“Fortunate Families? The Effects of Wealth on Marriage and Fertility”, 2023-03 ():
We estimate the effects of large, positive wealth shocks on marriage and fertility in a sample of Swedish lottery players.
For male winners, wealth increases marriage formation and reduces divorce risk, suggesting wealth increases men’s attractiveness as prospective and current partners. Wealth also increases male fertility.
The only discernible effect on female winners is that wealth increases their short-run (but not long-run) divorce risk. Our results for divorce are consistent with a model where the wealthier spouse retains most of his/her wealth in divorce.
In support of this assumption, we show divorce settlements in Sweden often favor the richer spouse.
[Commentary: “This is really a remarkable finding to have validated across multiple studies in multiple contexts with high empirical quality, as it really strengthens the argument that work-egalitarian models may have fundamental demographic problems, not just problems related to balance: in principle handing women a big pile of cash should ease work-life balance issues and so could boost fertility/marriage. In practice, it leads to divorce across multiple studies. Which suggests that easing work-life balance has only a limited benefit potential.”]