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Law and Economics

  • (back to top) Beyond the Classroom: Using Title IX to Measure the Return to High School Sports
    Review of Economics and Statistics, Forthcoming

    Abstract: Cross-sectional evidence suggests that high school athletes experience better outcomes than non-athletes, including higher educational attainment, more employment, and higher wages. Students self-select into athletics, however, so these may be selection effects rather than causal effects. This paper uses credibly exogenous variation in athletic participation caused by Title IX, federal legislation that led to dramatic increases in the number of American girls participating in high school sports. Between 1972 and 1978 U.S. high schools rapidly increased their female athletic participation rates (to approximately the same level as their male athletic participation rates) in order to comply with Title IX. This paper uses variation in the level of boys' athletic participation across states before Title IX as an instrument for the change in girls' athletic participation over the 1970s. Analyzing 25-34 year olds in the 1980 & 2000 censuses, I find that a 10-percentage point rise in the opportunity to play sports at the state-level generates an increase of 1 to 2 percentage points in college attendance and a 1 to 2 percentage point rise in female labor force participation. Furthermore, greater opportunities to play sports leads to greater female participation in previously male-dominated occupations, particularly for high-skill occupations.

  • (back to top)Title IX and the Evolution of High School Sports
    Contemporary Economic Policy    , 25(4), October 2007. [Lead Article]

    Abstract: The passage of Title IX, the 1972 Education Amendments to the Civil Rights Act, expanded high school athletic opportunities to include girls, revolutionizing mass sports participation in the United States.  This paper analyzes high school athletic participation in the United States and how sports offerings for boys and girls changed subsequent to the passage of this legislation.  Girls’ sports participation rose dramatically both following the enactment of Title IX and subsequent to enhancements to its enforcement.  Approximately half of all girls currently participate in sports during high school, however, there remains a substantial gap between girls and boys participation in many states.  States’ average education level and social attitudes regarding Title IX and women’s rights are correlated with this remaining gender gap.  Examining individual high school students, sports participation is seen more frequently among those with a privileged background: white students with married, wealthy, educated parents are more likely to play sports.  This finding points to an overlooked fact—while Title IX benefited girls by increasing the opportunity to play sports, these benefits were disproportionately reaped by those at the top of the income distribution.

  • (back to top) Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: Divorce Laws and Family Distress*
    Joint with Justin Wolfers
    Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(1), February 2006

    Abstract: This paper exploits the variation occurring from the different timing of divorce law reforms across the United States to evaluate how unilateral divorce changed family violence and whether the option provided by unilateral divorce reduced suicide and spousal homicide. Unilateral divorce both potentially increases the likelihood that a domestic violence relationship ends and acts to transfer bargaining power toward the abused, thereby potentially stopping the abuse in extant relationships. In states that introduced unilateral divorce we find a 8-16% decline in female suicide, roughly a 30% decline in domestic violence for both men and women, and a 10% decline in females murdered by their partners.

    *Previously circulated as 'Til Death Do Us Part: Effects of Divorce Laws on Suicide, Domestic Violence and Intimate Homicide.
    Click here to access the NBER Working paper: NBER Working Paper 10175

    Stata 8 Dataset and do files (zip, 2.61MiB)

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  • (back to top) The Impact of Divorce Laws on Marriage-Specific Capital
    Journal of Labor Economics, 25(1), January 2007.

    Abstract: This paper considers how divorce law alters the incentives for couples to invest in their marriage, focusing on the impact of unilateral divorce laws on investments in new marriages. Differences across states between 1970 and 1980 provide useful quasi-experimental variation with which to consider incentives to invest in several types of marriage-specific capital: spouse’s education, children, household specialization, and home ownership. I find that adoption of unilateral divorce—regardless of the prevailing property-division laws—reduces investment in all types of marriage-specific capital considered except home ownership. In contrast, results for home ownership depend on the underlying property division laws.

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  • (back to top) Divorce Law and Women’s Labor Supply
    Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 5(4), December 2008.

    Abstract: Divorce law changes made in the 1970s affected marital formation, dissolution, and bargaining within marriage. By altering the terms of the marital contract these legal changes impacted the incentives for women to enter and remain in the labor force. Whereas earlier work had suggested that the impact of unilateral divorce on female employment depended critically on laws governing property division, I show that these results are not robust to alternative specifications and controls. I find instead that unilateral divorce led to an increase in both married and unmarried female labor force participation, regardless of the underlying property laws.

  • (back to top)Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces
    Joint with Justin Wolfers
    Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21(2), Spring 2007.

    Abstract: We document marriage and divorce behavior, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries.  While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century.  Marriage rates have also been falling, but more strikingly, the importance of marriage at different points in the life cycle has changed, reflecting rising age at first marriage, rising divorce followed by high remarriage rates, and a combination of increased longevity with a declining age gap between husbands and wives.  Cohabitation has also become increasingly important, emerging as a widely used step on the path to marriage.  Out-of-wedlock fertility has also risen, consistent with declining “shotgun marriages”.  Compared with other countries, marriage maintains a central role in American life.  We then turn to documenting some of the driving forces causing these changes in the marriage market: the rise of the pill and women’s control over their own fertility; sharp changes in wage structure, including a rise in inequality and partial closing of the gender wage gap; dramatic changes in home production technologies; and the emergence of the internet as a new matching technology.  Finally, we discuss how these facts should inform family policy debates.

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  • (back to top) The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness
    Joint with Justin Wolfers
    American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Forthcoming

    Abstract:By most objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to male happiness.  The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found examining multiple countries, datasets, and measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups.  Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men.   These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging—one with higher subjective well-being for men.  Our findings raise provocative questions about the contribution of the women’s movement to women’s welfare and about the legitimacy of using subjective well-being to assess broad social changes.

    Stata 9 dataset, programs, figures, and log files (zip, 296MiB)

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  • (back to top)Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox
    Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2008
    Joint with Justin Wolfers

    The "Easterlin Paradox" suggests that there is no link between the level of economic development of a society and average levels of happiness. We return to   Easterlin‘s question: "Will raising the incomes of all increase the happiness of all?" and analyze multiple rich datasets spanning recent decades and a broader array of countries. We establish a clear positive link between GDP and average levels of subjective well-being across countries with no evidence of a satiation point beyond which wealthier countries have no further increases in subjective well-being. Moreover, we show that this relationship is consistent with the relationship between income and happiness within countries, suggesting a minimal role for relative income comparisons as drivers of happiness. Finally, we examine the relationship between changes in subjective well-being and income over time within countries, finding a powerful role for economic growth in raising happiness.

    Stata 9 dataset, code, and figures (zip, 106 MiB)

  • (back to top)Happiness Inequality in the United States
    Journal of Legal Studies, June 2008
    Joint with Justin Wolfers

    Abstract: This paper examines how the level and dispersion of self-reported happiness has evolved over the period 1972-2006.  While there has been no increase in aggregate happiness, inequality in happiness has fallen substantially since the 1970s.  There have been large changes in the level of happiness across groups: Two-thirds of the black-white happiness gap has been eroded, and the gender happiness gap has disappeared entirely.  Paralleling changes in the income distribution, differences in happiness by education have widened substantially.  We develop an integrated approach to measuring inequality and decomposing changes in the distribution of happiness, finding a pervasive decline in within-group inequality during the 1970s and 1980s that was experienced by even narrowly-defined demographic groups.  Around one-third of this decline has subsequently been unwound.  Juxtaposing these changes with large rises in income inequality suggests an important role for non-pecuniary factors in shaping the well-being distribution.

    Stata 10 dataset, code, and figures (zip, 19.3 MiB)

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  • (back to top)Trends in Marital Stability
    Joint with Justin Wolfers
    Under Review

    Abstract: Recent reports about the stability of marriages appear to yield conflicting conclusions. We reconcile these estimates, showing that data from several    sources uniformly point to increasing marital stability among those married since the mid-late 1970s.

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  • (back to top) The Evolution of the American Family: An Economic Interpretation
    American Journal of Family Law, 22(3), Fall 2008

    The last few decades have seen enormous changes in family forms. The institution of the family has been influenced by an array of socio-economic, regulatory, and even technological forces. Families involving same-sex marriage, divorce, remarriage, and planned childbirth or semi-permanent cohabitation in the absence of marriage have gained social acceptability if not legal rights. Additionally, the institutions of marriage and family have by no means come to rest. The debate among policymakers and the public continues over the effect of divorce on children, whether unilateral divorce or abortion laws need to be revised or overturned, and whether long-term cohabitants or same-sex partners have a right to employment or death benefits. As these debates become disputes and find their way to the legal system, the family lawyer can play a vital role in shaping the future of the family.

  • (back to top) Women's Education and Family Behavior: Trends in Marriage, Divorce and Fertility
    Joint with Adam Isen

    The production efficiencies of household specialization have declined with the development of technologies simplifying household production. Additionally, the opportunity cost of having a household specialist has risen as barriers to women in the workplace have been eroded. These developments, which have made way for an increase in the relative importance of the consumption benefits from marriage, have not impacted all families similarly. This paper examines how marital and fertility patterns have changed along racial and educational lines for men and women. Marriage and remarriage rates have risen for women with a college degree relative to women with fewer years of education, eroding a long-standing gap caused by greater marriage propensities among less educated women. In contrast, there has been little change in marital patterns by education for men. Divorce has been falling for all groups, but fell earlier and more sharply among college graduates. Fertility has historically declined with women’s educational attainment and that pattern continues, with the total number of births having changed little by women's educational attainment, despite the large increases in educational attainment for women. However, there has been a rise in the age of educated mothers, with little change in fertility timing for those with less education.

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Labor and Technology

  • (back to top) The Impact of the Internet on Worker Flows

    Abstract: The Internet represents a large shock to information flows and the nature of market transactions. This paper focuses on how this shock translates into changes in job search. It is likely that the Internet has both reduced search costs, and altered relativities, such as the returns to different types of search, and the ease with which one can search outside the local labor market. I find that in states that adopted the Internet rapidly, the unemployed have expanded their search activities and reallocated their effort across types of job search. The employed also appear to be searching more (or more successfully), with job-to-job flows increasing. Moreover, the Internet has changed the scope of job searches, as information now flows more freely across regional economies, stimulating greater migration across states. While it can be difficult to disentangle whether changes in state labor markets reflect Internet usage or drive Internet adoption, I find a useful instrument that isolates the causal mechanism: the Internet has diffused in much the same way as past innovations, and hence average state ownership rates of household appliances in 1960 describe Internet adoption patterns over the past decade. Disaggregating my main results, I find that the Internet has had the largest effects on the search behavior and mobility of the young and those with at least some college. Estimates on “placebos”, such as low-skill workers, show little effect.
  • (back to top) The Internet and Job Search
    In David Autor, ed.
    Labor Market Intermediation forthcoming University of Chicago Press

    Abstract: This paper examines how the Internet has impacted job search behavior. Examining those who use the Internet for job seeking purposes, I show that the vast majority are currently employed. These employed job seekers are more likely to leave their current employer and are more likely to make an employment-to-employment transition. Examining the unemployed, I find that over the past ten years the variety of job search methods used by the unemployed has increased and job search behavior has become more extensive. Furthermore, the Internet has led to reallocation of effort among various job search activities.

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Health/Public Economics

  • (back to top)Health Insurance Coverage of People in the Ten Years before Medicare Eligibility
    Joint with Katherine Swartz
    Published, Ensuring Health and Income Security for an Aging Workforce
    Peter Budetti, Janice Gregory, Richard Burkhauser and Allan Hunt (eds)National Academy of Social Insurance (2001).

    Abstract: This paper examines the current 55 to 64-year-old cohort’s economic status and financial preparation for their upcoming retirement. The age group in question has been of particular concern to policy makers as they are the first group of the baby-boom generation to become eligible for Medicare and Social Security.This paper evaluates relevant policy issues and potential solutions through a thorough examination of this group’s current financial characteristics.

Policy Articles and Op-Eds


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