WORKING PAPERS

“The Risk of Divorce and Household Savings Behaviour” with Libertad González (UPF-Economics Department)

“Female Employment and Household Income Distribution: A comparison of Germany and the US “ with Gosta Esping-Andersen(UPF)

“Only the Lonely? The Influence of Spouse on the Transition to Self-Employment”

WORK in PROGRESS

“Marriage and Savings: New Evidence from PSID”

“Assortative Mating and Wealth Inequality in the US”

“Risk of Divorce and the Labour Supply”

“The difficult combination of employment and childbirth. A comparison between Italy and the United Kingdom” with Tiziana Nazio (Oxford University)

“Academic Sex-Seggregation and Sector Expansion:Turkish Puzzle Revisited” with Hande Inanc(UPF)

Dissertation Summary

My current research aims to sharpen our understanding of why and how couple dynamics and marital transitions affect three critical economic outcomes: household savings, transition to self- employment and income distribution. In the first two papers, I investigate the impact of marriage and divorce on household savings behavior. Savings behavior is important for understanding of several sociological phenomena that are directly related to the well-being of individuals. For instance, savings have been the primary way of accumulating wealth, which is an important indicator of well-being. Similarly, savings behavior is a key determinant of the risk of poverty at different stages of life-cycle (i.e. old age poverty, or younger households’ access to housing) or across household types (i.e. poverty risks after divorce). However, sociologists have shown little interest in savings behavior and hence, the standard life-cycle savings theories are dominated by economists. The result is that current models of savings and consumption have strong assumptions about the homogeneity of household structures. What is more, those models assume a unitary utility and that the household head is the primary decision-maker whose preferences represent the preferences of all the individuals in the households.

My research on household savings behavior deviates from those standard models and brings a more sociological perspective to the models of savings behavior on two fronts: First it considers the importance of changes in the household structure over the life-cycle. Second, it sheds light on the influence of couple dynamics (i.e. gender roles,household bargaining). In particular, my first paper uses the PSID-US (Wealth files 1985-2005) data to identify the effect of transitions into marriage and the role of the bargaining model adopted by the couple, on the savings behavior of the individual. In the second paper, using Living in Ireland Survey (1994-2001), I take advantage of Irish Divorce Law as a quasinatural experiment for the exogenous increase in the risk of divorce and explain its effects on household savings behavior. I follow a D-I-D approach and use as control groups either married couples in other European countries (i.e. who are subject to similar economic conditions and not affected by the law change), or Irish families who did not experience a significant increase in the expected risk of divorce (such as very religious families). The paper finds that stable couples increase their savings when they face an increase in the risk of divorce.

The third paper turns to another critical economic outcome: the likelihood of becoming self employed. Sociologists have seen entrepreneurship as a critical source of stratification in society, a potential threat to earnings equality and a vehicle of social mobility. Yet, much of the research has treated the entrepreneur as the “lonely only” individual. Theoretical arguments have been heavily weighted towards a wide range of personality traits, motivational attributes and socio-cultural background. In this paper I draw attention to the role of marriage and spouses and I attempt to make the first systematic analysis of the extent to which spouses affect each other’s transition to self-employment. In doing so, I consider the career and marital history of an individual as parallel and interdependent processes. Again using PSID (1968-1999) individual and household files, I construct a sample to track individuals’ marriage and career history from the time that they end their education. I adopt a discreet-time event history approach to model the transition to self-employment dependent on the duration of the marriage, presence of a spouse, and spousal characteristics (i.e. homogamy, relative earnings, age difference). My preliminary results suggest that duration of marriage has a positive impact on the likelihood of such transition. In addition, likelihood increases the greater are the educational disparities between the partners.

The aim of the last paper is to understand the impact of women's employment on the distribution of income in EU countries and the US, and on the long-term financial position (including pension incomes and assets) of women versus men. I first explore how women’s labor supply and earnings differ across education/occupational groups. One key issue here is whether the labor supply and earnings of women married to high-income men is higher and rising faster than among women partnered to low income men. I then investigate how female career interruptions and their income effects differ across occupational/educational groups. A second key issue in this paper relates to underlying selection with regard to couple formation and dissolution.