This paper provides a first microeconomic foundation for the institution of marriage. Based on a model of reproduction …, mating, and parental investment in children, we argue that marriage serves the purpose of attenuating the risk of mating …, marriage circumscribes female infidelity and mate poaching among men, which reduces average levels of paternal uncertainty in …

daughters, when the marriage market exhibits competitive dowry payments and altruistic but paternalistic parents benefit from …

We investigate how job displacement affects whom men marry and study implications for marriage market matching theory … of the marriage market to derive several implications of our empirical findings: (i) husbands’ and wives’ incomes are … substitutes rather than complements in the marriage market; (ii) our findings are hard to reconcile with one-dimensional matching …

This paper studies the effects of different income transfers on individual welfare, in both marriage and divorce … losses derived from the marriage. We have also found that the donor of an intergenerational transfer can behave in a …

suitable alternatives, the taboo was no longer expedient, and was dropped. For the same reasons, marriage has become less …

Akerlof and Kranton (2000) and apply it to the marriage decision. The empirical evidence is consistent with the idea that … people are more likely to marry when their incomes approach a financial level associated with idealized norms of marriage. We … hypothesize that the marriage ideal is determined by the median income in an individual’s local reference group. After controlling …