I examine the effect of marriage penalties in the US income tax system on marital status. I construct a simulated instrument that exploits variation in the tax code over time and between US states to deal with potential endogeneity between the marriage penalty a couple faces and their marital status. I find that a $1000 increase in the marriage penalty faced reduces the probability of marriage ...

Title of dissertation: THE EFFECT OF SAME-SEX MARRIAGE LAWS ON DIFFERENT-SEX MARRIAGE: EVIDENCE FROM THE NETHERLANDS Mircea Ştefan Trandafir, Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Dissertation directed by: Professor Judith K. Hellerstein Department of Economics It has long been argued that the legalization of same-sex marriage would have a negative impact on marriage. My dissertation examines what happene...

On 3 December 1996, a Hawaiian state court upheld the legalization of same-sex marriage, although the next day the presiding judge set the ruling aside pending the outcome of an appeal by the state. This ruling rekindled fears that exist regarding the potential legalization of same-sex marriage throughout the United States. To answer concerns regarding same-sex marriage, I will examine several ...

We describe novel methods for highly adaptable representation of hypotheses about the complex temporal patterns typical of processes and threats. These methods permit expression and preservation of hypotheses about normal and abnormal processes of significant subtlety and complexity. The hypotheses can capture institutional domain knowledge and facilitate sharing across the organization. A hypo...

I expand Gary Becker’s market analysis of marriage behavior to derive a set of new implications about marriage and education. In my model, people can make college and career investments to improve their income and marriage prospects before they enter the marriage market. In the overlapping-generations marriage market, men are characterized by income, and women are characterized by income and re...

Despite increasing international attention to child marriage and its negative health and social consequences, little is known about the knowledge and beliefs of individuals who are in control of negotiating children's marriages and of the social context in which these individuals function. Using data from a 2007 cross-sectional household survey and multilevel logistic regression models, this pa...

Although disadvantaged women are the targets of marriage programs, little attention has been paid to women's marriage constraints and their views of marriage. Drawing on an exchange framework and using qualitative data collected from single women participating in a marriage initiative, we introduce the concept of marriageable women-the notion that certain limitations may make women poor marriag...

BACKGROUND A well-documented association exists between age at marriage and the risk of divorce. However, substantial gaps in our knowledge and understanding of its origins, nature, and implications still exist. OBJECTIVES This article documents the relationship between women’s ages at first marriage and marriage cohort divorce rates, assessing the importance of relative ages at marriage (based...

Policies to promote marriage are controversial, and it is unclear whether they are successful. To analyze such policies, one must distinguish between a marriage that is created by a marriage-promoting policy (marginal marriage) and a marriage that would have been formed even in the absence of a state intervention (average marriage). We exploit the suspension of a cash-on-hand marriage subsidy i...