Bargaining on your Spouse : Coasean and Non-Coasean Behaviour Within Marriage

Acknowledgments Funder was provided by University of Aberdeen.Peer reviewedPostprin

Bargaining on your spouse : Coasean and non-Coasean behaviour within marriage

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Educational homogamy and assortative mating have not increased

Some economists have argued that assortative mating between men and women has increased over the last several decades, thereby contributing to increased family income inequality. Sociologists have argued that educational homogamy has increased. We clarify the relation between the two and, using both the Current Population Surveys and the decennial Censuses/American Community Survey, show that neither is correct. The former is based on the use of inappropriate statistical techniques. Both are sensitive to how educational categories are chosen. We also find no evidence that the correlation between spouses' potential earnings has changed dramatically.Othe

Marriage and divorce: changes and their driving forces

We document key facts about marriage and divorce, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century. Marriage rates have also been falling, but more strikingly, the importance of marriage at different points in the life cycle has changed, reflecting rising age at first marriage, rising divorce followed by high remarriage rates, and a combination of increased longevity with a declining age gap between husbands and wives. Cohabitation has also become increasingly important, emerging as a widely used step on the path to marriage. Out-of-wedlock fertility has also risen, consistent with declining "shotgun marriages." Compared with other countries, marriage maintains a central role in American life. We present evidence on some of the driving forces causing these changes in the marriage market: the rise of the birth control pill and women's control over their own fertility; sharp changes in wage structure, including a rise in inequality and partial closing of the gender wage gap; dramatic changes in home production technologies; and the emergence of the internet as a new matching technology. We note that recent changes in family forms demand a reassessment of theories of the family and argue that consumption complementarities may be an increasingly important component of marriage. Finally, we discuss how these facts should inform family policy debates.Public policy

Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces

We document key facts about marriage and divorce, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century. Marriage rates have also been falling, but more strikingly, the importance of marriage at different points in the life cycle has changed, reflecting rising age at first marriage, rising divorce followed by high remarriage rates, and a combination of increased longevity with a declining age gap between husbands and wives. Cohabitation has also become increasingly important, emerging as a widely used step on the path to marriage. Out-of-wedlock fertility has also risen, consistent with declining "shotgun marriages". Compared with other countries, marriage maintains a central role in American life. We present evidence on some of the driving forces causing these changes in the marriage market: the rise of the birth control pill and women's control over their own fertility; sharp changes in wage structure, including a rise in inequality and partial closing of the gender wage gap; dramatic changes in home production technologies; and the emergence of the internet as a new matching technology. We note that recent changes in family forms demand a reassessment of theories of the family and argue that consumption complementarities may be an increasingly important component of marriage. Finally, we discuss the welfare implications of these changes.

Matching in Marriage Market and Labor Market

This dissertation examines how matching -- in marriage markets and labor markets -- can change under certain market circumstances and under different information provisions. The first two chapters analyze marriage market, with a particular focus on the impacts of cross-border marriage in marriage markets. Given the severely male-biased sex ratios in many Asian countries including China and India, demands for foreign brides are expected to grow in the near future. In the first chapter, I theoretically investigate the impacts of cross-border marriage on marital patterns and surplus division of couples. I use a frictionless transferable utility matching framework to analyze how cross-border marriage affects matching patterns and marital shares for couples. In the second chapter, I test the model's predictions, focusing on Taiwan (a wealthier side with male biased sex ratios) and Vietnam (a poorer side with balanced sex ratios in the marriage market). I find that cross-border marriages are predominantly made up of Taiwanese men and Vietnamese women; Taiwanese men are selected from the middle level of the socioeconomic status distribution, and Vietnamese women are positively selected. Moreover, cross-border marriage significantly affects men and women who stay in their own countries without engaging in cross-border marriage, by altering marriage rate, matching partners, and intra-household allocations within the households. My results suggest that changes in trade and immigration policies can have far-reaching implications on marital outcomes and women's bargaining power. The third chapter investigates job and jobseeker matching in labor market. Specifically, it explores whether inaccurate expectations of job seekers about their competitiveness contribute to poor job matching in developing countries. We utilize the largest online job portal in the Middle East and North Africa region to evaluate the effect of an intervention providing information about own competitiveness to job applicants. Providing information about the relative fit of an applicant's background for a particular job causes job seekers to apply for jobs that are better matches given their background. The effects of information are the largest among entry-level workers with higher levels of education, who generally face the highest unemployment rates in the region. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that changes over time in demand for skills in the job market may lead to inaccurate expectations that hinder labor market matching. Improving the efficiency of online job search may be particularly welfare-enhancing in the Middle East and North Africa region given that the young, highly-educated subpopulation that faces the greatest labor market hurdles also has the highest level of internet connectedness

On the Causes and Consequences of Divorce

In most Western economies, the flourishing of the Welfare State has coincided with a decline of the role of the family: divorce has been introduced, and the number of marriages has decreased. We suggest that a taboo against divorce was part of the informal safety net in a period when social protection was provided by the family. Once the State started offering suitable alternatives, the taboo was no longer expedient, and was dropped. For the same reasons, marriage has become less popular. We further notice that divorce is an extremely costly process, and once allowed it may act as an independent reason for the reduction of the number of marriages. This latter result is especially evident under the assumption that agents subjectively evaluate the probability of facing a divorce using an availability heuristic.divorce, marriage, availability heuristic

A Survey of Theories of the Family

This review explores the theory of household technology and the associated possibilities for distributing utility among household members. It also explores decision theory within the household, drawing on standard consumer decision theory. The review discusses models of equilbrium in which families are formed by persons voluntarily choosing mates. This theory is analogous to ``Tiebout theory'' in urban economics, where the objects of choice include not only the amount of public goods supplied in each city, but also which individuals live in each place. An aspect of family life that has fewer parallels in the economics of market economies is intrafamilial affection. The final section of this paper reviews a growing theoretical literature on love, altruism and the family.Center for Research on Economic and Social Theory, Department of Economics, University of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/101098/1/ECON082.pd

School Choice and Voucher Systems: A Comparison of the Drivers of Educational Achievement and of Private School Choice

Despite promotion by well-known economists and supporting economic theory, econometric analyses of voucher systems often find that they have been unsuccessful in improving traditional measures of educational success. This paper examines a possible explanation of this phenomenon by comparing the drivers of educational achievement and of school popularity by examining private school choice. The findings of this paper indicate that there is a disconnect between school success and school popularity, which adversely effects both the demand and supply-side benefits of voucher systems. Additionally, this paper reviews matching mechanisms that seek to efficiently match students with schools based on both student and school preferences