Mate
Changing the Price of Marriage: Evidence from Blood Test Requirements
Kasey Buckles, Melanie Guldi & Joseph Price
Journal of Human Resources, Summer 2011, Pages 539-567
Abstract:
We use state repeals of blood test requirements (BTRs) for a marriage license that occurred between 1980 and 2008 to examine the impact of changes in the price of marriage on the marriage decision. Using a within-group estimator that holds constant state and year effects and exploits variation in the repeal dates of BTRs across states, we find that BTRs are associated with a 6.1 percent decrease in marriage licenses issued by a state. This main finding is supported with results from individual-level marriage license and Current Population Survey data. The largest effects are found for lower socioeconomic groups.
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Peter Leeson, Peter Boettke & Jayme Lemke
George Mason University Working Paper, June 2011
Abstract:
For over a century English husbands sold their wives at public auctions. We argue that wife sales were indirect Coasean divorce bargains that permitted wives to buy the right to exit marriage from their husbands in a legal environment that denied them the property rights required to buy that right directly. Wife-sale auctions identified "suitors" - men who valued unhappy wives more than their current husbands, who unhappy wives valued more than their current husbands, and who had the property rights required to buy unhappy wives' right to exit marriage from their husbands. These suitors enabled spouses in inefficient marriages to dissolve their marriages where direct Coasean divorce bargains between them were impossible. Wife sales were an efficiency-enhancing institutional response to the unusual constellation of property rights that Industrial Revolution-era English law created. They made husbands, suitors, and wives better off.
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Did Divorces Decline After the Attacks on the World Trade Center?
Tonya Cross Hansel, Paul Nakonezny & Joseph Lee Rodgers
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, July 2011, Pages 1680-1700
Abstract:
The attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) on September 11, 2001, was an act of terrorism that had many potential influences on the city and state, including influences on families. We analyzed divorce data from 1991 to 2005 for all 62 New York counties to assess divorce response to the attack on the WTC. The results suggested that there were lower observed divorce rates in New York following the attack on the WTC than the prevailing 10-year cubic divorce trend would have predicted. We also compared counties in and around New York City to those farther away, and we compared metropolitan to nonmetropolitan counties in New York. In metropolitan counties, divorces were lower in the predicted direction.
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Obama to Blame? African American Surge Voters and the Ban on Same-Sex Marriage in Florida
Stephanie Slade & Daniel Smith
The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics, July 2011
Abstract:
Did African American voters - drawn to the polls by Barack Obama in 2008 - cast their ballots for him and then vote to ban gay marriage in Florida, causing Amendment 2 to pass? Using original survey and county-level data, we find the linkage fails to hold. While they tend to be less supportive of marriage equality than whites, black surge voters in Florida were only slightly more likely to support a ban on gay marriage than other likely voters. In addition, we show that although counties that experienced large numbers of black surge voters did exhibit more support for Obama, they were no more supportive of Amendment 2 than other counties. Finally, we demonstrate that black voters were not responsible for carrying Florida's gay marriage ban to passage, as it would have met and surpassed a 60-percent threshold even in their absence.
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The Economic Cost of Homosexuality: Multilevel Analyses
Amanda Baumle & Dudley Poston
Social Forces, March 2011, Pages 1005-1031
Abstract:
This article builds on earlier studies that have examined "the economic cost of homosexuality," by using data from the 2000 U.S. Census and by employing multilevel analyses. Our findings indicate that partnered gay men experience a 12.5 percent earnings penalty compared to married heterosexual men, and a statistically insignificant earnings penalty compared to partnered heterosexual men, when both individual- and state-level characteristics are taken into account. Partnered lesbians experience about a 3.5 percent earnings advantage compared to married heterosexual women, and a 9 percent earnings advantage compared to partnered heterosexual women. Although individual-level characteristics are the primary determinants of their earnings, we find that some contextual characteristics affect the earnings of partnered gay men and lesbians, relative to partnered heterosexuals, and that these effects vary by sex.
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Catharine Cross & Anne Campbell
Aggression and Violent Behavior, September-October 2011, Pages 390-398
Abstract:
Although men and women both have incentives to aggress, women's use of aggression is consistently lower than men's except within intimate partnerships. We propose that women's aggression is best understood by considering the role of fear as an adaptive mechanism which reduces exposure to physical danger. We review evidence that men and women faced qualitatively different adaptive challenges over evolutionary time and that this resulted in a sex difference in direct aggression mediated by greater female fear. We suggest that the absence of a sex difference in intimate partner aggression results partly from a reduction in female fear mediated by oxytocin, which reduces stress responses to biologically necessary encroachments on women's bodies. We suggest that a more complete understanding of women's aggression requires: acknowledging that women's relative restraint with regard to aggression is itself an adaptation; researching in more depth the fear-reducing effects of oxytocin and how these might operate in intimate partnerships; and considering more fully how cultural and biological factors might interact.
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The financial consequences of too many men: Sex ratio effects on saving, borrowing, and spending
Vladas Griskevicius et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The ratio of males to females in a population is an important factor in determining behavior in animals. We propose that sex ratio also has pervasive effects in humans, such as by influencing economic decisions. Using both historical data and experiments, we examined how sex ratio influences saving, borrowing, and spending in the United States. Findings show that male-biased sex ratios (an abundance of men) lead men to discount the future and desire immediate rewards. Male-biased sex ratios decreased men's desire to save for the future and increased their willingness to incur debt for immediate expenditures. Sex ratio appears to influence behavior by increasing the intensity of same-sex competition for mates. Accordingly, a scarcity of women led people to expect men to spend more money during courtship, such as by paying more for engagement rings. These findings demonstrate experimentally that sex ratio influences human decision making in ways consistent with evolutionary biological theory. Implications for sex ratio effects across cultures are discussed.
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The Face of Love: Spontaneous Accommodation as Social Emotion Regulation
Michael Häfner & Hans IJzerman
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present research investigated whether accommodation, typically formulated as the tendency to deliberately inhibit a destructive reaction in response to a partner's destructive behavior, could also occur spontaneously. Supporting this notion, results of the first study revealed that participants respond to their partner's angry face with a spontaneous smile, whereas strangers' angry faces are mimicked and thus lead to a spontaneous frown. Importantly, the facial EMG data are moderated by participants' daily interaction styles: People perceiving themselves in a communal relationship show spontaneous acts of accommodation, whereas this is not the case for people in exchange relationships. The moderation occurred in our first (spontaneous) and third (forced accommodation) studies. The results of the second study replicated the first study in that participants in communal relationships frowned less toward partner's subliminally presented angry faces but more to their sad faces. The authors discuss their findings as spontaneous social emotion regulation.
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Paul Amato & Jennifer Kane
Journal of Family Issues, August 2011, Pages 1073-1103
Abstract:
The authors used data from the Add Health study to estimate the effects of parents' marital status and relationship distress on daughters' early family formation transitions. Outcomes included traditional transitions (marriage and marital births) and nontraditional transitions (cohabitation and nonmarital births). Relationship distress among continuously married parents was not related to any outcome. Offspring with single parents and remarried parents had an elevated risk of nonmarital births and nonmarital cohabitation. Offspring with remarried parents with a high-distress relationship had an elevated risk of early marriages and marital births. These results, combined with analyses of mediating variables, provide the strongest support for a modeling perspective, although some support also was found for a perspective based on escape from stress.
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Genomic imprinting and the evolutionary psychology of human kinship
David Haig
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 28 June 2011, Pages 10878-10885
Abstract:
Genomic imprinting is predicted to influence behaviors that affect individuals to whom an actor has different degrees of matrilineal and patrilineal kinship (asymmetric kin). Effects of imprinted genes are not predicted in interactions with nonrelatives or with individuals who are equally related to the actor's maternally and paternally derived genes (unless a gene also has pleiotropic effects on fitness of asymmetric kin). Long-term mating bonds are common in most human populations, but dissolution of marriage has always affected a significant proportion of mated pairs. Children born in a new union are asymmetric kin of children born in a previous union. Therefore, the innate dispositions of children toward parents and sibs are expected to be sensitive to cues of marital stability, and these dispositions may be subject to effects of imprinted genes.
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Spending on Children: Direct Survey Evidence
Jens Bonke & Martin Browning
Economic Journal, August 2011, Pages F123-F143
Abstract:
We present estimates of spending on children from a Danish expenditure survey which asks respondents directly about allocations of expenditures to individual household members. Our main finding is that the average Danish family allocates 44% of total assignable spending on non-food non-durables and services to children. There is considerable variation across households. More is spent on older children and expenditure on children is an increasing concave function of the number of ‘equivalent' children. We find that households in which the mother has had a child by a previous partner spend 24% less on children than otherwise similar households.
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Routine housework and tripartite marital commitment
Chiung-Ya Tang
Personal Relationships, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study assumes that performing household labor is a method of maintaining the marital relationship and investigates whether higher marital commitment (personal, moral, and structural) is associated with more time spent on housework. Data taken from the second wave of the National Survey of Families and Households on 3,428 paired spouses in the United States were used to test research hypotheses. Results indicate that (a) husbands with higher moral commitment, or those married to a wife with lower moral commitment, do more routine housework, and (b) husbands with stronger personal commitment do less routine housework and their wives do more. The interplay of gender ideology and marital commitment as they pertain to housework performance for each gender is discussed.
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The High Sex Ratio in China: What Do the Chinese Think?
C. Zhou et al.
Journal of Biosocial Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
High sex ratios are well documented in many Asian countries, including China. This study was conducted in three Chinese provinces to explore awareness of the high sex ratios and its effects. Questionnaires were completed by 7435 respondents; 46% were urban and 53% were female. Sixty-four per cent were aware of the high sex ratio, and the majority were able to identify a range of consequences both for society and for unmarried men. These high levels of awareness of the negative impacts of high sex ratios should ultimately help to reduce the sex ratio at birth.
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Intermarriage, Ethnic Identity, and Perceived Social Standing Among Asian Women in the United States
Juan Chen & David Takeuchi
Journal of Marriage and Family, August 2011, Pages 876-888
Abstract:
This study investigates the consequences of Asian women's intermarriage - whether it is associated with higher social standing and lower ethnic identity, using data on Asian women (N = 589) from the National Latino and Asian American Survey (NLAAS). The socioeconomic status of partners of women who intermarried and partners of women who married men of the same ethnicity are compared. The potential associations between intermarriage and two subjective measures - ethnic identity and perceived social standing - are explored. The study rejects the hypothesis based on the conventional belief that Asian women in the United States find "better" partners with higher socioeconomic status from other racial or ethnic groups. The findings support the view that marital assimilation leads to identificational assimilation and demonstrate that intermarriage is not associated with higher perceived social standing. The results suggest that educational and occupational endogamy plays a larger role in Asian women's intermarriage than social exchange.
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Excluding Mothers-in-Law: A Research Note on the Preference for Matrilineal Advice
Jonathan Marx, Lee Miller & Scott Huffmon
Journal of Family Issues, September 2011, Pages 1205-1222
Abstract:
With whom do parents discuss medical and behavioral child-rearing questions? In a telephone survey of 167 parents (49 fathers and 118 mothers) in the southern United States, the authors found that mothers express a clear preference for their own mother's advice as opposed to that of their mother-in-law. Fathers are less likely to consult any relative and show little preference for their own mothers in seeking parenting advice. Directions for further research are discussed.