We reconsider the well-known Becker–Coase (BC) theorem according to which changes in divorce law should not affect divorce rates. We do that in a context of households that consume public goods in addition to private goods. For the Becker–Coase theorem to hold in this setting, utility must be transferable both within marriage and upon divorce, and the marginal rate of substitution between public and private consumption needs to be invariant in marital status. We show that if divorce alters the way some goods are consumed (either because some goods that are public in marriage become private in divorce or because divorce affects either the marginal rate of substitution between public and private goods or even the cardinalization of a spouse’s utility), then the Becker–Coase theorem holds only for very specific preferences. We conclude that, in general, divorce laws will influence the divorce rate, although the impact of a change in divorce laws can go in either direction.

We provide a new explanation for the narrowing and reversal of the gender education gap. We assume that parents maximize the full income of their children and that males have an additional income, independently of education. This additional income biases preferences toward sons and implies that females have relative advantage in producing income through education. When the returns to human capital are low, the bias toward sons is high, so that parents whose first newborns are females have more children. Consequently, daughters are born to larger families and hence receive less education. As returns to human capital increase, gender differences in producing income diminish, bias toward sons declines, variation in family size falls and the positive correlation between family size and the number of daughters is weakened. Ultimately, the relative advantage of females in education dominates differences in family size, triggering the reversal in the gender education gap.

The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS)-International partnership is a project of the Minnesota Population Center and national statistical agencies, dedicated to collecting and distributing census data from around the world. IPUMS is currently disseminating data on over a half-billion persons enumerated in more than 250 census samples from 79 countries. The data series includes information on a broad range of population characteristics, including fertility, nuptiality, life-course transitions, migration, labor-force participation, occupational structure, education, ethnicity, and household composition. This paper describes sample characteristics and data structure; the data integration process including the creation of constructed family interrelationship variables; the flexible dissemination system that enables researchers to build customized extracts of pooled census samples across time and place; and some of the most significant findings that have emerged from the database.