We analyze the role of the marriage contract. We first formalize three prominent hypotheses on why people marry …: marriage provides an exogenous payoff to married partners, it serves as a commitment device and it serves as a signaling device … given duration of marriage. We then bring these alternative views of the marriage contract to bear on the data using …

daughters, in a dualistic transitional economy, where preferences conflict across generations and the marriage market exhibits …

Changing distributions of male and female types affect the measurement of educationbased marriage market sorting. We …

Changing distributions of male and female types affect the measurement of education-based marriage market sorting. We …

marriage market thanks to the relative under-supply of unmarried women, have lower incentives to raise their female heirs …

frictionless marriage market. One of our key empirical findings is that there is a very strong preference for within-caste marriage … persistent feature of the Indian marriage market …

recognition between men and women that provides a microfoundation for the institution of marriage. In the model, men and women …. As a socially sanctioned commitment device among partners, the institution of marriage reduces this risk by restraining … societal, economic, and technological changes in their effects on marriage patterns. A combination of factors is argued to …