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...

Popular discourse portrays marriage as a source of innumerable public and private benefits, happiness, companionship, financial security, and even good health. Complementing this view, our legal discourse frames the right to marry as a right of access, the exercise of which is an act of autonomy...

We present a new approach to the estimation of dynamic models using panel data, not on individuals, but aggregated to some level such as the school, county or state. This approach embeds the reduced form implications of dynamic optimization for exiting a chosen state (via divorce, dropping out,...