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....

Almost half of missing women in India are of post-reproductive ages. I show that intra-household gender inequality and gender asymmetry in poverty can account for a substantial fraction of these missing women. Using a natural experiment, I link women's intra-household bargaining power to their...

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 develop a new test procedure to assess its validity. Our...

In this paper, I develop an integrated approach to collective models and matching models of the marriage market. In the collective framework, both household formation and the intra-household allocation of bargaining power are taken as given. This is no longer the case in the present...

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...

HIV/AIDS was the main cause of death among young adults in the 1990s. The sexual freedom from the rise of contraceptives and women's empowerment affected individuals' preferences for dating, marriage and fertility. In this paper, we investigate whether the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the 1980s...

At the heart of economic and sociological thinking on divorce lies the idea that a couple divorces if at least one spouse expects to improve their life in doing so. De facto, divorces are predominantly initiated by one spouse alone. This might suggest that one spouse typically benefits from...

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...

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...

This paper investigates the life outcomes of immigrant descendants of intermarriage. Conceptually there are two major opposing mechanisms by which intermarriages might affect their offspring: the marital surplus mechanism suggests that children of intermarriage would receive less effective...