This paper studies the effect of gender imbalance on assortative matching and household income inequality. Using data across prefectures in China, we show that a higher sex ratio in the marriage market is negatively associated with both assortative marriage and household income inequality. Motivated by empirical evidence, we develop a heterogeneous-agent model to study the mechanism behind the pattern. The quantitative results of the model match the empirical evidence: a higher sex ratio is associated with a lower degree of assortative matching, which leads to a decrease in household income inequality. When we allow men and women to choose their level of education endogenously before entering the marriage market, we find that a higher sex ratio leads to a higher level of education investment among both men and women, with men investing more significantly than women.

This study explores the marriage matching of only-child individuals and the related outcomes. Specifically, we analyze two aspects: First, we investigate the marriage patterns of only children, examining whether people choose mates in a positive or negative assortative manner regarding only-child status. We find that, along with being more likely to remain single, only children are more likely to marry another only child. Second, we measure the matching premium or penalty as the difference in partners’ socioeconomic status between only-child and non-only-child individuals, where socioeconomic status is approximated by years of schooling. Our estimates indicate that among women who marry an only-child husband, only children are penalized, as their partners’ educational attainment is 0.63 years lower. Finally, we discuss the potential sources of this penalty in light of our empirical findings.

A growing number of papers theoretically study the effects of introducing a preference signaling mechanism. However, the empirical literature has had difficulty proving a basic tenet, namely that an agent has more success when the agent uses a signal. This paper provides evidence based on a field experiment in an online dating market. Participants are randomly endowed with two or eight “virtual roses” that a participant can use for free to signal special interest when asking for a date. Our results show that, by sending a rose, a person can substantially increase the chance of the offer being accepted, and this positive effect is neither because the rose attracts attention from recipients nor because the rose is associated with unobserved quality. Furthermore, we find evidence that roses increase the total number of dates, instead of crowding out offers without roses attached. Despite the positive effect of sending roses, a substantial fraction of participants do not fully utilize their endowment of roses and even those who exhaust their endowment on average do not properly use their roses to maximize their dating success.

We examine the effects of mining booms in Indonesia on labor market outcomes using exogenous price changes and 452 mines. We do this using labor force surveys between the years 1998 and 2011, and four waves of individual panel data between 1997 and 2014. Surprisingly, female incomes grow during mining booms, not because women work more, but because their work moves from the agricultural to the service sector where paid work is more common. Men experience mixed labor market changes. High average mining incomes attract male labor to mining districts, allowing for some adjustment of labor supply to demand. Suggestive evidence also shows that informal work increases marginally for men, potentially in auxiliary mining jobs. A male dominated industry that supports economic opportunities for women can unexpectedly benefit women as well.

Understanding gender disparities in home-based self-employment (HBS) and their links to homeownership and socioeconomic factors is crucial for advancing sustainable development goals (SDGs) in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially Nigeria. This study uses data from the 2010/2011, 2012/13, 2015/16, and 2018/19 waves of the Nigerian General Household Survey (GHS). It employs random effect probit regression, the LASSO method for identifying predictors, and the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition technique to analyse gender differences in nonlinear binary outcomes. The results show that female business owners are more likely to engage in HBS compared to males, highlighting the importance of gender equality (SDG 5) and decent work (SDG 8). While male entrepreneurs are mainly driven by profit, females prioritise balancing paid and unpaid work, reflecting motivations beyond profit within heterodox economics. Significant gender-differentiated impacts are observed in relation to monthly rent, post-secondary education, dwelling space, energy, and regional locations. Notably, the presence of children significantly increases female involvement in HBS, a trend not seen among males. Marriage also influences female participation, suggesting that marital circumstances and economic benefits play a role. These findings highlight the need for policies addressing gender-specific constraints, challenging traditional gender roles, and promoting inclusive human development within the SDG framework.

This paper explores whether a positive unexpected exogenous (unearned) wealth shock affects household structure decisions in different Spanish regions. The Christmas draw of the Spanish National Lottery is used in a natural experiment as a proxy for exogenous random variations in provincial wealth. A static and dynamic linear panel event-study design allows for control of changing economic and demographic conditions at the province level and the dynamic effects on the analyzed decisions. The evidence is consistent with families getting divorced and having children when the province in which they live experiences an unexpected increase in wealth, but no conclusive effect on wedding plans is found.

This paper examines the impact of female education on fertility outcomes by using the Universal Primary Education (UPE) program in Malawi as a natural experiment. The finding indicates that the UPE policy improves rural women's educational attainment by 0.42 years and an additional year of female education decreases women's number of children ever born and the number of living children by 0.39 and 0.34, respectively. An analysis of potential mechanisms suggests that the decreased fertility rates are likely driven by the reduction in women's fertility preferences, the postponement of marriage, and the delay of motherhood. Contrarily, the study finds no evidence that increased female education affects women's labor force participation and the use of modern contraception.

Using the public-use files of the Canadian Community Health Survey and a difference-in-differences methodology, we estimate the impact of a universal income transfer (the Universal Child Care Benefit) on food insecurity, separately for adults and children within households. The income transfer reduced the risk of overall food insecurity by 20% at the child level, and the effect was larger in households with lower education or income. The transfer also reduced the likelihood of moderate/severe food insecurity among adults in single-parent families, as well as adults and children in households with secondary education or less. These findings withstand several robustness checks.

It is well-known that marital status is an important predictor for life expectancy. However, non-married individuals are often misclassified as singles which ignores the heterogeneity within the group. This paper shows the importance of distinguishing between types of singles, and in particular whether they are cohabiting, when predicting life expectancies. We use unique and detailed longitudinal register data to track marital status throughout the individual's lifetime. We find that all types of singles consistently benefit from living with a spouse, i.e., after divorce, becoming widower or being never married. This result holds for both men and women. For certain types of cohabiting singles we reject significant differences in life expectancy compared to married individuals. Finally, we use a case study to show that, like married individuals, all types of singles that cohabit also serve as informal caregivers and have the potential to limit the end-of-life long-term care expenditure levels.

Theoretical models have ambiguous predictions on how workplace gender composition affects the incidence of marriage. Marital search theory suggests that having more opportunities for interactions between members of the opposite gender increases the likelihood of marriage. Yet, according to overload choice theory, people with more options could actually delay or forgo marriage if the increase in the number of choices makes it more difficult for them to make marriage decisions. I explore how changes in the gender composition within occupation and industry over the past 40 years affect marriage decisions. I find that a higher share of opposite gender coworkers within a person's occupation-industry is associated with a decreased likelihood of ever having been married.

This article is a response to a piece in this journal, by David Bartram, which questions the validity of a vast literature establishing consistently a U-shaped relationship between age and happiness. There are 618 published studies that find U-shapes in that relationship in 145 countries, and only a handful that do not. Of the 30 countries that Bartram (2023, National Institute Economic Review, 1–15) examines, he finds U-shapes in 18. We show compelling evidence of U-shapes in the remaining dozen countries. Supporting evidence of a U-shape is found in objective measures including deaths of despair, depression, stress and pain that are worst in midlife.

Using detailed data from the third round of the District Level Household Survey of India, this paper examines in detail the effect of child marriage of women on contraceptive usage and access to skilled care during pregnancy and delivery. This paper particularly focuses on sixteen different outcome variables categorized under four broad sub-groups; namely, family planning and contraceptive usage, birth history, utilization of antenatal care; and finally, natal and postnatal care. The overall results presented in the paper suggest that women who marry early, i.e. before they reach the legal age of marriage are more likely to have experienced miscarriage, give birth before they turn 18 and lose children. They also lack current contraception usage and are less likely to access public health facilities during both pregnancy and childbirth. These results, however, vary widely based on the state of residence and age of the women in question.

Over the past three decades, educational attainment in Mexico has grown substantially. This increase in educational attainment may affect marriage patterns through the growing supply of individuals with higher education and changing preferences over their partner's education level. We use administrative marriage and birth certificate records to quantify changes in the relative education levels for both married and unmarried couples. Our results suggest that individuals who marry outside their education category prefer to match with a partner with a similar education level. That is, college graduates prefer to match with individuals with a secondary education rather than those with a primary education. We also find that assortativeness among pairs which include college graduates has grown considerably over this time period. Our findings hold across both marriage records and birth certificate records, indicating a parallel increase in assortativeness regardless of marital status.

We study changes in educational homogamy in the US and four European countries over the decade covering the Great Recession. The marital preferences identified point to the widening of the social gap between different educational groups since these preferences have increased the inclination of the individuals to match with others of similar educational traits in all five countries. We obtain this finding with an aggregate measure characterizing revealed preferences of individuals in relationship. We apply a novel approach for validating our finding: we compare our aggregate measure with dating data informative about the reservation points not only of those people who will be in a couple, but also those who will remain single. Finally, we challenge a commonly held view: we argue that marital preferences should not be blamed for the documented increase of the social gap since preferences are not exogenous, but are shaped by changes in the employment prospects of the potential partners.

We used the 2016 Hong Kong Census data and the diagonal reference model to investigate the effects of partners' educational pairings on fertility in Hong Kong. Our findings suggest a negative relationship between couples' educational achievements and their fertility. Moreover, males' educational attainment is more consequential of whether having children or not and both males' and females' educational attainments are determinants of the number of children to raise. In addition, the more educated a wife is relative to her husband, the less likely the couple is to have children. Once these educationally hypogamous couples have at least one child, they tend to have fewer children than their homogamous counterparts. By contrast, couples with a relatively more educated male are more likely to have children and tend to rear more children than those in educationally homogamous marriages.

This paper is the first to study the effects of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 on marriage rates between foreign-born individuals and natural-born citizens. Using marriage license data, I find that gains to marriages involving a native bride and foreign groom decrease by 0.2 log points. The decrease in is driven by reductions in gains to marriages involving a Mexican groom or a non-Canadian, non-Mexican groom. I do not find evidence that the effects differed for states with lower educational attainment or higher shares of illegal immigrants.

This study examines the degree of educational assortative mating, its evolution, and its relationship with income inequality in Thailand using national labor force survey data from 1985 to 2016. Since the 1990s, Thailand shows a trend of decreasing educational homogamy, but there is evidence of continuing educational hypergamy in Thai households. Using the semiparametric decomposition method of DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996), the study finds that educational assortative mating has affected changes in household income inequality over time. Furthermore, there exists a negative relationship between income inequality and marital sorting with same education, which contradicts evidence found in developed countries.

Simple ordinary least squares estimates indicate that absent fathers boost probabilities of adolescent criminal behavior by 16–38%, but those numbers likely are biased by unobserved heterogeneity. This paper first presents an economic model explaining that unobserved heterogeneity. Then turning to empirics, fixed effects, which attempt to address that bias, suggest that absent fathers reduce certain types of adolescent crime, while lagged-dependent variable models suggest the opposite. Those conflicting conclusions are resolved by an approach that combines those two estimators using an orthogonal reparameterization approach, with model parameters calculated using a Bayesian algorithm. The main finding is that absent fathers do not appear to directly affect adolescent criminal activity. Rather, families with absent fathers possess traits that appear to correlate with increased adolescent criminal behaviors.

In this paper, I address the U-shaped dynamics (a decrease followed by an increase) in the age at first marriage during the twentieth century. First, I show that the U-shaped dynamics have been steeper in Western that in other countries. Second, I find that these dynamics in the West are strongly related to the post-World War II (WWII) economic growth. By contrast, in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries age of marriage was much less correlated across Western countries. I propose a simple model where age of marriage is a function of search frictions and married women's labor force participation. Both factors put together generate U-shaped dynamics as a result of an industrial boom that mimics the post-WWII Western economic development.

We study marital assortative mating in education and its relation to dowry in India. There are four main results and contributions of this paper. First, instrumental variable estimates using Indian Human Development Survey-II data suggest existence of positive assortative mating in education levels of husband and wife. Second, this association is weaker in dowry-prominent districts suggesting that in districts with strong patriarchal norms, high dowry transfers could substitute for lower bride's education. Third, we study the independent effect of husband's and wife's education and its interaction on dowry. Estimates suggest that dowry rises with the groom's education and falls with the bride's schooling years. However, the joint effect of husband-and-wife education on dowry is negative, implying that though dowry rises with groom's education, the rate of increase is smaller the more educated the bride is. Finally, to explain the empirical results, we propose a theoretical model of assortative mating in the presence of dowry.