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...

This paper combines partner matching with an intra-household allocation model where couples decide if they want to marry or cohabitate. Marriage encourages but does not ensure a higher level of spousal commitment, which in turn can generate a larger marital surplus. Individuals' marital...

We develop a model of the household in which spousal incomes are determined by pre-marital investments, the marriage market is characterized by assortative matching, and endogenously-determined sharing rules form the basis of intra-household allocations. By incorporating pre-marital investments...

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 combines partner matching with an intra-household allocation model where couples decide if they want to marry or cohabitate. Marriage encourages but does not ensure a higher level of spousal commitment, which in turn can generate a larger marital surplus. Individuals' marital...

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...

We develop a collective household model with spousal matching in which there exists marital gains to assortative matching and marriage quality for each couple is revealed ex post. Changes in alimony laws are shown to affect existing couples and couples-to-be differently. For existing couples,...

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...

"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...