A Swedish study of almost 77,000 lottery players suggests that sudden, unearned wealth can alter family life in gendered ways: men become more likely to marry and have children, while women experience a brief rise in divorce risk. The research, published in the Journal of Human Resources, used random windfalls from lotteries to examine long-term effects on marriage and fertility.
Economist Anastasia Terskaya, a co-author, framed the findings within a long-standing theoretical tradition. “Economists have long argued that money shapes decisions about marriage, divorce and having children,” she said. “Gary Becker’s work in the 1960s-70s is the classic example.” She emphasised that the study seeks to identify causality by using random prize sizes.
Money may also influence what people look for in a partner. A separate line of research cited by the researchers suggested that women’s stated preference for wealthier partners can shift when they gain economic power, though that prior work relied on simulations rather than real-world behaviour. The Swedish study adds a real-world angle to those theories, though disentangling wealth from other factors remains challenging.
To isolate the effect of wealth itself, the team chose lottery winnings because prize amounts are random. “Lotteries get around this problem because the size of the prize is random,” Terskaya explained. By comparing players who faced the same odds but won different amounts, the researchers argue they can estimate how wealth alters life trajectories.
The study tracked 76,859 lottery players aged 18 to 44 at the time of win, linking their records to government registries on marriage, divorce and childbirth across two-, five- and ten-year horizons. The lotteries included a monthly subscription draw, a scratch-ticket prize and a savings account that fed into lottery draws. The players resembled other Swedes of similar age and sex, with 33 percent married among players versus 35 percent in the comparison group; incomes were similar, though players were somewhat less likely to have attended college (24 percent versus 30 percent).
The researchers grouped participants tightly by exact lottery participation, such as the number of subscription tickets bought in a given month, to approximate a randomised experiment. This design allowed them to ask what happens to family life when people suddenly become wealthier.
Among those who were unmarried at win, a 1 million SEK windfall increased the probability of marriage within five years for men by 4.7 percentage points, from a baseline of about 16 percent. The rise was most pronounced among men who started with below-median incomes prior to winning.
For unmarried women, the effect on marriage was small and not statistically significant, though researchers cautioned the gender gap did not reach a level where they could rule out chance. “Even in Sweden, one of the world’s most gender-equal societies, men’s and women’s responses differ,” Terskaya observed, suggesting different marriage preferences between the sexes.
Divorce presented a more striking gender divergence. Married women who won the lottery saw their short-term divorce risk nearly double, rising by almost 4 percentage points from a baseline of 4 percent within two years after the win. “The divorce effect for women is sharp and short-lived,” Terskaya noted. “This suggests that women still face financial barriers to leaving a marriage.” The effect faded by the ten-year mark, implying wealth accelerated divorces that were already under consideration rather than causing new splits.
In contrast, wealth appeared to reduce divorce risk for married men, though this result was the least robust in the study and proved sensitive to the sample definition. The researchers warned that the stabilising effect on male marriages did not hold consistently across different age ranges and statistical tests.
The divorce findings align with broader work suggesting gendered dynamics in how income relates to marriage stability. The Swedish results also resonated with Finnish research cited by PsyPost in 2026, which linked higher secondary-earner income to greater divorce risk and higher primary-earner income to more stable marriages, albeit using observational income data rather than windfall shocks.
On fertility, the team found that wealth likewise functions as a normal good for men: ten years after a win, male winners had 0.056 more children per 1 million SEK won, amounting to roughly a 14 percent increase in fertility. The researchers estimated that 20 to 40 percent of the fertility rise could be attributed to higher marriage rates and lower divorce rates. Women’s fertility showed a small positive bump but did not reach statistical significance, with the strongest gender gap among winners over 35, a factor the authors say could reflect age-related fertility constraints rather than preferences alone.
Across the full sample, the authors noted that each 1 million SEK of windfall wealth raises the number of children born over ten years by about 0.033, a figure they describe as modest in absolute terms but potentially meaningful when scaled. They also estimated that every $100,000 of windfall wealth increases the odds of marriage in the next five years by about 1.2 percentage points, warning that large-scale cash transfers would be an expensive way to influence marriage or birth rates.
Commenting on the broader interpretation, Jeong Jin Yu, a professor not involved in the study, said the findings confirm that men’s economic resources are linked to marriage and family formation. He stressed that the study’s lottery design strengthens causal inference but cautioned that the data do not measure relationship quality or decision-making within marriages.
The authors stressed the context: Sweden’s welfare state, permissive divorce regime and cultural norms shape the results, so the findings may translate best to other high-income welfare states and less to developing countries. They urged caution against overinterpreting the data as universal.
The study, titled Fortunate Families? The Effects of Wealth on Marriage and Fertility, was authored by David Cesarini, Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling and Anastasia Terskaya. The researchers emphasised that future work should explore relationship quality, financial decision-making within couples and how wealth affects each partner’s independence, across different nations.
