Abstract Family formation is associated with sharp declines in men’s criminal activity, but the underlying mechanisms remain underexplored. This paper proposes and tests an intrahousehold bargaining mechanism. Entering a union, whether through cohabitation or marriage, brings previously unconstrained risky behavior into household negotiation. Partner disapproval creates demand for change, while bargaining power determines how strongly that demand translates into behavioral change. Using individual-level panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) linked to gender-specific local labor demand shocks, I show that men’s likelihood of arrest falls as their female partners’ relative labor market opportunities improve, a proxy for bargaining power. Arrest declines are also larger among men with higher baseline risk, consistent with more previously unconstrained behavior becoming subject to household negotiation. The bargaining-power association is at least as strong in cohabitation as in marriage, inconsistent with explanations based solely on legal marriage or marital identity.
Abstract Female empowerment is intended to improve women’s welfare, yet empirical evidence often reveals a non-monotonic relationship between women’s outside options and household conflict. I develop a household bargaining model, building on Hirschman’s exit-voice framework, that explains this pattern. By modeling bargaining access as contested rather than automatic, I formalize a strategic gap between activated voice and credible exit. Early gains activate voice without fully deterring resistance, raising conflict; further gains make exit credible and reduce resistance, producing an inverse-U pattern. The framework reframes conflict as an equilibrium outcome of contested bargaining access rather than as backlash against norm violation, suggesting that rising conflict can signal newly activated agency. The model further implies that standard survey measures of agency may conflate silent tolerance, expressive voice, and credible influence.
Many jobs require workers to be available when schedules, clients, or workloads change unexpectedly. That flexibility must be produced somewhere: firms can absorb it internally through backup staffing, or households can reorganize around the focal worker. I develop a model in which firms and households are alternative producers of flexibility, and household organization feeds back into firms’ job design. When firms provide less flexibility internally, households produce more worker reserve availability by specializing around the worker’s job. By lowering the effective cost of demanding worker flexibility, this adjustment makes more flexibility-intensive forms of work more profitable for firms to adopt. A supply of household flexibility can therefore create its own demand. The resulting equilibrium can be inefficient, and I characterize the conditions under which jobs are excessively flexibility-intensive and firms rely excessively on households to absorb the costs of worker availability.
The paper studies how an authority designs requirements for obtaining a promised benefit to keep people believing and trying. Easier requirements make the benefit seem more attainable and encourage effort, but make failure harder to explain away. The authority therefore trades off motivating effort today against preserving the belief that motivates effort tomorrow.