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We study the determinants of intra-household decision-making responsibility over economic and financial choices using a direct measure provided in the 1989–2010 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth. We find that the probability that the wife is responsible for decisions increases as the wife's characteristics in terms of age, education and income become closer or even higher than those of her husband's. Thus, consistently with a bargaining approach, decision-making responsibility is associated with marriage heterogamy, and not only along strictly economic dimensions. However, in support of an alternative household production approach, we also find that the probability that the wife is responsible is lower when she is employed, which suggests the presence of a specialization pattern assigning responsibility to the spouse with more available time. Our results are robust to additional controls and alternative samples.

This article uses data from the 1987–1988 National Survey of Families and Households to study the determinants of religious intermarriage in the United States as well as changes over time in its prevalence. Separate logit regressions are estimated for exclusivist Protestant, ecumenical Protestant, and Catholic respondents. Variables identified as playing a role in the intermarriage decision include the proportion of coreligionists in the relevant marriage market, various proxies for religiosity and for commitment to the parental faith, education, a premarital pregnancy, and gender. The estimated effects are generally consistent with hypotheses derived from a model of religious intermarriage. The results also show that the prevalence of religious heterogamy has increased significantly over the past decades for Catholics and ecumenical Protestants. In sharp contrast, there has been no perceptible change in the probability of marrying outside the religion for exclusivist Protestants, a group which continues to display distinctive patterns of economic and demographic behavior.

This is a challenging moment for the law of discrimination. The state’s role in discrimination has largely shifted from requiring discrimination - through official policies such as segregation - to prohibiting discrimination - through federal laws covering areas such as employment, housing, education, and public accommodations. Yet the problem of discrimination persists, often in forms that are hard to regulate or even to recognize. At this challenging moment, the intimate domain presents a vital terrain for study in two main ways. First, conceptually, studying the intimate domain permits new insights into discrimination and the law’s identity categories, because people are more willing to be explicit about identity-based preferences in this domain than in others (such as employment). Second, practically, examining the intimate domain reveals the ways that relationships in this sphere affect hierarchies and opportunities in more public domains, and the role the state plays in those relationships. This Article therefore examines intimate discrimination, focusing on race, sex, and disability, and identifies key norms for each category. For race, the norm is homogamy, or pairing with one’s own type; for sex, by contrast, the norm is heterogamy, pairing outside one’s type; and for disability, the norm is desexualization, rather than pairing with one group or another. The Article does not assume that intimate discrimination is necessarily bad. On the contrary, examining the nuanced landscape of discrimination in this realm is one of the Article’s main purposes. Ultimately, the Article concludes that, at the level of individual interaction, intimate differentiation based on these identity traits can be good, bad, or neutral, depending on context. For this and other reasons, legal regulation targeting individual differentiation on these bases would be woefully misguided. Nonetheless, the state plays important roles in intimate discrimination at a structural level. By creating the infrastructure of society, the state shapes the accidents of who meets whom and how. In addition, the state plays a role in the hierarchy of intimate opportunities by shaping social capital and relative advantages. The state therefore should reform its laws and policies to attend to its structural role in intimate discrimination. For sex, the most obvious next step is to cease to restrict marriage according to sex. For disability, the state should help to encourage opportunities for intimate affiliation by, among other things, attending to the architecture of intimacy, by which I mean the ways that structures of accommodation operate to help or hinder not only access, but also closeness. For race, the state’s goal should not be to encourage race mixing, but rather to lift burdens on existing relationships, such as residential segregation. Recognizing how intimate affiliations affect opportunities and status hierarchies, both in the intimate sphere and beyond, points us toward new ways to intervene in the persistent problem of discrimination.

In choosing marriage partners, we generally look for someone with similar status characteristics to our own. This paper suggests that status inequalities may be hypothesized to make a difference in marital satisfaction. Using the couple as the unit of analysis, the effects of educational heterogamy on marital satisfaction were investigated. Using ordinary least-squares regression, we found that when husbands had more education than their wives, both partners reported less than happy marriages with more disagreement and less positive feedback. Conversely, when the wife had more education, both partners reported more satisfaction with the marriage. Using results from the ordinary least-squares regression, a two-stage least-squares model was estimated. In this more complete model, the strongest effect on each partner's marital satisfaction was the feedback regarding the other partner's happiness within the marriage. Possible explanations for these findings are presented. We argue that longitudinal studies, using the couple as the unit of analysis, are essential if we wish to study the processes of marital interaction between spouses.

This research focuses on age differences in marriage. The purpose is to develop a partial test of whether over the past five decades age has become less relevant and age norms less constraining. A reduction in the strength of age norms should result in a decrease in coeval marriages. If age norms become less binding, then one should expect people to cast a wider age net when selecting their mate, leading to an increase in the number of marriages with unconventional age differences. Microdata samples of 111000 from 1940 through the 1980 Census of the United States Population were used to derive trends in the proportion of ageheterogamous and age-homogamous couples. The results show that between 1940 and 1980 there was no abatement of age homogamy. In fact a strong trend towards increasing homogamy was discovered. This movement toward increased homogamy, and the converse decrease in the age heterogamy, indicates that age has become more, not less, relevant in mate selection.

Deviations from the age norms governing mate selection often provoke negative stereotypes regarding the participants. This article focuses on age heterogamous unions or so-called May–December marriages, involving an older person with a young spouse. The public often attributes pecuniary (gold digger) motives to the latter. Our research tests the widespread notion that the younger woman exchanges youth for status or money. Using data from the Panel on Income Dynamics, age homogamous and age heterogamous couples are compared in terms of each of the spouse's achieved and inherited status and the contribution these make to explained variance in family income. Analysis using hierarchical multiple regression revealed that, contrary to popular belief, the status of the older spouse does not make a more important contribution toward explained income. Indeed, in this study, the reverse was the case in that the wife's status contributed more toward explained income. The notion that age heterogamy in marriage represents a channel of upward mobility for young women married to older men needs systematic reexamination.