Using a sample of established couples, we conduct an experiment on household decision-making. Individual partners first make a series of dichotomous choices between household goods and vouchers for experiences and then the couple jointly face the same choices. A random lottery device is used to...

We devise and execute three experiments to test key features of models of household decision-making. Using established couples (married and unmarried) we test income pooling, unanimity and Pareto efficiency. Subjects make choices individually and jointly and are asked to make predictions about...

Female bargaining power in rural Haryana, as in much of northern India, is constrained by widespread discrimination against women. In recent years, however, women successfully demand private sanitation facilities from potential husbands as a precondition for marriage. I study this manifestation...

This paper revisits the issue of the unilateral divorce law, taking into account that: 1/ the decisions to engage in marriage and then to divorce or to stay married are fundamentally sequential decisions; 2/ household consumption has a large joint component, generating economies of scale. The...

In this paper, we examine the pure exchange motive for intergenerational transfers within the family. We consider a model where a selfish parent offers a financial transfer in exchange for the services of the child. Using a Stackelberg game, we study the optimal attention-money contract between...

This study proposed, first, to carry out, based on archive documents, an incursion as regards matrimonial relationships of XVIIIth century with all legal, economic and social connotations involved. The marriage contracts studied fall into a typology more closely of what was happening in the same...

Although the effect of parents on their children has been the focus of much research on health and families, the influence of children on their parents has not been well studied. In this paper, I examine the effect of the sex composition of children on mothers' physical condition, as proxied by...

In this paper, we use a two-period one-to-one matching model with incomplete information to examine the effect of changes in divorce costs on marital dissolution. Each individual who has a nontransferable expected utility about the quality of each potential marriage decides whether to marry or...

We study the problem of marriage formation and marital distribution in a two-period model of matching, extending the matching with bargaining framework of Crawford and Rochford (1986). We run simulations to find the effects of alimony rate, legal cost of divorce, initial endowments, couple and...

We propose a simple model of a mating economy in both monogamous and polygynous cultures, and derive implications for how polygyny affects individual and aggregate fertility. We find that an attractive woman is more likely to find a high-status husband. However, when polygyny is allowed,...