I develop a model of marriage matching where males and females care about two distinct characteristics of their spouse - beauty and earnings. Each individual's beauty is exogenous, but earnings depend on human capital investments made by each individual prior to entering the marriage market. I...

To what extent are young workers affected by health shocks that happen to their parents? This paper studies the short and long-term spillover effects of parents' adverse health events on their adult children. We use the unique structure of the Panel Survey on Income Dynamics (PSID) to build...

In this paper, we describe mating patterns in the United States from 1964 to 2017 and measure the impact of changes in marital preferences on between-household income inequality. We rely on the recent literature on the econometrics of matching models to estimate complementarity parameters of the...

Positive assortative matching in terms of traits like ethnicity, race and personality has been prevalent in marital formation. One possible explanation for this is that spouses in endogamous marriages have complementary skills and tastes that increase marital surplus. This paper aims to estimate...

This paper presents microeconomic simulation techniques to examine what drives differences in inequality across countries. The simulation decomposes cross-country inequality differences into the importance of individual decisions, such as fertility, mating, labor force participation, and...

In this paper, we extend Gary Becker's empirical analysis of the marriage market to same-sex couples. Becker's theory rationalizes the well-known phenomenon of homogamy among different-sex couples: individuals mate with their likes because many characteristics, such as education, consumption...

We present a model embodying moderate amounts of nominal rigidities which accounts for the observed inertia in inflation and persistence in output. The key features of our model are those that prevent a sharp rise in marginal costs after an expansionary shock to monetary policy. Of these...

This study follows teens through young adulthood as they transition to independent living. We focus on a little-studied issue: why some youths live in groups rather than alone or with parents. This choice is important because the size of the group has a substantial impact on the demand for...

A recent strand of literature in demography argues that young unmarried Americans value marriage so highly that it is perceived as a family status to be chosen after certain economic preconditions are fulfilled - after they have achieved the so-called "white picket fence dream" (a house, surplus...

What factors influence the decision by immigrants to marry within or outside of their ethnic group? I attempt to answer this question by using data from the 2008-2016 American Community Survey. This datasource allows for improved estimation of the determinants of endogamy as it includes...