There is a positive and significant correlation of many traits, such as age, religion, socioeconomic status, and education, among spouses. Becker (1973) shows that positive assortative matching – which results in a perfect correlation of traits in spouses – is optimal if the traits...

To what extent do imbalances in the ratio of men to women in the population account for the historical trends in marriage and divorce? To answer this question, we build a model of marriage with two main features. First, there exists asymmetry across men and women with respect to the length of...

We document a negative trend in the leisure of men married to women aged 25-45, relative to that of their wives, and a positive trend in relative housework. We develop a simple bargaining model of marriage, divorce and allocations of leisure-time and housework. Calibration to US data shows the...

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