Resumen de The effects of marital transitions and spousal characteristic on economic outcomes
My dissertation aims to improve our understanding of why and how couple dynamics and marital transitions affect four critical economic outcomes: household savings, labour supply, transition to self-employment and income distribution. In all of my papers, behavior of the couple is at the center. First chapter analayzes the likelihood of starting a business and examines at the influence of marriage, its duration and the characteristics of the spouse on the probability to make a transition to entrepreneurship. In the second chapter, I take advantage of Irish Divorce Law introduced in 1996 as quasi-natural experiment for the rise in the risk of divorce and explain its effects on household savings behavior. The third chapterturns its attention to labour supply behaviour of the men on women experiencing a risk in the marital stability. Similarly, the last paper is also concerned about entry and exits from marriage, but it considers these phenomena together with the rise in female employment. Consequently, this chapter sheds light to the mechanisms through which changes in family types and labor supply decisions of women are actually leading to higher or lower inequality. Generally, my dissertation covers both substantive and methodological issues on several fields from inequality research to family demographics and entrepreneurship.
