Low sex ratios are often equated with unfavorable marriage prospects for women, but in France after World War 1, the … marriage probability of single females rose 50%, despite a massive drop in the male/female ratio. We conjecture that the war …-time birth-rate bust induced an abnormal postwar abundance of singles with relatively high marriage propensities. We compute the …

. Theoretically, the high productivity of a spouse in a marriage could affect the other spouse’s earnings in two ways: negatively … residuals from estimates of pre-marriage earnings equations. Results indicate that there are negative effects of the spouse … marriage. However, closer examination shows that only the youngest groups of males and females experience this negative effect …

dataset by surveying 6,030 parents and adult children in Mumbai, India, to study selection into arranged marriage and its … effects on spouse choice. I consider the choice between an arranged and a love marriage as the outcome of bargaining between … parents and children, when agents have different preferences for spouse attributes. I find that stronger financial and kinship …

the "marriage squeeze," a population increase leads to an excess supply of brides since men marry younger women. As a … result, dowry payments rise in order to clear the marriage market. The explanation is essentially static; unmarried brides do … not re-enter the marriage market. This paper demonstrates that the marriage squeeze argument cannot explain dowry …

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 …