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Mechoulan, Stéphane

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10222/36358

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    Divorce laws and the structure of the American family
    (UNIV CHICAGO PRESS, 2006-01) Mechoulan, S.
    This paper investigates the impact of no-fault divorce laws on marriage and divorce in the United States. I propose a theory that captures the key stylized facts of the rising then declining divorce rates and the apparent convergence of divorce rates across the different divorce regimes. The empirical results suggest that a shift from fault to no-fault divorce increased the odds of divorcing for those couples who married before the shift. The analysis further suggests that those couples who marry after the shift to a no-fault regime, in turn, sort themselves better upon marriage, which offsets the direct effect of the law on divorce rates. Consistent with that selectivity argument, after a switch to a no-fault divorce regime, women get married later in life. These results hold for the law that governs property division and spousal support. The law that governs divorce grounds does not seem to matter significantly.
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    The External Effects of Black Male Incarceration on Black Females
    (UNIV CHICAGO PRESS, 2011-01) Mechoulan, Stephane
    This article examines how the increase in the incarceration of black men and the sex ratio imbalance it induces shape the behavior of young black women. Combining data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Current Population Survey to match male incarceration rates with individual observations over two decades, I show that black male incarceration lowers the odds of black non-marital teenage fertility while increasing young black women's school attainment and early employment. These results can account for the sharp bridging of the racial gap over the 1990s for a range of socioeconomic outcomes among females.
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    Altruism and Innovation in Health Care
    (UNIV CHICAGO PRESS, 2010-08) Jena, Anupam B.; Mechoulan, Stephane; Philipson, Tomas J.
    The joint presence of technological change and consumption externalities is central to health care industries around the world, because medical innovation drives the expansion of the health care sector and altruism seems to motivate many public subsidies. Although traditional economic analysis has proposed well-known remedies to deal with consumption externalities and inefficient technological change in isolation, it lacks clear principles for addressing them jointly. We argue that standard remedies to each of the two problems are inadequate. Focusing on U. S. health care, we provide illustrative calculations of the dynamic inefficiency in the level of research and development (R&D) spending when innovators are unable to appropriate the altruistic surplus of non-consumers. We calibrate that altruistic gains amount to about a quarter of consumer surplus in the baseline scenario and that R&D spending may be underprovided by as much as 60 percent.