Polygamy and Plural Marriage

The Mystery of Polygamy

The economic literature on marriage identifies a number of benefits of marriage and discusses mechanisms that cause societies to prefer certain marital structures such as polygyny or monogamy. In principle, however, these benefits and mechanisms might lead societies towards polyandry and even cenogamy. The rareness of polyandry and the absence of cenogamy, however, clearly indicate that importa...

Productivity, Rank, and Returns in Polygamy.

This study sheds light on the development of family structures in a polygamous context with a particular emphasis on wife order, and offers an explanation for the association between outcomes of children and the status of their mothers among wives based on observable maternal characteristics. In a simple framework, I propose that selection into rank among wives with respect to female productivi...

Attitudes to polygamy in English law

This article1 documents recent developments in British legal policy towards polygamy.2 The issue of polygamy became linked to the arrival and the different cultural patterns of Asian and African migrants to Britain in the post Second World War period. At first, questions were raised about the recognition of polygamous unions or the possibility of English law’s control over men in such situation...

Plural Quantification and Classes

Plural Predication

My thesis consists of three self-contained but interconnected papers. In the first one, 'Word and Objects', I assume that it is possible to quantify over absolutely everything, and show that certain English sentences containing collective predicates resist paraphrase in first-order languages and even in first-order languages enriched with plural quantifiers. To capture such sentences I develop ...