Essays in Family Economics

This thesis contains three stand-alone papers. Each paper addresses a timely research question that is relevant for ongoing policy debates. The first paper examines whether the “housing crisis” deters the transition to adulthood in England. Specifically, I consider whether the increase in local house prices reduces leaving the family home and/or the transition to a partnership. Using an instrumental variable approach, I find causal evidence that greater house prices increase the probability of living with parents but do not influence relationship formation. The second paper explores the reason for the high level of instability of young people’s relationships. We present an equilibrium partnership model with endogenous separations and frictions with sorting by match quality. Our estimates show that onthe-job is the major channel of partner separations and that pairwise exclusivity is important: well-matched partners, on average, jointly reduce outside contact rates by 77%. Self-enforced commitment explains how cohabitation thrives as an institution even as UK divorce law weakens and marriage rates decline. Reflecting the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic during my study the final paper concentrates on the impact of working from home on worker productivity during the pandemic. We explore how workers adapted to working conditions and which type of workers thrived in each work location. We find that as the pandemic progressed, those who previously performed well in a work location were more likely to remain there. We also estimate factors affecting productivity outcomes across locations controlling for endogenous selection. We find that those in ‘good’ jobs were advantaged in the home environment. Key personality traits – agreeableness and conscientiousness – impact productivity across locations.