Household Consumption When the Marriage is Stable

We develop a novel framework to analyze the structural implications of the marriage market for house-hold consumption patterns. We start by de…ning a revealed preference characterization of e¢ cient householdconsumption when the marriage is stable. In particular, stability means that the marriage matching is indi-vidually rational and has no blocking pairs. We show that this revealed preference characterization generatestestable conditions even if there is only a single consumption observation per household and individual pref-erences are heterogeneous across households. In addition, the characterization allows for identifying theintrahousehold decision structure (including the sharing rule) under the same minimalistic assumptions. Anapplication to Dutch household data demonstrates the empirical usefulness of our theoretical results.