Payments at the time of marriage, which are ubiquitous in developing countries, can be substantial enough to impoverish … parents. Brideprice and dowry have both been linked to domestic violence against women, and inflation in these payments has … prompted legislation against them in several jurisdictions. Marriage payments are often a substitute for investment in female …

This chapter surveys the voluminous literature on household formation and marriage markets in developing countries. We … market. We end the chapter with a discussion of marriage dissolution and other changes in household structure. Fertility … these factors are particularly important in poor countries, especially in a rural setting. We then focus on marriage, which …

frictions to aggregate marriage behavior in 18th century Quebec. The reduced form estimates show that a simple random matching … model of the marriage market, in which there are gains to assortative matching and women may leave the marriage market at a … higher rate than men, can explain these data. The estimates also show that the marriage market was segmented by social status …

developing world. In a model of incomplete marriage markets, dowries are viewed as ex ante transfers made from the bride's family …

difference arises because of differences in access to family support networks: cohabitees' household income falls by less because … marriage does not appear to translate into economic protection. …

the husband, the wife spends more time on household chores; moreover, those couples are less satisfied with their marriage … argue that this pattern is best explained by gender identity norms, which induce an aversion to a situation where the wife … earns more than her husband. We present evidence that this aversion also impacts marriage formation, the wife's labor force …

In the marriage market, families make investments on behalf of their young so that they are able to form a household … with their preferred partner. We analyze marriage markets in a central region of China between about 1300 and 1850 through … the lens of a model of marriage matching and intergenerational transmission of inequality. For both female and male …

gender inequality. Because parenthood is often tied to marriage, we also investigate the existence of marriage penalties in … different regions of the world. The fraction of gender inequality explained by child penalties varies systematically with … minuscule fraction of gender inequality. But as economies develop -- incomes rise and the labor market transitions from …