This paper revisits the link between education-based marriage market sorting and income inequality. Leveraging Danish administrative data, we develop a novel categorization of marriage market types based on the starting wages and wage growth trajectories associated with educational programs:...

This paper bridges two distinct areas of inquiry: the economic theory of the family and behavioral research on time-inconsistent preferences. In our model, hyperbolic discounting couples engage in household production activities, thereby accumulating family-specific capital over time. At any...

We document the time-series of employment rates and hours worked per employed by married couples in the US and seven European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the UK) from the early 1980s through 2016. Relying on a model of joint household labor supply...

This paper examines how marital and fertility patterns have changed along racial and educational lines for men and women. Historically, women with more education have been the least likely to marry and have children, but this marriage gap has eroded as the returns to marriage have changed....

Both in the UK and in the US, we observe puzzling gender asymmetries in the propensity to outmarry: Black men are more likely to have white spouses than Black women, but the opposite is true for Chinese: Chinese men are half less likely to be married to a White person than Chinese women. We...

This paper describes Gary Becker's theoretical models of marriage. At the micro-level, these are all rational choice models. At the market level, Becker offers two major types of models: partial equilibrium models based on Price Theory as taught by Marshall and Friedman and optimal sorting...

A large fraction of domestically abused women report that their partners interfere with their participation in education and employment. As of yet, mainstream economics has not dealt in any systematic way with this phenomenon and its implications for welfare policy. This paper puts forward a...

Under the common-law system of coverture in the United States, a married woman relinquished control of property and wages to her husband. Many U.S. states passed acts between 1850 and 1920 that expanded a married woman's right to keep her market earnings and to own separate property. The former...

We demonstrate that the notion of a "family constitution" (self-enforcing, renegotiation-proof family norm) requiring adults to provide attention for elderly parents carries over from a world where sexually indifferentiated individuals reproduce by cell separation, to one where individuals...

We propose a theoretical explanation for the so-called "beauty premium". Our explanation is based entirely on search frictions and the fact that physical appearance plays an important role in attracting a marriage partner. We analyse the interaction between frictional labour and marriage markets...