the legal costs of divorce, on the interrelationships among the decisions on marriage, fertility and divorce …

of an efficiency loss. Efficiency can be restored through suitably designed marriage contracts because they can provide …) use of marriage is affected by the possibility of divorce …

suitable alternatives, the taboo was no longer expedient, and was dropped. For the same reasons, marriage has become less …

-specific capital over time. At any given point in time, the gains to continued marriage depend on the accumulated stock of this capital …, sophisticated couples – but not naive ones – may choose to enter marriage on terms which make divorce more costly to obtain. Third …-restoring earnings tax is genderneutral and fairly flat with respect to marriage duration. The optimal divorce tax is an inverted …

This paper describes Gary Becker's theoretical models of marriage. At the micro-level, these are all rational choice … possible intellectual influences on Becker's theory of marriage, compares Becker's research on marriage with that of some … scholars interested in intra-marriage distribution, and documents that Becker's students at Chicago were more interested in …

This paper presents an inter-temporal model of individual behavior with uncertainty about marriage and divorce and … which accommodates the possible presence of economies or diseconomies of scale from marriage. We show that a scenario of … higher marriage rates and higher divorce rates will be associated with higher savings rates in the presence of economies of …

Neither marriage nor a legally enforceable contract serves any useful purpose if the parties have access to a perfect … enforceable contract. Separate-property marriage may reduce and community-property marriage actually eliminate inefficiency, but …

This paper explores the role of marriage when markets are incomplete so that individuals cannot diversify their … love. Is love more important to a lasting marriage than economic compatibility? To answer this question, I develop a simple … model where rational individuals meet, enjoy the economic and non-pecuniary benefits of marriage (i.e., love), and then must …