We investigate the role of marital patterns in explaining rising income inequality using a structural marriage matching model with unobserved heterogeneity. This allows us to consider both the extensive and intensive margins of the marriage market, i.e. who remains single and who marries whom....

We investigate the role of marital patterns in explaining rising income inequality using a structural marriage matching model with unobserved heterogeneity. This allows us to consider both the extensive and intensive margins of the marriage market, i.e. who remains single and who marries whom....

We use a simple structural matching model with unobserved heterogeneity to produce counterfactual marriage patterns of two kinds: counterfactuals that hold the match surplus constant across markets and counterfactuals that hold the joint utility constant. These counterfactuals allow us to...