If the economic crises we have experienced in the last quarter century have taught us anything, it is this: home economics affects family relationshipsthat is, how people organize ourselves in the smallest social unit we have, the family.

Thanks to the work of an international team of economists, we now know a little better how it affects the economy. By analyzing a group of Swedish lottery winners, the researchers found that winning these prizes not only affected the formation and breakup of families, but also affected men and women differently.

The study in question was published as a study report by National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an American research center dedicated to economic analysis. So, research not yet peer-reviewed. Its purpose as described in the document is for your discussion and comment.

The study analyzes marriages and divorces (depending on whether the award goes to a single or married person, respectively) and fertility (in this case regardless of marital status) in the short, medium, and long term (after two, five, and ten years). Winners of different lottery draws in Sweden.

The analysis reveals that winning lottery prizes increases the odds of getting married and having children (whether or not included) and has an indistinguishable impact on divorces.

However, the authors highlight the breakdown by gender from their results. The reason for this is that while the results are close to the average in the short and medium term when only men are considered, the results are different for women.

when it comes to men, a lottery win of one million Swedish crowns (in exchange for about 90,000 euros) meant a 30% increase in the probability of marriage in the medium term (five years). Winning the lottery also implied a lower probability of divorce for men in the medium and long term.

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 elegant women in the sample did not at least significantly change their behavior regarding the establishment or expansion of families. The average results also showed a trend towards more marriages and more children, although the difference from the general population was not significant.

An important difference emerged in short-term divorce: Winning the lottery won the women. Swedish women will be more likely to divorce in the short run. Of course, in the medium term the effect once again became indistinguishable from the Swedish average and disappeared 10 years later.

Lottery results are used by economists to analyze wealth outcomes, avoiding some of the biases that arise from variables associated with the money we win. Because lotteries are random, some of these biases can be avoided.

The researchers turned to three types of lottery draws held in Sweden that left 86,768 prize samples for people ages 18 to 44 that the researchers used. In addition to gender, the researchers control for some other variables, such as education level, age, or number of children at the time the award was won.

open discussion

The results presented have a point of impermanence. As stated in the research paper, the article has not yet been peer-reviewed and open to interpretation by the scientific community. For example, one detail that escapes analysis is the weight in the consequences of same-sex marriage.

The results are consistent with the idea of ​​hypergamy, the idea that (heterosexual) marriages tend to occur between a man of higher socioeconomic status and a woman with fewer resources, which is not surprising given that men tend to have more income and resources than women. .

“Such different effects can occur for a variety of reasons, for example, there is a strong social norm idealizing the male head of householdThe authors explain by citing the fact that such consequences can only occur as a result of differences in the benefits that marriage creates 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 Scandinavian country alternates between first and second place in the ranking. glass ceiling index of the magazine Economist. The index and ranking attempt to measure the “role and influence of women” in the context of the workforce and tend to be dominated by Scandinavian countries.

What we can draw from this study is that, despite all the developments in the last centuries, “some universally accepted truths” have not changed much since Jane Austen’s time.

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