Economics, Judaism, and Marriage (in Hebrew)

This paper points to parallels between the economic approach to marriage and Jewish Law. The economic approach is applied to the sex ratio question, the price of Torah scholars, the need for marriage brokers, marriage contracts and polygamy, all topics also addressed by Jewish law

A market approach to intermarriage

A market approach to intermarriage is developed in the tradition of economic theory. The model includes a supply of women's work in home production and a demand for such work by men. Separate markets exist for different types of work in household production, including different ethnic or religious groups. Some individuals intermarry in the sense that they partner with people from another group. I derive testable predictions regarding the determinants of intermarriage.The model is applied to explain why some Jewish men intermarried with Gentile women and others did not. Controlling for preferences for homogamy (based on Jewish education) it is predicted that men who prefer exogamy will pay a price in terms of being more educated than their Gentile wife, or having fewer previous marriages. Data from the 1970-71 Jewish Population Survey in the USA are used to test the predictions

Women’s Jobs and Marriage: Baby-Boom versus Baby-Bust (Travail des Femmes et Mariage: du baby-boom au baby-bust)

Studies of the determinants of labor supply do no typically include characteristics of the marriage market. What inspired this paper is Shoshana Grossbard-Shechtman's economic theory of marriage which considers how marriage market forces influence individual value of time in marriage. From pioneering work by Louis Henry and others, we know that changes in cohort size influence marriage market conditions. Consequently, it is hypothesized that changes in cohort size influence the value of time of women in marriage. Given that most women are married or plan to marry, this analysis implies that women born at times of increases in the number of births will be more likely to participate in the labor force. This hypothesis was using US. time series data on women's labor force participation and a number of other variables known to have an impact on labor supply. It is found that rapid increases in women's labor force participation coincided with rapid growth of the population entering marriage markets and therefore the creation of marriage market imbalances favoring men. Such rapid growth in population characterized not only the post World War II so-called baby-boom, but also an earlier period of growth in births starting in the late 1930s. As for the slow growth in women's labor force participation observed in recent years, it has coincided with the coming of age of successive generations of shrinking size born during the baby­ bust

Women’s Jobs and Marriage: Baby-Boom versus Baby-Bust (Travail des Femmes et Mariage: du baby-boom au baby-bust)

Studies of the determinants of labor supply do no typically include characteristics of the marriage market. What inspired this paper is Shoshana Grossbard-Shechtman's economic theory of marriage which considers how marriage market forces influence individual value of time in marriage. From pioneering work by Louis Henry and others, we know that changes in cohort size influence marriage market conditions. Consequently, it is hypothesized that changes in cohort size influence the value of time of women in marriage. Given that most women are married or plan to marry, this analysis implies that women born at times of increases in the number of births will be more likely to participate in the labor force. This hypothesis was using US. time series data on women's labor force participation and a number of other variables known to have an impact on labor supply. It is found that rapid increases in women's labor force participation coincided with rapid growth of the population entering marriage markets and therefore the creation of marriage market imbalances favoring men. Such rapid growth in population characterized not only the post World War II so-called baby-boom, but also an earlier period of growth in births starting in the late 1930s. As for the slow growth in women's labor force participation observed in recent years, it has coincided with the coming of age of successive generations of shrinking size born during the baby­ bust

A direct test of the efficient marriage market hypothesis

This paper takes Becker 's efficient marriage market hypothesis at face value, and directly confronts it with data from Hong Kong. The theory of optimal assignment is used to develop an empirical model of spouse selection, which resembles a Tobit model. This model can address positive or negative assortative matching as well as marginal product pricing in marriage markets. We also use a computer algorithm to solve the assignment problem for imputed marital output. The degree to which the actual pairing of husbands and wives corresponds to the optimal pairing provides a goodness-of-fit test of the efficient marriage market hypothesis. (JEL, C51, C61, C78, J12).postprin