Essays on the economics of gender and the family

This thesis explores several of the major life cycle decisions of women and households in the United States, including decisions of whether to marry or divorce, whether to have children, and how to organize labor within a married household. These studies are motivated by two underpinning themes: first, although women have much greater independence and control over their life course than they used to, the consequences of these key life cycle decisions still play a major role in contributing to gender inequality and the gender wage gap. To fully understand the gender wage gap, then, it is necessary to understand what factors influence these decisions. Closely linked to this insight is the recognition, based on the recent research frontier, that women do not make these decisions in isolation. Decisions within households are joint, and may be influenced by household members’ bargaining power, which in turn is affected by external conditions in the marriage and labor market. Societal forces including gender norms may also constrain women’s choices.With these two themes in mind, each of the three chapters contributes to the understanding of how these decisions arise. The first chapter explores how both the quantity and quality of marriages are affected by reductions in exposure to individual risk through an expansionof public health insurance. Public insurance reduces the value of intra-household risk sharing, so people can therefore be more patient and picky in committing to a partner. The second chapter explores how unintended births may be affected by financial subsidization of prescription contraceptives through public health insurance coverage. The results suggest limited if any benefits aside from for teens, implying the need to explore other methods and mechanisms to reduce unintended births. The third chapter examines whether the so- called “male breadwinner norm”, prescribing that husbands should earn more than wives, leads women to work less to avoid or compensate for violation of the norm. The findings suggest earlier work claiming such a result was based on a flawed estimation strategy, and underscores both the importance of studying in detail how gender norms may operate, and the care needed to provide quantitative evidence for the impact of gender norms.