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 …

social insurance. We focus on the Vietnamese’s beliefs in marriage fortune predictions by the Taoist astrological system Tử … Vi. First, we estimate a structural model of assortative marriage matching and show that such beliefs’ importance in … marriage formation amounts to 6.5% of that of the entire age and education profile. Second, we estimate the effect of …

value of their current match exceeds that of remaining single. If both partners propose, the meeting ends up in a marriage … ages of first-time brides and grooms. We show that modeling the marriage decision in this simple way is sufficient to … previous literature on this topic claims that marriage is a waiting game in which women are choosier than men, and old and rich …