Essays in family and labour economics

This doctoral dissertation consists of three self-contained chapters in family and labour economics. The first chapter studies why couples cohabit before marriage and the value of cohabitation as a learning device. Exploiting a Swedish survivor-pension reform and linking the reform response to a structural model of cohabitation, marriage and singlehood, it highlights how cohabitation facilitates learning in a low-commitment union. The second chapter studies the effects of family planning policies on fertility, human capital accumulation, and demographic change in China. Using an overlapping-generations model, it demonstrates a human-capital channel that operates beyond the standard quantity–quality trade-off and proposes policy mechanisms to stabilise fertility while minimising losses in human capital. The third chapter studies how local labor market frictions shape entry into platform-based entrepreneurship. Combining digital data from a large online retail platform with local employment shocks in the United States, it shows that entrants during adverse labor-market conditions adopt more effective customer strategies and achieve stronger subsequent performance.