Economics and Finance Research Talk - 29 November

Speaker: Tom Potons (University of Sussex)

A Spouse and a House are All We Need? Housing Demand, Labor Supply and Divorce over the Lifecycle Abstract: We present a limited commitment framework of household behavior in which households make decisions regarding labor supply, divorce and housing demand over their lifecycle. We identify and estimate our structural model using exogenous variation in female labor supply and divorce rates due to the White v. White reform in England. We study the effect of post-divorce asset division rules and credit market policies on the value of marriage and intra-household behavior. We show the insurance value of marriage is affected by both the presence of limited commitment and borrowing constraints. We also conduct a welfare analysis of sudden house price shocks, where we show that single women might incur most costs of such upticks in house price volatility.

For more Information:

Wenke.Zhang@brunel.ac.uk; Matteo.Pazzona@brunel.ac.uk