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....

An important paper by Chiappori et al. (2012) has proposed an elegant and parsimonious model of spousal matching over multi-dimensional characteristics. Importantly, the model suggests specific testable assumptions that allow researchers to uncover marginal rates of substitution (MRS) between...

This paper proposes a new and easy-to-estimate marriage matching function (MMF). Unlike existing MMFs, the equilibrium marriage matching distribution associated with the proposed MMF is not necessarily unique. I show its existence under minimal conditions, and provide testable conditions under...

Im Jahr 2003 wurden 88,4% aller Scheidungen in Österreich im Einvernehmen geschieden. Die einvernehmliche Scheidung erfordert

Why do some U.S. states have higher levels of marital formation than others? This paper introduces an economic model wherein a state's representative individual may choose to marry in order to diversity his or her idiosyncratic income risk. The paper demonstrates that such a diversification...

Collective rationality is seldom if ever rejected in the literature, raising doubt about its falsifiability. We show that the standard approach to test the collective model with distribution factors may yield misleading inference. We generalize the model and provide an appropriate test procedure...

Im Jahr 2003 wurden 88,4% aller Scheidungen in Österreich im Einvernehmen geschieden. Die einvernehmliche Scheidung erfordert--wenn beide Gatten die Scheidung wünschen--nur eine Vereinbarung der wesentlichen Scheidungsfolgen. Anhand von Scheidungsakten der Jahre 1997 bis 2003 eines...

Why do some U.S. states have higher levels of marital formation than others? This paper introduces an economic model wherin a state s representative individual may choose to marry in order to diversify his or her idiosyncratic income risk. The paper demonstrates that such a diversification...

Why do some U.S. states have higher levels of marital formation than others? This paper introduces an economic model wherein a state's representative individual may choose to marry in order to diversity his or her idiosyncratic income risk. The paper demonstrates that such a diversification...

The gender education gap has undergone a transition in the post-war period, from favoring men to favoring women. As a consequence, in 30% of young American couples, the wife is more educated than the husband. These \married down" women display substantially higher employment rates, relative to...