Professor Grossbard on the Law and Economics of Households (as of July 2010)

Powerpoint from first Annual Lecture on the Family, TheFamilyWatch, Madrid, May 2010 (.pptx)

Some of these articles can be downloaded via REPEC at http://authors.repec.org/pro/pgr93/

"Does Community Property Discourage Unpartnered Births?" (with Olivia Ekert-Jaffe), in European Journal of Political Economy, 24 (2008) 25–40. Investigates the likelihood of an unpartnered birth as a function of laws regulating the division of joint property in case of divorce. Based on a rational choice model of marriage and assuming that on average women earn less than men, we predict that women are less likely to have an unpartnered birth when rules for the division of joint property are more advantageous to spouses with lower earnings. We derive more predictions regarding the effects of age, non-intact home, and religiosity, and the interaction between these variables and legal regimes regarding divorce. We test our predictions with retrospective data from the Family Fertility Surveys collected in the 1990s. Most of our predictions are confirmed by a multi-country analysis for 17 legal regimes in 12 Western countries as well as single-country analyses for four countries. Our major findings are that the likelihood of an unpartnered birth is higher in countries that offer most women less access to joint property in case of divorce, and that this effect is weaker for teenagers than for women in their twenties.

Shoshana Grossbard. “Repack the Household: A Comment on Robert Ellickson’s Unpacking the Household,” in Yale Law Journal Pocket Edition, at http://yalelawjournal.org/2007/04/16/grossbard.html  April 2007.

"Competitive Marriage Markets and Jewish Law" . Revised version can be found in The Economics of Judaism and Jewish Human Capital, edited by Carmel U. Chiswick and Tikva Lecker with Nava Kahana. Ramat-Gan , Israel : Bar Ilan University Press, 2006.

Marriage and the Economy: Introduction to Shoshana Grossbard-Shechtman,  Marriage and the Economy: Theory and Evidence from Advanced Industrial Societies New York and Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 2003.

Shoshana Grossbard-Shechtman and Bertrand Lemennicier. "Marriage Contracts and the Law-and-Economics of Marriage: An Austrian Perspective," Journal of Socio-Economics, 28: 665-690, 1999.

Shoshana Grossbard-Shechtman, "Marriage Market Models," in M. Tommasi and K. Ierulli (eds.) The New Economics of Human Behavior, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Includes an economic analysis of the effects of no-fault divorce laws on women’s material well-being after divorce, on divorce rates, on marriage rates, labor force participation rates, and financial well-being during marriage. This analysis uses a Demand and Supply model of women’s work in marital household production.

Shoshana Grossbard-Shechtman. On the Economics of Marriage - A Theory of Marriage, Labor and Divorce. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993. (index available)

Amyra Grossbard-Shechtman. "Economics, Judaism, and Marriage," Dinei Israel, A Journal of Science and Jewish Law, 1986 (in Hebrew).