Search Results
Working Paper
Marriage Market Sorting in the U.S.
We examine shifts in the U.S. marriage market, assessing how online dating, demographic changes, and evolving societal norms influence mate choice and broader sorting trends. Using a targeted search model, we analyze mate selection based on factors such as education, age, race, income, and skill. Intriguingly, despite the rise of online dating, preferences, mate choice, and overall sorting patterns showed negligible change from 2008 to 2021. However, a longer historical view from 1960 to 2020 reveals a trend toward preferences for similarity, particularly concerning income, education, and ...
Working Paper
Cohabitation, Child Development, and College Costs
US college-educated couples with children marry at higher rates than those without a college degree. We argue that marriage, which entails lower separation risk and more equitable asset division if separation occurs, provides insurance to the lower-earning spouse, facilitating child investment. Investing in children is more valuable for college-educated couples, who are more likely to send their children to college. Using an OLG model of marriage, cohabitation, wealth accumulation, and educational investments where college is costly and completion is risky, we find that high college costs ...
Working Paper
Improving Child Welfare in Middle Income Countries: The Unintended Consequence of a Pro-Homemaker Divorce Law and Wait Time to Divorce
This study identifies the impact of access to and the speed of divorce on the welfare of children in a middle income largely Catholic country. Using difference-in-difference estimation techniques, I compare school enrollment for children of married and cohabiting parent households before and after the legalization of divorce. Implementing pro-homemaker divorce laws increased school enrollment anywhere from 3.4 to 5.5 percentage points, and the effect was particularly salient on secondary school students. I provide evidence that administrative processes influencing the speed of divorce affect ...
Working Paper
Optimal Taxation, Marriage, Home Production, and Family Labor Supply
An empirical approach to optimal income taxation design is developed within an equilibrium collective marriage market model with imperfectly transferable utility. Taxes distort labour supply and time allocation decisions, as well as marriage market outcomes, and the within household decision process. Using data from the American Community Survey and American Time Use Survey, we structurally estimate our model and explore empirical design problems. We consider the optimal design problem when the planner is able to condition taxes on marital status, as in the U.S. tax code, but we allow the ...
Journal Article
Pink and Poverty Taxes on Marriage
A "pink tax" is the extra cost charged for goods and services esigned for women. In this research, we expand the scope of this pink tax by examining gender and income differentials in marriage taxes. A marriage tax reflects the decline in spending power as a result of the difference in taxes and transfer benefits that arise from marriage. We use a lifetime measure of the marriage tax and show that low-income females with children are penalized the most, with a loss of 3.35 percent of their lifetime resources because of marriage. This marriage tax also makes a significant difference to their ...
Report
Human capital investments and expectations about career and family
This paper studies how individuals believe human capital investments will affect their future career and family life. We conducted a survey of high-ability currently enrolled college students and elicited beliefs about how their choice of college major, and whether to complete their degree at all, would affect a wide array of future events, including future earnings, employment, marriage prospects, potential spousal characteristics, and fertility. We find that students perceive large ?returns" to human capital not only in their own future earnings, but also in a number of other dimensions ...
Working Paper
Is Our Fiscal System Discouraging Marriage? A New Look at the Marriage Tax
We develop, apply, and test a new measure of the marriage tax: the reduction in future spending from getting married. Our measure is a comprehensive, actuarial (expected) present value. It incorporates all major and most minor US tax and benefit programs, weighing the present value of additional net taxes from marrying along each marital survivor path by the path’s probability. And it assumes clone marriage—marrying oneself—to ensure the living-standard loss from marrying is unaffected by spousal choice. We calculate our marriage tax for young respondents using the Survey of Consumer ...
Working Paper
Opioids and Post-COVID Labor-Force Participation
At the onset of COVID-19, U.S. labor-force participation dropped by about 3 percentage points and remained below pre-pandemic levels three years later. Recovery varied across states, with slower rebounds in those more affected by the pre-pandemic opioid crisis, as measured by age-adjusted opioid overdose death rates. An event study shows that a one-standard-deviation increase in pre-COVID opioid death rates corresponds to a 0.9 percentage point decline in post-COVID labor participation. The result is not driven by differences in overall health between states. The effect of prior opioid ...
Working Paper
Manning Up and Womaning Down: How Husbands and Wives Report Earnings When She Earns More
To infer social preferences regarding the relative earnings of spouses, we use measurement error in the earnings reported for married couples in the Current Population Survey. We compare the earnings reported for husbands and wives in the survey with their “true” earnings as reported by their employers to tax authorities. Compared with couples where the wife earns just less than the husband, those where she earns just more are 15.9 percentage points more likely to under-report her relative earnings. This pattern reflects the reporting behavior of both husbands and wives and is consistent ...
Working Paper
Marriage Market Sorting in the U.S.
We examine shifts in the U.S. marriage market, assessing how online dating, demographic changes and evolving societal norms influence mate choice and broader sorting trends. Using a targeted search model, we analyze mate selection based on factors such as education, age, race, income and skill. Intriguingly, despite the rise of online dating, preferences, mate choice and overall sorting patterns showed negligible change from 2008 to 2021. However, a longer historical view from 1960 to 2020 reveals a trend toward preferences for similarity, particularly concerning income, education and skills. ...