Overview
Justin Wolfers is a labor and macroeconomist at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Formerly at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is best known for his collaborative work with Betsey Stevenson on the economics of marriage, divorce, and family structure, and for his broader empirical work on well-being, forecasting, and prediction markets.
Key Contributions / Features
- Marriage and Divorce survey (Stevenson and Wolfers 2007): canonical empirical survey of 150-year U.S. marriage and divorce trends; proposed the consumption-complementarities theory of modern marriage; documented the post-1981 divorce decline, cohort variation, racial/education heterogeneity, international comparisons, and driving forces.
- Unilateral divorce and divorce rates (Wolfers 2006): American Economic Review paper reconciling the conflicting literature on whether unilateral divorce laws raised divorce rates; finding: divorce spiked 2 years post-reform (pent-up demand) then reverted; at a 10-year horizon, no discernible long-run effect — unilateral divorce explains little of the long-run trend.
- Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law (Stevenson and Wolfers 2006): showed that unilateral divorce laws reduced female suicide and domestic violence, even though they did not permanently raise divorce rates — evidence that legal regime shapes intra-marriage bargaining power.
- Prediction markets and forecasting: research on the efficiency and information content of prediction markets for economic, political, and sporting outcomes.
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