In June of 1988 in Sweden it was announced that survivorship benefits, a sort of government provided life insurance paid to a wife whose husband dies, would be discontinued. There was one interesting exception: an unmarried couple with a child together born before the change could take up survivorship insurance if they married before Jan 1 1990. The spike in new marriages in the graph shows the response to this incentive.
That’s the basis for Petra Persson‘s job market paper. Petra points out that the spike is somewhat mysterious because for all of these couples the promise of survivorship insurance wasn’t enough to induce them to marry previously and only when the option was going to disappear did they exercise it.
Of course some of these new marriages were couples that planned eventually to marry (and take up benefits) and who moved their marriage date earlier. But Petra credibly…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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