We develop a model of the household in which spousal incomes are determined by pre-marital investments, the marriage market is charaterized by assortative matching, and endogenously-determined sharing rules form the basis of intra-household allocations. By incorporating pre-marital investments...

Several recent papers (Shimer 2003a, 2003b; Costain and Reiter 2003; Hall 2003) have shown that general equilibrium labor market models have a hard time generating the degree of cyclical volatility in unemployment and vacancies that is observed in the data. These papers have suggested that rigid wages...

There is a positive and significant correlation of many traits, such as age, religion, socioeconomic status, and education, among spouses. Becker (1973) shows that positive assortative matching – which results in a perfect correlation of traits in spouses – is optimal if the traits...