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Research
Yours, Mine and Ours: Do Divorce Laws Influence
the Intertemporal Behavior of Married Couples
Divorce
laws determine spouses' individual property rights over household
resources. This paper examines how such laws influence the intertemporal
behavior and the welfare of U.S. married couples. To this end, I build a life-cycle model where
spouses are uncertain about their future preferences for remaining married
and make collective choices about consumption, wealth accumulation, human
capital investment and divorce under multiple divorce law regimes. I
estimate the model using variation in U.S. divorce laws from the 1970s to
the 90s and data from the PSID and the NLSW. I find that couples responded
to equal division of assets in unilateral divorce by increasing tangible
assets, which is compatible with the presence of a strong income effect for
the primary earner. Moreover, in equal division of assets and unilateral
divorce regimes, women accumulated relatively less labor market experience,
as tangible assets provided them with more insurance and additional
bargaining power in their households.
Equal division of assets benefited women in the sample, who only
held approximately 15 percent of bargaining weight in their marriages.
However, equal division may be far less favorable to women, and potentially
detrimental, as they gain parity.
Compulsory Licensing: Evidence
from the Trading-with-the-Enemy Act (with Petra Moser)
Compulsory
licensing, which is permissible under the Trade Related Intellectual
Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, allows domestic firms to produce
inventions that are patented by foreign nationals, without the consent of
patent owners. As an emergency measure, compulsory licensing offers clear
benefits, as it helps deliver life-saving drugs to millions of patients.
The long run effects of compulsory licensing, however, are unclear. This
paper uses an exogenous event of compulsory licensing after World War I to
measure the long-run effects of compulsory licensing on domestic invention
in the licensing country. Specifically, we compare changes in patents by
domestic inventors across U.S. chemical inventions that were differentially
affected by compulsory licensing under the Trading with the Enemy Act
(TWEA) of World War I. Our data suggest that compulsory licensing has a
large positive effect on domestic invention. The data also show that the
full effects of compulsory licensing take up to ten years to materialize,
suggesting that they will be missed in analyses of contemporary data.
Widowhood and
Loss of Welfare among U.S. Women (in progress)
Compulsory
Licensing: Does it Discourage Invention among Patent Owners? (with
Petra Moser, in progress)
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