This book is a response to growing public concern about family breakdown, which is associated in the academic world with a burgeoning interest in marriage and divorce. Academic interest has spread beyond the conventional boundaries of socio-legal studies, and a new literature has emerged that draws on economic analysis to illuminate the dynamics of family formation and dissolution. This new approach is distinguished by the importance it assigns to incentives. Whereas other approaches mostly belittle the role of incentives, the economic approach gives them a central place in the analysis of marriage and divorce. Legal and other policy innovations that substantially alter the structure of incentives are presumed to have a significant impact on individual behavior and hence on the formation, operation, and dissolution of families.

Some followers of the economic approach are professional economists, some are specialists in the economic analysis of law, and still others are academic lawyers. They are all represented in this book. The subject matter of the book may be loosely described as “the economic analysis of family law” in so far as it concerns marriage, divorce, and related issues. The literature on this topic tends to be largely American in origin and is scattered around a wide diversity of academic journals. In this book we bring together some of the major authors in the field, who survey and synthesize existing literature and in some cases provide new analyses of their own.