Courtship as an Investing Game : Labor-Market and Marriage-Market Outcomes by Age by Marriage

This paper documents relationships between age at marriage and labor-market out- come reflected by personal income as well as relationships between age at marriage and marriage-market outcome reflected by spousal income for Americans born from 1900s to 1970s, and motivated by these documented relationships, provides a theory based on human capital investments and differential fecundity to explain these relationships, gender differences in these relationships, as well as the changes of these relationships over time, improving the predictions by the seminal theories of Becker (1973, JPE) and Bergstrom and Bagnoli (1993, JPE)