Mated
Classed Pathways to Marriage: Hometown Ties, College Networks, and Life after Graduation
Elizabeth Armstrong & Laura Hamilton
Journal of Marriage and Family, forthcoming
Method: The study analyzes six waves of longitudinal interviews with 45 women from differing social class backgrounds. The first interview was conducted at age 18, when women started college at a Midwestern public university. The final interview was collected at age 30 and was supplemented by a survey collecting the income, education, occupation, and debt of women and their spouses.
Results: Women from privileged backgrounds were more likely to marry and married men who earned substantially more than the partners of less privileged women. Differences resulted from lifelong variation in social networks, originating in childhood. College did not interrupt long‐standing exclusionary class networks. After graduation, social class background shaped where women moved, as well as with whom they worked and socialized.
The sex ratio and global sodomy law reform in the post-WWII era
Simon Chang
Journal of Population Economics, April 2021, Pages 401-430
Abstract:
This paper studies the role of the population sex ratio, i.e., the ratio of men to women, in the global wave of sodomy law reform in the post-WWII era. Using data from a global survey, this paper first shows that men are more homophobic than women and that this pattern has persisted over time across countries. Using newly constructed panel data on 183 countries, this paper then shows that having a high sex ratio makes repeal of a sodomy law less likely. This negative relationship between the sex ratio and sodomy law repeal is robust to numerous checks, including using temperature as an instrumental variable for the sex ratio.
The Power of Time: The Impact of Free IVF on Women’s Human Capital Investments
Naomi Gershoni & Corinne Low
European Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Women’s time-limited fertility window, compared to men’s longer period of fecundity, could be a key constraint in shaping the gender gap in career choices and hence outcomes. Israel’s 1994 policy change that made in-vitro fertilization free provides a natural experiment for examining how fertility time horizons impact women’s investment choices. We find that following the policy change women complete more college and graduate education. We then present evidence suggesting that these larger investments contributed to better labor market outcomes, reducing the gender gap in career achievement. This further implies that persistent labor market inequality may be partly rooted in biological asymmetries.
The husband-older age gap in marriage is associated with selective fitness
Brett Pelham
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Wives are usually younger than their husbands. Although this has been replicated across time and culture, there is no previous evidence of the likely evolutionary underpinnings of this age gap. Study Set 1 replicated the marriage age gap - and its moderators - in 6.4 million American marriages that led to U.S. births between 2016 and 2018. This effect also replicated in three million unmarried unions. Study 2 directly examined the life history tradeoff that connects the marriage age gap to selective fitness. When husbands are somewhat older than wives (but neither much older nor much younger), selective fitness is high, as operationalized by rates of short-term infant survival and neonatal breastfeeding. This pattern held independent of the robust effects of maternal age. Eight cross-cultural replications involving more than 225,000 mothers in low- to moderate-income nations examined lifetime selective fitness (total number of living children) rather than single birth outcomes. In all eight nations, analyses revealed both a husband-older age gap and a life history tradeoff in lifetime selective fitness. Life history tradeoffs account well for the husband-older age gap in marriage.
Mortgage subsidies, homeownership, and marriage: Effects of the VA Loan Program
Judith Ricks
Regional Science and Urban Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the effect of mortgage subsidies on homeownership and marriage. The empirical design exploits both access to the Veteran’s Administration Loan Guaranty Program and geographic variation in house prices. The results show that veterans living in one standard deviation higher house price areas had 22.7 percent higher homeownership and 8.7 percent higher marriage. These differences cannot be explained by differences in income or educational attainment. The evidence supports that reductions in the down payment constraint mattered more than the relative cost of homeownership. This suggests that mortgage subsidies affect housing demand through both the homeownership and household formation channels.