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Infidelity

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Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a relatively little-explored topic in economics, namely, infidelity. While in the last 40 years there has been a number of studies focusing on extramarital affairs and on-the-match search, the scarcity of data and the complexity of modelling infidelity may have limited the amount of papers that analyzed this issue. The chapter starts with a simple conceptual framework on the incidence of infidelity and then reviews the empirical literature on its socio-economic determinants, the contextual factors (workplace, internet) that may facilitate it, as well as its persistence. The chapter proceeds with a brief description of theoretical models of infidelity, ranging from games and networks to search and matching models. In the final part, the chapter discusses the consequences of infidelity on child development and adult health and highlights avenues for future research.

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Acknowledgment

Responsible Section Editor: Klaus F Zimmermann.

The article has benefitted from valuable comments of the editors, anonymous referees, Michele Tertilt, and participants at the 37th EBES conference in Berlin. Financial support by the German Research Foundation (through the CRC-TR-224 project A3 and a Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Prize) is gratefully noted.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

    Effrosyni Adamopoulou

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  1. Effrosyni Adamopoulou
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Correspondence to Effrosyni Adamopoulou .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. UNU-MERIT & Princeton University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Klaus F. Zimmermann

Section Editor information

  1. Center for Population, Development and Labour Economics at UNU – MERIT, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Klaus F. Zimmermann

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Adamopoulou, E. (2022). Infidelity. In: Zimmermann, K.F. (eds) Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57365-6_236-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57365-6_236-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-57365-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-57365-6

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