In this paper we investigate the effect of relative income on marital status. We develop an identity model based on … Akerlof and Kranton (2000) and apply it to the marriage decision. The empirical evidence is consistent with the idea that … people are more likely to marry when their incomes approach a financial level associated with idealized norms of marriage. We …

In this paper we investigate the effect of relative income on marital status. We develop an identity model based on … Akerlof and Kranton (2000) and apply it to the marriage decision. The empirical evidence is consistent with the idea that … people are more likely to marry when their incomes approach a financial level associated with idealized norms of marriage. We …

possibility of discriminating between different models of behavior. This is studied for theories of marriage, which crucially … depend on auxiliary assumptions as to what contributes to well-being in marriage. Both applications are empirically tested …

Educational homogamy is an important but poorly understood source of inequality. This paper analyzes a group of men and … marry educated spouses. Nevertheless, movie actors show a strong tendency to sort positively on education in marriage. These … findings suggest that male and female preferences alone induce considerable sorting on education in marriage and that men and …

The prevalence and stability of marriage has declined in the United States as the economic lives of men and women have … childbearing between socioeconomic groups raise concerns about child wellbeing in poor families and future inequality. This paper …

income inequality. To these ends, we use rich data from the United States and Norway over the period 1980-2007. We find … educational assortative mating accounts for a non-negligible part of the cross-sectional inequality in household income. However …, changes in assortative mating over time barely move the time trends in household income inequality. The reason is that the …

polygyny (multiple wives). Wealth inequality naturally produces multiple wives for rich men in a standard model of the marriage … market where polygyny is not ruled out. Our model demonstrates, however, that while higher male inequality generates more … polygyny, higher female inequality produces a more monogamous equilibrium. Moreover, we derive how female inequality in the …

birth as a proxy for the local level of male inequality. Increasing male inequality explains about 30% of the marriage rate … inequality, and analyses several explanations for this result. A causal link is established by showing that the results are … robust to the inclusion of city fixed-effects and city-specific time trends, and by using inequality in the woman’s state of …