If the succession of economic crises that we have experienced in the last quarter of a century has taught us anything, it is that the domestic economy affects family relationshipsthat is, how humans organize ourselves in the smallest of the social units that we have, the family.
We now know a little better how it affects the economy thanks to the work of an international team of economists. By analyzing a group of Swedish lottery winners, the researchers found that winning these prizes not only affected the formation and dissolution of families, but also affected men and women differently.
The study in question has been published as a working paper, by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an American research center dedicated to economic analysis. That is to say, the research has not yet been peer-reviewed. Its intention, explained in the document, is your discussion and comment.
The work analyzes marriages and divorces (respectively depending on whether the award goes to someone single or married), and fertility (in this case regardless of marital status) in the short, medium and long term (two, five and ten years ahead) of the winners of different lottery draws in Sweden.
The analysis finds that winning lottery prizes increased the probability of getting married and having children (regardless of whether there was a wedding involved), as well as an effect on divorces that was indistinguishable from zero.
But the authors highlight from their results the breakdown by gender. The reason is that, although when considering only men the results are similar to the average in the short and medium term, the results were different in the case of women.
In the case of men, a lottery winnings of one million Swedish crowns (about 90,000 euros in exchange) implied an increase in the odds of marriage of 30% in the medium term (five years). Winning the lottery also implied a lower probability of divorce in the medium and long term for men.
Winning the lottery also increased their fertility: 1 million kroner meant an average of 0.056 more children over a 10-year period, a small but significant change.
In contrast, the graceful women in the sample did not change their behavior regarding the formation or extension of families, at least significantly. Although the average results also showed a trend toward marrying more and having more children, the difference from the general population was not significant.
Where a significant difference did appear was in short-term divorce: Winning the lottery made women Swedish women’s odds of divorce will increase in the short term. Of course, in the medium term the impact once again became indistinguishable from the Swedish average, to disappear after 10 years.
The lottery results are used by economists to analyze the results of wealth, avoiding some biases due to variables correlated with the money we earn. As the lotteries are random, part of these biases can be avoided.
The researchers turned to three types of lottery draws held in Sweden that left a sample of 86,768 prizes for people between the ages of 18 and 44 that the researchers used. In addition to gender, the researchers control for some other variables such as education level, age, or the number of children at the time of winning the prize.
open discussion
The results presented have a point of provisionality. As noted in the research paper, the paper has not yet been peer-reviewed and is open to comment from the scientific community. One detail that, for example, escapes analysis is the weight in the results of homosexual marriages.
The results are consistent with the idea of hypergamy, the idea that (heterosexual) marriages tend to occur between a man with higher socioeconomic status and a woman with fewer resources, not surprising considering that men tend to own more income and resources than women.
“Such differential impacts may arise for a variety of reasons, for example because there is a strong social norm idealizing the male head of household”, the authors explain in reference to the fact that such results can only appear as a result of differences in the utility generated by marriage for both sexes.
All this despite the fact that Sweden is one of the countries with the least socio-economic gender inequality in the world. The Nordic country has been alternating between first and second place in the ranking based on the glass ceiling index of the magazine The Economist. Index and ranking try to measure “the role and influence of women” in the labor context and tend to be dominated by Nordic countries.
What it seems we can extract from this work is that despite all the advances in recent centuries, it seems that some “universally accepted truths” have not changed much since the time of Jane Austen.
In Magnet | This is the “penalty per child” in Spain: the woman earns 28% less at 10 years of the first child
Image | pedestrian Hugo