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Despite the large occurrence of cohabitation and its strong link to important behavioral outcomes, it has received little attention in the literature. We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to document the labor supply, housework hours, and fertility patterns of cohabiting partners. The data suggests that in comparison to marriage, cohabitation is associated with a lower degree of household specialization, higher relationship instability, and greater degree of positive assortative mating. We develop and estimate a dynamic model of household formation and dissolution, fertility and labor supply and use the estimated model to perform policy experiments that investigate the welfare implications of different institutional arrangements regarding divorce regulations. In a dynamic model of the household with limited commitment, marriage leads to equilibrium outcomes that are closer to the efficient allocation when there are gains from specialization. On the other hand, cohabitation enables partners to insure themselves against uncertainty regarding the match quality of the relationship. Each match has different gains from either living arrangement, depending on their observable characteristics, and match quality. Cohabitation provides a tradeoff between the advantages and disadvantages of getting married and remaining single. Our goal is to use the estimated model to assess the welfare implications of inefficiencies that may arise in co-residential relationships due to lack of commitment. JEL Classification Code: J12, J16, J31, J61

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and Frances Raday Haim Striks School of Law, College of Management Academic Studies, IsraelThis collection of articles arises from a conference held in Tel Aviv in 2009 at the Concord Research Centre for the Integration of International Law in Israel, School of Law, College of Management Academic Studies. Delegates to the conference came from a variety of professions and areas of expertise and included academics and legal and welfare practitioners. What was common among us, however, was our interest in the international dimensions of both understandings of the family and of the normative systems that define and regulate it. We all believed that understandings of family are situated in and across cultural and economic manifestations of reproduction, dependency and care relations in a global context and that they are regulated in international and regional as much as in domestic law.Families are perceived to exist in all societies and in this sense are global phenomena. Even if no one form of family can be described as global, the work that it does can be described in that way. Care and dependency relations exist in all communities and all communities must ensure safe and reliable reproduction. Traditionally and pervasively, the imperatives of care and reproduction are carried out primarily in private contexts and, inevitably, these care and reproductive relations attract measures of regulation and protection by cultures, religions and legal systems both locally and internationally.Our participants noted, however, that the significant designation of those relations as 'family' is informed by, among other things, cultural and religious ideas of gender and generational relations (Raday; Büchler; this volume). These ideas range from the 'traditionalist', in which the functions of the family members and their rights and obligations are defined by status and are usually nonnegotiable, to the 'modernist', in which family relations are constructed and shifted according to individual choice, and are contractually binding at most. Traditionalist families tend to be rigidly formulated into hierarchical patriarchal units, often justified or even 'sacralised' by religious edict (Raday, this volume) and cultural practice (Tagari; Sandberg and Hofri-Winogradow; this volume), while the modernist family is amorphous and based on a conception of autonomous choice (Büchler, this volume). Given that these two 'types' of families not only represent the opposite ends of a descriptive spectrum along which many variations and combinations of relationships can exist, but can exist simultaneously in any particular society, our participants asked how any legal system, whether cultural, religious, international or national, can provide general laws which are appropriate for its whole range of familial relations.Other participants highlighted the relationship between family living and public living, in particular the relationships between ideas of citizenship, nation and family. Ronen, for example, notes in this volume how protection of famil...