The obituary discusses why Gary Becker is one of the most successful social scientist in the second half of the twentieth century. It argues that his success was due to his ability to recognize which resources are scarce in non-market situations and environments, and to use economics to analyze...

This paper presents a tractable framework for studying frictionless matching in school, work, and marriage when individuals have heterogeneous social and cognitive skills. In the model, there are gains to specialization and team production, but specialization requires communication and...

Liquidity considerations will limit the number of markets in a competitive economy. Welfare implications are ambigious. Since liquidity is a positive externality, there may be too little liquidity per market at a noncooperative equilibrium and too many markets compared to the surplus-maximizing...

Parents transfer wealth to their children in many ways. The dowry is distinctive because it is a large transfer made to a daughter at the time of her marriage. In an insightful essay, Goody (1973) proposed that the dowry is a premortem inheritance to the bride. A daughter obtains a wealth...

The objective of the paper is to develop and estimate a non-parametric dynamic model of the marriage market. Individuals are differentiated by their age and current marital status. In each period, unmarried men and women choose whether they want to marry and who to marry. Equilibrium transfers...