New Evidence on Gay and Lesbian Household Incomes

Using independent data from the Centers for Disease Control, the author tests a key assumption of previous research on gay and lesbian incomes: that same-sex unmarried partner households are, indeed, gay or lesbian. The author shows that this independent data suffers from less severe underreporting of same-sex unmarried partner households than the 1990 Decennial Census. Furthermore, individual level information on sexual behavior and family planning is used to show that these households exhibit sexual behavior that is systematically different from married and different-sex couples and that is consistent with a large body of public health and HIV literature on gay men and lesbians. Finally, the author replicates, confirms, and extends previously published Census-based results on the household income penalty faced by gay male couples, showing that these results are not an artifact of deficient data. He finds similar results for lesbian couples. (JEL J1 , J3 )     

Explorations - Introduction: Towards Lesbian,Gay, and Bisexual Perspectives in Economics: Why and How They May Make a Difference

The economics profession has only recently begun to include research on lesbians and gay men, but we argue that a lesbian economics has long existed, with documentation of anti-lesbian discrimination, discussion of its private and social costs, and practical work for change. This tradition, along with the newer traditions built upon work with gay men and bisexual people, provides a basis for feminists to expand work in economics on lesbian and gay issues. The articles in the symposium propose ideas for future research, for learning from other disciplines, and for creating a more welcoming academic climate.     

Poverty in US Lesbian and Gay Couple Households

Poverty is a widely researched topic in economics. However, despite growing research on the economic lives of lesbians and gay men in the United States since the mid 1990s, very little is known about poverty in same-sex couple households. This study uses American Community Survey data from 2010 to 2014 to calculate poverty rates for households headed by different-sex versus same-sex couples. Comparing households with similar characteristics, the results show that those headed by same-sex couples are more likely to be in poverty than those headed by different-sex married couples. Despite that overall disadvantage, a decomposition of the poverty risk shows that same-sex couples are protected from poverty by their higher levels of education and labor force participation, and their lower probability of having a child in the home. Lastly, the role of gender – above and beyond sexual orientation – is clear in the greater vulnerability to poverty for lesbian couples.     

MARRIAGE,MARKETS, AND MONEY: A COASIAN THEORY OF HOUSEHOLD FORMATION

This article integrates search‐based models of marriage and money. We think about households as organizations, the way Coase thinks about firms, as alternatives to markets that become more attractive when transactions costs increase. In the model, individuals consume market‐ and home‐produced goods, and home production is facilitated by marriage. Market frictions, including taxes, search, and bargaining problems, increase the marriage propensity. The inflation tax encourages marriage because being single is cash intensive. Microdata confirm singles use cash more than married people. We use macrodata over many countries to investigate how marriage responds to inflation, taxation, and other variables.     

Wealth,Wages, and Wedlock: Explaining the College Gender Gap Reversal

In this paper, I study the role of changes in the wage structure and expectations about marriage in explaining the college gender gap reversal. With strongly diminishing marginal utility of wealth and in the presence of a gender wage gap, single women have a greater incentive than single men to invest in education. Marriage‐market distortions tend to depress the overall benefit of education for women relative to men. I develop a tractable two‐period model and parameterize it using US census data for the cohort born in 1950. I then show that it can generate a reversal and that the most important driving force for this is the decline in marriage rates.     

Economic Effects of Workfare Reforms for Single Mothers: Benefit Substitution and Labour Supply Responses*

We analyse the economic effects of nationwide Norwegian reforms on the state benefit programme targeting single mothers. Our results show that for each reduction of 100 Norwegian kroner (NOK) in benefit payments from the programme, single mothers replaced 65 NOK through benefit substitution. Their labour supply and disposable income also increased in the short term. However, the reforms doubled the poverty rate among single mothers in the long term. The reforms led to a total net gain to public expenditure of 3.6 billion NOK (449 million euros) during the 1998–2008 period, corresponding to a 14 percent decrease in total benefit payments to single mothers.     

Marriage, commitment and divorce in a matching model with differential aging

This paper analyses a matching model of the marriage market with directed, on-the-job search. Everyone is born attractive but “matures” according to a Poisson process into unattractiveness. Marriages between equally attractive people are stable but mixed marriages are not. The implied patterns of marriage and divorce are consistent with those identified in the empirical literature. When the utility from being single is low, in order to commit to their relationship, attractive people in mixed marriages may voluntarily divest of their attractiveness.     

More on Marriage,Fertility, and the Distribution of Income*

According to Pareto (1896) , the distribution of income depends on “the nature of the people comprising a society, on the organization of the latter, and, also, in part, on chance.” In the model developed here the “nature of the people” is captured by attitudes toward marriage, divorce, fertility, and children. Singles search for mates in a marriage market. Married agents bargain about work, and the quantity and quality of children. They can divorce. Social policies, such as child support requirements, reflect the “organization of the (society).” Finally, “chance” is modeled by randomness in income, marriage opportunities, and marital bliss.     

Sexual identity and the lesbian earnings differential in the U.S.

Two decades of research on wage differentials by sexual orientation uses data-sets that do not ask respondents about their own sexual orientation, even though sexual identity is key to theories that explain why a wage differential might exist. We show that many women who claim a lesbian identity for themselves are not classified as lesbian by researchers using the behavioral proxies typically available in the data. Conversely, many women who describe themselves as heterosexual are classified as lesbian because they report sexual experiences with women. Misclassification may lead to erroneous conclusions about changes in labor market outcomes. The results highlight the need to develop robust methods for collecting data on sexual identity and for more research on the interrelationship between sexual identity and behavior, especially occupational choice.     

Law, Property, and Marital Dissolution

This paper challenges the view that legal rights are not important in affecting whether people divorce, but it puts as much emphasis on property rights (given, for example, by the law on alimony) as on dissolution rights. The paper sets out two stylised models of marriage and examines the consequences of fuller compensation for economic sacrifices made during marriage. If the dominant economic issue in a marriage is who undertakes household tasks then a law giving fuller compensation makes divorce more likely. If the dominant issue is child custody, divorce is less likely.     

Age at marriage,social norms,and female education in Nepal

We study the impact of age at marriage on female education. We hypothesize that in cultures where women marry young, parents discount the pecuniary benefits of educating girls; the earlier the anticipated age at marriage the greater this discount. We empirically test this effect using household data from Nepal. We control for potential endogeneity of age at marriage by exploiting variations in cultural norms regarding dowry and differences in the average age of female marriage among ethnicities and regions as instrumental variables. The econometric results support the hypothesis that female education is negatively affected by cultural norms that favor early marriage.     

Peace in the Household: Gender,Agency, and Villagers' Measures of Marital Quality in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

Although development studies have emphasized quality of life, the quality of marriage remains uninvestigated. This study challenges the bargaining model by arguing that theories of marital quality, derived from women's voices and subaltern knowledge, should be integral to feminist economic theories of marriage and intrahousehold gender relations. Findings from a longitudinal (1999–2009) ethnographic study of microcredit loanee families in rural Bangladesh reveal that Muslim women believe high marital quality or togetherness leads to peace in the household. This local model of marriage is central to the moral economy of social life. The study identifies eight local measures of marital quality that define what low-income women think a good Muslim husband should be like. The study concludes that the peace-in-the-household model emphasizes the transformation of masculinity as a program strategy that should be implemented in microcredit households in various parts of the world.     

Building the Family Nest: Premarital Investments, Marriage Markets, and Spousal Allocations

We develop a transferable utility model of the household in which the marriage market is characterized by (negative or positive) assortative matching, and spousal allocations are determined by premarital investments. We demonstrate that all sharing rules along the assortative order support efficient outcomes both in terms of premarital investments and intra-household allocations. The efficiency of premarital choices and household allocations then enables us to show that, for each couple, the marriage market generates a unique and maritally sustainable sharing rule that is a function of the distribution of premarital endowments and the sex ratios in the market. According to our results, transfers among spouses occur on two margins: premarital investments and intra-marital spousal allocations. Asymmetries in the sex ratios in the marriage markets produce gender differences in premarital investments and consumption that are larger for individuals with small premarital endowments than those with larger endowments. A corollary of these findings is that, when men are in short supply in the marriage markets, women can invest more than men even when the returns to investment are lower or the costs are higher for women.     

Teen families,welfare transfers,and the minimum wage: evidence from Canada

Abstract This study evaluates the impacts of welfare transfers and the minimum wage on teen family formation by pooling provincial data from Canada between 1990 and 2005. OLS estimates suggest that welfare transfers have had limited impact on teen births. On the other hand, a 10% increase in the minimum wage is significantly correlated with a 3%–5% rise in teen birth rates. This finding is explained by further regressions, which reveal that an increase in the minimum wage is significantly associated with (1) higher earnings among male teens, (2) an increase in teen marriage rates, and (3) an increase in fertility among married teens but not among unmarried females. Finally, estimates based on the 2003 and 2005 waves of the Canadian Community Health Surveys demonstrate that married teens are more likely to engage in sex as well as unprotected intercourse in comparison with single teens.     

Marriages are Made in Kitchens: The European Marriage Pattern and Life-Cycle Servanthood in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam

Due to methodological difficulties of historical research on women’s labor, little is known of women’s contribution to household incomes in preindustrial economies. This article is the first to use domestic servants’ wages, as documented in account books from the period 1752–1805, to estimate the capital that women could accumulate during their years of service before marriage. As such, it offers a new perspective on women’s contribution to household resources. Results show that servants working for the most well-off households in eighteenth-century Amsterdam could save a marriage budget that was between one-third and half of the capital that an unskilled man could save in the same amount of time. Furthermore, servants’ wages would in theory have been sufficient to support a family of four at the subsistence level, illustrating that women’s wages and potential savings cannot be ignored.     

Class, gender and marriage

This paper estimates the contributions of differential fecundity, social heterogeneity, assortative matching and search frictions to aggregate marriage behavior in 18th century Quebec. The reduced form estimates show that a simple random matching model of the marriage market, in which there are gains to assortative matching and women may leave the marriage market at a higher rate than men, can explain these data. The estimates also show that the marriage market was segmented by social status.     

Do children of the first marriage deter divorce?

In terms of economics, individuals divorce if their expected gains from marriage fall short of their expected utility outside the current marriage, and children represent a marriage-specific type of investment, which generally increases the value of marriage for the spouses. However, children may also disrupt marital stability as they will induce dramatic changes into the household allocation of money and time. In particular, children conceived before or after first marriage may be valued differently by the spouses and this may lead to marital conflicts. It is difficult to assign a priori the direction of the effect of children on marriage stability, and causality may run either way, as couples who anticipate a separation are more likely to have fewer children than those who are happy together, while children born before first marriage may be associated with a lower marriage attachment of their parents. Here, we follow an empirical approach and take advantage of the richness of the data on pre-marital history from the 24 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth79, to estimate the effect of children conceived before or after first marriage on marital stability. We find a significant deterrent effect of young children conceived during first marriage to the likelihood of divorce, while children conceived before first marriage are found to have a disruptive effect on marital stability.     

SINGLE MOMS AND DEADBEAT DADS: THE ROLE OF EARNINGS,MARRIAGE MARKET CONDITIONS,AND PREFERENCE HETEROGENEITY

Why do some men father children outside of marriage without providing support? Why do some women have children outside of marriage when they receive little support from fathers? Why is this behavior more common among Blacks than Whites? We estimate a dynamic equilibrium model of marriage, employment, fertility, and child support decisions. We consider the extent to which low earnings, marriage market conditions, and preference heterogeneity explain nonmarital childbearing, deadbeat fatherhood, and racial differences in these outcomes. We find the Black–White earnings gap and preference heterogeneity explain a substantial portion of racial differences, whereas marriage market conditions are less important.     

理想家庭、婚姻制度与司法程序——对我国婚姻家庭制度与生活实践相关性的反思

婚姻家庭本身具有建构性。改革开放以来,面对我国婚姻家庭生活的急剧变化,婚姻家庭制度的规范力和塑造力弱化,制度变革体现为对生活实践变化的被动接受,继而加剧了婚姻解体的趋势。当下极有必要反思婚姻家庭制度与生活实践的相关性问题,这涉及婚姻家庭理想模式建构、制度规范重构以及婚姻家庭纠纷审理的司法程序设计等内容。     

Marriage,Divorce, and Interstate Risk Sharing*

In this paper, we study the importance of marriage for interstate risk sharing in the US. We find that US federal states in which married couples account for a higher share of the population are less exposed to state‐specific output shocks. Thus, in addition to improving the allocation of risk at the individual level, marriage also has implications for risk sharing at the more aggregated state level. Quantitatively, the impact of marriage on interstate risk sharing varies over divorce regimes.