Ho-Po  Crystal Wong

The liberalization of divorce laws has reduced the commitment value of marriage and household specialization. I examine how the homemaking provision in family law that gives recognition to the contribution of homemakers in marriage in the division of marital properties at divorce affects spousal time allocation. Conceivably such law could enhance the gender division of labor within the household. I develop a non-cooperative household model to analyze the effects of the provision on spousal behavior. The empirical findings provide support for the non-cooperative household model, particularly under unilateral divorce regimes where it is difficult for partners to make long-term commitment to their partners. Consistent with the implications from the model, the results show that the unilateral divorce regimes with the homemaking provision is associated with wives increasing their housework and reducing their labor supply. The study highlights the importance in legally delineating the property rights of homemakers in marital property division at divorce, in inducing women to invest in their marriage, especially when divorce is unilateral, which could hinder spousal co-operation.

If mothers take care of children more than fathers, then after the onset of COVID-19 mothers’ employment is expected to drop more than that of fathers. This gender gap is likely to be larger where women are less concerned about the financial repercussions of opting out of the labor force, and therefore the gender gap in employment is likely to grow more where community property or homemaking provisions give more protection to homemakers in case of union dissolution. Difference-in-differences and dynamic study estimations applied to CPS data for 2019–2020 show that after the onset of COVID-19 the labor force participation of mothers of school-age children—but not of fathers–dropped more in states with marital property laws more generous to parental caregivers. These results stand in contrast to how these groups’ labor force participation changed after the Great Recession, compared to pre-recession levels.

This paper presents instrumental variables (IV) estimates of the effect of childbearing on female labor supply in Hong Kong. Using the preference for sons in Chinese families, I extend the work of Angrist and Evans (1998) to estimate the effect of a second child on labor supply, as well as third and subsequent children (henceforth AE). In contrast to AE, the magnitude of the IV estimates of the effect of additional fertility on mothers’ labor supply are substantially higher than the OLS estimates. Also, among highly educated women in Hong Kong, child gender is a much weaker instrument for fertility and the 2SLS estimates are much more noisy. These findings reflect that educated women are less influenced by traditional values. The overall results suggest that the labor supply of traditional women with son preference responds strongly to increased fertility.

This paper seeks to understand the role played by immigrant ethnic composition in the process of women’s suffrage in the United States. Any theory of the extension of voting rights to women must explain why native men voted to extend the franchise to women. In this paper, we consider what we call the “ethnic group threat.” To the extent that native males believed that the political preferences of native women were better aligned with theirs than new (primarily male) immigrants, male voters would be willing to grant women voting rights to secure their social and political status. We use a hazard model and immigration data from 1870 to 1920 to investigate the impact of immigrant ethnic composition on women suffrage, we find that states with a higher proportion of immigrants from Italy, Eastern/Southern Europe, and Mexico gave women the the right to vote faster.

A variety of states in the United States have adopted the homemaking provision in their divorce laws since the 1980s. The provision requires judges to recognize homemakers' contribution to their marriages in dividing marital properties at divorce. I model the marital decisions of couples as a sequential game, in which the potential wife's decision in whether to marry and specialize in home production depends on whether she is legally protected by the homemaking provision, as the law would reinforce her post-divorce property rights and therefore increase her bargaining power within the marriage. I use the variation in the timing of the passage of the homemaking provision to identify its effect on marriage. I find that the provision substantially increases marriages using both state- and individual-level data.

I examine John Maynard Keynes’s struggle with the doctrine of forced saving during the period 1924-36, from when he worked on the Treatise on Money to the completion of his General Theory. I investigate what led Keynes to completely abolish ideas related to forced saving and how his new formulation was affected by this struggle. I argue that the forced saving thesis is inherently inconsistent with his Fundamental Equations, and the change in the equilibrating mechanism from price to output proposed by Ralph Hawtrey enabled Keynes to completely abolish this notion from his monetary theory.

Positive assortative matching in terms of traits such as ethnicity and race has been prevalent in marital formation. One possible explanation for this is that spouses in endogamous marriages possess complementary skills and tastes that increase marital surplus. This paper aims to estimate the effects of ethnic assortative matching on a variety of household outcomes by using the exogenous variation in immigrant flows in the USA during the period 1900–1930 to disentangle the selection effect of partners. The major finding is that the complementarities in home production from same ethnic marriage enhances investment in household public goods such as childrearing and home ownership and reduces the market labor supply of wives. The OLS estimates of the sizes of these effects appear to be substantially biased downward, indicating positive selection into intermarriage in terms of unobservable traits that increase marital surplus.