Marriage and divorce: the role of unemployment insurance
利用德国失业保险改革，研究家庭层面风险分担变化如何影响婚姻市场，发现改革降低了与非德国国籍者的通婚，但提高了婚姻稳定性。
Abstract This paper examines how changes in household-level risk sharing affect the marriage market. We use as our laboratory a German unemployment insurance (UI) reform that tightened means-testing based on the partner’s income. The reduced generosity of UI increased the demand for household-level risk sharing, which lowered the attractiveness of individuals exposed to unemployment risk. Because unemployment risk correlates with non-German nationality, our main finding is that the UI reform led to a decrease in intermarriage. The 2004 expansion of the European Union had a comparable effect on intermarriage for the affected nationalities. Both reforms increased marital stability, which is consistent with better selection by couples.