A woman assessing the wealth of a potential husband may observe some, but not all, of his wealth. She may screen, leading to status consumption and wasteful gift giving. The screening activity is costly not only for the potential husband, but also for the woman, as it reduces the wealth of the...

This note presents evidence of the following gender asymmetry: the job-finding effort of married men and women is affected by the income of their spouses in opposite directions. For women, spouse income influences job finding negatively, just as own wealth does: the more the man earns and the...

This paper describes trends in parental wealth homogamy among union cohorts formed between 1987 and 2013 in Denmark. Using high-quality register data on the wealth of parents during the year of partnering, we show that the correlation between partners' levels of parental wealth is considerably...

In this paper we develop a discrete model of optimal taxation of married couples and empirically discuss the optimality of income taxation for this group. To this end, we derive the social welfare function which guarantees that joint taxation of married couples is optimal. We will contrast this...

This paper analyzes the causal relationships between marriage and subjective well-being in a longitudinal data set spanning 17 years. We find evidence that happier singles opt more likely for marriage and that there are large differences in the benefits from marriage between couples. Potential,...

Using a rich panel data set from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we test whether spouses who are similar to each other in certain respects have a lower probability of divorce than dissimilar spouses. We focus on the effect of homogamy with respect to education and church attendance. Gary...

"We evaluate the effects of the transition from cohabitation to marriage on household domestic and market work hours using a sample of working couples. For this purpose we use the 21 first waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSEOP). We adapt to system GMM estimation the estimator presented...

Taking advantage of the panel structure of the data, the impact of intermarriage on labor market productivity as measured by earnings is examined. Contrarily to previous studies which rely on instrumental variable techniques, selection issues are addressed within a fixed effects framework. The...