The article explores joint consumption equilibrium environments. It illustrates network formation through one-to-one directional synapses. Family (couple) arrangements, spontaneously generated under a decentralized general equilibrium price system are suggested - involving link and...

Neither marriage nor a legally enforceable contract serves any useful purpose if the parties have access to a perfect credit market. In the presence of credit rationing, efficiency and utility equalization are guaranteed only by a legally enforceable contract. Separate-property marriage may...

We propose a search-matching model of the marriage market that extends Shimer and Smith (2000) to allow for labor supply. We characterize the steady-state equilibrium when exogenous divorce is the only source of risk. The estimated matching probabilities that can be derived from the steady-state...

We use a unique dataset to analyze the marriage patterns of the British and German nobility from the 1500s to the 1800s, and discuss the differences in institutions between the two countries. Historical evidence shows that: nobles tended to marry nobles with identical title; and, German marriages...

The literature on partnership dissolution generally takes the dissolution decision as given and examines whether the outcome is efficient. A well-known result is that k 1-price auctions dissolve a partnership efficiently when the share structure is sufficiently close to equal. We extend the...

If women marry younger than men, increased population growth causes a surplus of women in the marriage market. This paper introduces search frictions into a matching model with transferable utility and age-dependent match payoffs to study if this so-calledmarriage squeeze has caused a dowry...

Focal points for private bargaining occur every instance the tax law provides a tax election that directly affects multiple taxpayers. These elections explicitly enable, and actually incentivize, the taxpayers to cooperate in order to reduce their aggregate tax burden. For example, divorced...

We extend the search-matching model of the marriage market of Shimer and Smith (2000) to allow for labor supply, home production, match-specific shocks and endogenous divorce. We study nonparametric identification using panel data on marital status, education, family values, wages, and market...

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...

This paper proposes a general equilibrium approach to examine the marriage market and within-household transfers. Using observations on who matches with whom, I derive information on how efficiently the market functions and on agent's preferences in terms of mate choice. I use a multidimensional...