In this article, I study fertility decisions with special emphasis on the timing of births and abortions over the life cycle. Given the policy debate regarding abortion availability and recent evidence of its positive impact on women's outcomes, understanding the fertility process should help guide the discussion. Here, I present a life-cycle model of consumption-savings and fertility decisions in an environment with uninsurable income shocks and imperfect fertility control. My model presents a framework in which both opportunity costs of child rearing and technological restrictions (in the form of contraception effectiveness) have roles shaping lifetime fertility choices. *

This article studies a competitive search model of the labor market with learning about match‐specific productivity in which risk‐averse workers factor present and future unemployment risks in their search decisions. We examine internally efficient equilibrium allocations in which match termination occurs only if the joint value of a worker–firm pair is negative. Internal efficiency poses a trade‐off between present and future risks. Public insurance provision also affects this trade‐off and, hence, worker turnover and job composition. In addition to unemployment benefits, the implementation of the planner's allocation requires a negative income tax and a 0 layoff tax.

General rightsThis document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. AbstractThe length of new employment relationships is of first order importance for a number of questions in recent macro-labor research. We investigate it using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation for the U.S. from 1996 onwards, and document that above two-fifths of newly employed workers fall into non-employment within a year. We also find that the transition rate from employment to non-employment within the first year varies significantly for different groups of the population, increases with the duration of the previous non-employment spell, exhibits an acyclical or weakly procyclical pattern and a much higher volatility than the unemployment rate.Keywords: Worker turnover, non-employment duration, cyclicality, volatility JEL Codes: J31, J60, J63 * We are grateful to Joan Llull and many participants at numerous seminars and conferences for their comments since the beginning of this project. We would also like to thank the editor and referees for their comments.

In this paper we document that married individuals face a lower unemployment rate than their single counterparts. We refer to this phenomenon as the marriage unemployment gap. Despite dramatic demographic changes in the labor market over the last decades, this gap has been remarkably stable both for men and women. Using a flow-decomposition exercise, we assess which transition probabilities (across labor force states) are behind this phenomenon: For men, the main driver is the higher job losing probabilities faced by single workers. For females, the participation margin also plays a crucial role.

We study unemployment insurance in a framework where the main source of heterogeneity among agents is the type of household they live in: some agents live alone while others live with their spouses as a family. Our exercise is motivated by the fact that married individuals can rely on spousal income to smooth labor market shocks, while singles cannot. We extend a version of the standard incompletemarkets model to include two-agent households and calibrate it to the US economy with special emphasis on matching differences in labor market transitions across gender and marital status as well as aggregate wealth moments. Our central finding is that changes to the current unemployment insurance program are valued differently by married and single households. In particular, a more generous unemployment insurance reduces the welfare of married households significantly more than that of singles and vice versa. We show that this result is driven by the amount of self-insurance existing in married households, and thus, we highlight the interplay between self-and government-provided insurance and its implication for policy.