More or Less Unmarried. The Impact of Legal Settings of Cohabitation on Labour Market Outcomes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We study how different levels of protection upon separation affect the labour market behaviour of unmarried cohabiting partners. In Canada, unmarried cohabitation becomes a legal status after one year of relationship. Most provinces automatically expand couples’ rights and responsibilities after several years of cohabitation: some provinces allow cohabiting partners to claim for alimony upon separation, while others consider cohabiting couples to be equal to married couples. Using cross-province variations in legal settings and minimum eligibility duration, we show that eligibility for a more protective regime increases men’s labour supply and earnings and decreases those of women’s. The impact of the marriage-like regime is stronger, especially for women. We find that the effect is significantly stronger for couples directly eligible at the time of the reform than for couples who are eligible after the reform and may have anticipated changes in the legal settings. Our results show that eligibility affects within-household allocation of earnings and hours of work, and reinforces existing inequality. We present some evidence that enhancing protection upon separation has an effect on the selection of couples into cohabitation. Our results contribute to the ongoing public debate regarding the legal recognition and level of protection that should be given to unmarried cohabiting partners. Our results show that behavioural response may offset additional protection upon separation by increasing women’s dependence on their partner.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".