institution of marriage from a life-long union to one that may dissolve. Cohabitation allows couples to live together without undertaking the vows of marriage, but also allows couples to avoid the potentially higher costs of divorce. Thus, divorce and cohabitation seem to be intrinsically linked. We theorize how the increase in divorce may be linked to the increase in cohabitation at the macro, meso, and micro levels. Using focus group data, we explore how divorce may have changed attitudes and beliefs concerning marriage and cohabitation. We then investigate whether survey data and official statistics provide evidence consistent with a link. While exogenous factors have been important for the increase in cohabitation, we argue that the divorce revolution has been a catalyst for the cohabitation boom.
Journal Article
Career and family decisions: Cohorts born 1935-1975
Comparing the 1935 and 1975 U.S. birth cohorts, wages of married women grew twice as fast as for married men, and the wage gap between married and single women turned from negative to positive. The employment rate of married women also increased sharply, while that of other groups remained quite stable. To better understand these diverse patterns, we develop a life-cycle model incorporating individual and household decisions about education, employment, marriage/divorce, and fertility. The model provides an excellent fit to wage and employment patterns, along with changes in education, marriage/divorce rates, and fertility. We assume fixed preferences, but allow for four exogenously changing factors: (i) mother's education, health, and taxes/transfers; (ii) marriage market opportunities and divorce costs; (iii) the wage structure and job offers; (iv) contraception technology. We quantify how each factor contributed to changes across cohorts. We find that factor (iii) was the most important force driving the increase in relative wages of married women, but that all four factors are important for explaining the many socio-economic changes that occurred in the past 50 years. Finally, we use the model to simulate a shift from joint to individual taxation. In a revenue-neutral simulation, we predict this would increase employment of married women by 9% and the marriage rate by 8.1%.
Journal Article
Divorce and Housing Cost Shocks in Mexico
Economic explanations of divorce are centered on the idea that individuals make marital decisions based on potential financial benefits. This paper aligns with this perspective and extends a growing literature on the impact of housing cost shocks on divorce rates (Rainer and Smith, 2010; Farnham et al., 2011; Harknett and Schneider, 2012; Klein, 2017) by analyzing the impact of unexpected housing cost shocks on Mexico's divorce rates over the past 15 years. This research presents two novel contributions. Firstly, it focuses on Mexico, where factors such as economic informality, family networks, inequality, and migration shape individuals' marital calculations distinctly from those of more economically developed countries. Secondly, life circumstances, specifically the duration of marriage and socioeconomic status, are tested to see how they moderate individuals' reactions to unexpected housing cost changes. Utilizing newly compiled state-level data, the findings of this study underscore the importance of context. Notably, the duration of marriage emerges as a critical factor in how individuals respond to unexpected housing cost shocks. Consistent with the literature, unexpected positive housing cost shocks are found to stabilize marriages (Klein, 2017), particularly for marriages of longer duration. In contrast, unexpected negative housing cost shocks do not have a statistically significant impact on divorce rates in Mexican states. As hypothesized, couples with lower socioeconomic status demonstrate a higher propensity to divorce during unexpected positive housing cost shocks.
Journal Article
Customary norms, inheritance, and human capital
We study the role of traditional norms in land allocation and human capital investment. We exploit a policy experiment in Ghana that increased the land that children from matrilineal groups could inherit from their fathers. Boys exposed to the reform received 0.9 less years of education—an effect driven by landed households, for whom the reform was binding. We find no effect for girls, whose inheritance was de facto unaffected. These patterns suggest that before the reform matrilineal groups invested more in education than they would if unconstrained, to substitute for land inheritance, underscoring the importance of cultural norms.
Journal Article
