Resumen de Essays on formation and dissolution of households
In Western Europe and the US, the last couple of decades have witnessed a large increase in the new forms of marriages, usually called quasi-marriages, like cohabita- tion. Today in many European countries more than 15% of all couples are cohabiting. Furthermore, cohabiting couples di¤er from married ones. They tend to share house- hold tasks and market works more equally than married couples. The aim of the rst chapter of the dissertation, "Will You Quasi-Marry Me? The Rise of Cohabitation and Decline of Marriages" is to account for the rise in cohabitation as well as the cross-sectional di¤erences between cohabiting and married couples. To this end, a two-period model of marriage and cohabitation with home production is built. Using this framework, the relationship between the narrowing of the gender wage gap, the improvement in household production technology and the agents marital decisions is analyzed, both theoretically and empirically. The second chapter of the dissertation, "Peer E¤ects in Young Adults Marital Decisions" studies peer group e¤ects on marital decisions using data from Waves I and III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). This data- base contains detailed information on adolescents high school friends as well as their marital behavior later in life. A balanced panel for the years 1995-2002 is constructed using the calendar of all past and current relationships of the respondents. This pro- cedure allows to recover the marital status of each individual and of her friends at any given year in order to analyze how the marital transitions of individuals depend on the marital status of their friends. The e¤ect of peers on marital decisions is identi ed using panel data, instrumental variables techniques, and by exploiting the timing of friendship formation. The results after controlling for various observable character- istics of individuals and their friends show that peer e¤ects in marital decisions are signi cant. Robustness checks using former and placebo friends support the results, and indicate that actual peers do matter. The third chapter of the dissertation, "Young Adults living with their Parents and the In uence of peers" focuses on young adults living with their parents in the U.S. and studies the role of peers. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) the in uence of high school friends on the coresidence of young adults with their parents is analyzed. The challenges in the identi cation of peer e¤ects in a static framework are addressed and are mitigated by employing an instrumental variable technique and controlling for state xed e¤ects. The analysis is then extended to a dynamic framework and exploits di¤erences in the timing of leaving the parental home among peers. The results indicate that there are statistically signi cant peer e¤ects on the nest-leaving behavior of young adults.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
