We develop a transferable utility model of the household in which the marriage market is characterized by (negative or positive) assortative matching, and spousal allocations are determined by premarital investments. We demonstrate that all sharing rules along the assortative order support...

Countries with more developed financial sectors experience less fluctuations in real per capita output, consumption and investment growth. However, the manner in which the financial sector develops matters. The relative importance of banks in the financial system is important in explaining...

Ethnic and religious fractionalization have important effects on economic growth and development, but their role in internal violent conflicts has been found to be negligible and statistically insignificant. These findings have been invoked in refutation of the Huntington hypothesis, according...

We develop a two-sided matching model with positive sorting, divorce and remarriage. Match quality for each couple is revealed ex post and those with poor draws divorce. Competition determines lifetime expected utilities but per-period utilities depend on the laws that govern the distribution of...

Various historical accounts have suggested that the Ottomans' rise helped the Protestant Reformation as well as its offshoots, such as Zwinglianism, Anabaptism, and Calvinism, survive their infancy and mature. Utilizing a comprehensive data set on violent confrontations for the interval between...

Can households make efficient choices? The fact that cohabitation and marriage are partnerships for joint production and consumption imply that their gains are highest when household members cooperate. At the same time, empirical findings suggest that spousal specialization and labor force...

We reconsider the well known Becker-Coase (BC) argument, according to which changes in divorce laws should not affect divorce rates, in the context of households which consume public goods in addition to private goods. For this result to hold, utility must be transferable both within marriage...

This paper emphasizes that the evolution of religious institutions in Europe was influenced by the expansionary threat posed by the Ottoman Empire five centuries ago. This threat intensified in the second half of the 15th century and peaked in the first half of the 16th century with the Ottoman...

We present a model with pre-marital schooling investment, endogenous marital matching and spousal specialization in homework and market production. Investment in schooling raises ages and generates two kinds of returns in our framework: a labor-market return and a marriage-market return because...

The Ottoman Empire had a profound impact in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa at the apogee of its power, covering the era between 1453 C. E. and 1699 C. E. In this paper, I exploit the empire’s unique culture and institutions to examine the roles of ethnicity and religion in conflict...