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....

Recent theoretical contributions depart from the usual practice of treating individual attitude endowments as a black box, by assuming that these are shaped by the attitudes of parents and other role models. Attitudes include fundamental preferences such as risk preference, and crucial beliefs...

Societies socialize children about many things, including sex. Socialization is costly. It uses scarce resources, such as time and effort. Parents weigh the marginal gains from socialization against its costs. Those at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale indoctrinate their daughters less...

Virtue is modeled as an asset that women can use in the marriage market: since men value virginity in prospective mates, preserving her virtue increases a woman's chances of marrying a high-status husband, and therefore allows for upward social mobility. Consistent with some historical and...

This paper documents that changes in assortative mating patterns over the last four decades along the dimensions of age, ethnicity and religion are not responsible for the increasing marital stability in Austria. Quite the contrary, without the rise in the age at marriage, divorce rates would be...

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...

There is longstanding evidence that children raised by single parents are more likely to perform poorly in school and partake in 'deviant' behaviors such as smoking, sex, substance use and crime at young ages. However, as of yet there is not widespread evidence or agreement as to whether or not...

This paper presents a model of consumption and household production that takes into account substitution between health-related goods that are produced at home and those produced commercially as well as substitution between goods produced at home by oneself and those produced by one's spouse or...

With a representative survey of 1,214 participants conducted in early 2022, this study investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on marriage and childbirth in Iran. The results of the empirical investigation using logistic regressions suggest that the experience of unemployment due to the...

We use unique data characterizing individual savings for twins and non-twins in urban China to examine why the savings rates of the young are elevated relative to the middle-aged, despite rising individual life-cycle incomes. We show that inter-generational co-residence masks the true life-cycle...