Empirical Relationships
Alimony and marital commitment: The unintended consequences of alimony reform on assortative matching
Daniel Fernández-Kranz & Jennifer Roff
Review of Economics of the Household, June 2026, Pages 395-441
Abstract:
Recent literature indicates that divorce law changes which reduce commitment or income-sharing upon separation will lead to an increase in assortative matching and reduce household specialization which may not be compensated upon divorce. Using state-level data on alimony reform that reduced the entitlements of eligible spouses and American Community Survey data on the characteristics of newlyweds, we find that alimony reform that limits alimony increases measures of spousal correlation in educational attainment and regression-based measures of assortative matching, with the largest effects among those groups who might be more sensitive to the reform. Our results indicate that alimony reform may increase inter-household income inequality by increasing the covariance of spousal earnings.
Did unilateral-no-fault divorce laws raise divorce rates?
Jordan Hillman
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Between 1970 and 1980, 37 states adopted unilateral-no-fault divorce laws. This change was known as the no-fault revolution. Critics claim that no-fault divorce has weakened moral values and contributed to family breakdown. Past research offers mixed conclusions on whether these laws increased divorce rates. This paper improves upon previous studies by distinguishing between unilateral-no-fault and overall (unilateral and mutual) no-fault divorce treatment dates. Using a causal inference framework and a stacked-regression difference-in-differences estimator with entropy balancing, this study accounts for varied treatment timing. The findings show no lasting or statistically significant effects of unilateral-no-fault divorce laws on divorce rates.
Consent-based laws and aggregate fertility
Adrian Mehic
Journal of Health Economics, July 2026
Abstract:
This paper examines how expanding the legal definition of sexual assault affects fertility and sexual behavior, using a panel of European countries. I find that switching to tacit consent-based legislation reduces fertility by about 4% relative to the mean. This effect is driven by a decrease in couple formation and an increase in abortion rates. Supporting evidence is consistent with a behavioral channel in which more risk-averse individuals withdraw from dating and partner markets following the reform, altering the composition of those who remain active toward a pool that is less precautionary. Consistent with this compositional shift, contraceptive use rises among younger women but declines among older age groups, while condom use falls among young men. Finally, an analysis of appeals court verdicts in Sweden following the adoption of consent-based legislation shows a decline in unanimous guilty verdicts, indicating challenges in assessing tacit consent. These results are consistent with a simple framework in which heterogeneity in risk perceptions and precautionary behavior in dating and partner markets, including reduced participation by some individuals, helps explain the observed decline in fertility following the reform.
Sports Betting Legalization Amplifies Emotional Cues and Intimate Partner Violence
Emily Arnesen & Kyutaro Matsuzawa
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study explores the relationship between legalized sports gambling, unexpected emotional cues stemming from NFL home team upset losses and reported intimate partner violence (IPV). Using 1995-2022 crime data from NIBRS, replicating and extending Card and Dahl (2011)'s model, we find that legalized gambling increases the impact of upset losses on IPV by 10 percentage points. The effect is larger in states with mobile betting, where higher bets were placed, around paydays, and for teams on a winning streak. These results suggest that financial losses from gambling amplify emotional reactions to unexpected team losses.
Credit and Coverture in the Age of American Mass Consumption
Emily Remus
Law and History Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article considers how married women's legal status under coverture shaped retail credit practices in the twentieth-century United States, as a mass consumer economy began to take shape. It focuses particularly on the law of necessaries, which made husbands liable for the "necessary" purchases of their wives. Rooted in English common law, this doctrine had long facilitated the flow of commerce by enabling married women -- who lacked the legal capacity to pledge credit in their own names -- to trade on their husbands' credit. Yet at the dawn of the twentieth century, when women's preferences were increasingly determining retailer practices, the law of necessaries provoked new tensions among merchants, wives, and bill-paying husbands. What counted as necessary in an expanding world of goods, and who had the right to decide? Conflict over these questions lay at the heart of numerous lawsuits from the period, including one brought in 1901 by famed Philadelphia retailer Wanamaker & Co. against a New York businessman who refused to settle his wife's charge account. In probing Wanamaker v. Weaver, this article casts light on a key inflection point in the development of modern consumer credit, when American women's growing importance as consumers collided with a legal foundation that diluted their financial autonomy. The conflict generated confusion for credit-granting retailers in the early twentieth century and would ultimately influence their approach to consumer credit in decades to come.