Based on county-level census data for the German state of Bavaria in 1939 and 1946, we use World War II as a natural experiment to study the effects of sex ratio changes on out-of-wedlock fertility. Our findings show that war-induced shortfalls of men to women significantly increased the...

This paper provides a first microeconomic foundation for the institution of marriage. Based on a model of reproduction, mating, and parental investment in children, we argue that marriage serves the purpose of attenuating the risk of mating market failure that arises from incomplete information...

In a stylized Robinson Crusoe economy, we demonstrate the usefulness of homogeneity in initial conditions when solving and analyzing macroeconomic models. In a first step, we define state-like and control-like variables. In a second step, we introduce the value-function-like function. While the...