Property rights and women’s earnings : evidence from British Columbia’s Family Law Act
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In March 2013, British Columbia’s Family Law Act extended equal-division property rights to common-law partners after two years of cohabitation. Using Statistics Canada’s Longitudinal Administrative Databank (2006–2019) and event-study difference-in-differences with Ontario and a propensity-score–matched control, I focus on couples already positioned to be covered (“Pre-CLPs”). Women in Pre-CLPs experience short-run declines in employment income after 2013, with minimal pre-trends in the benchmark specification; men’s estimates are small and rarely significant. Effects are not stronger for mothers of young children, consistent with large pre-existing childcare-related earnings penalties. On relationship margins, entries into CLP and marriage show short-lived post-2013 bulges amid upward pre-trends—consistent with awareness/reclassification rather than durable formation changes. I find no systematic evidence of strategic avoidance of the two-year threshold. Overall, aligning CLP and marital property rights appears to reallocate women’s time away from market work within ongoing unions, with muted effects on men and relationship survival.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".