Marriage, Labor Supply, and Home Production

Abstract

We develop a search model of marriage where men and women draw utility from private consumption and leisure, and from a non-market good that is produced in the home using time resources. We condition individual decisions on wages, education, and an index of family attitudes. A match-specific, stochastic bliss shock induces variation in matching given wages, education, and family values, and triggers renegotiation and divorce. Using BHPS (1991-2008) data, we take as given changes in wages, education, and family values by gender, and study their impact on marriage decisions and intrahousehold resource allocation. The model allows to evaluate how much of the observed gender differences in labor supply results from wages, education, and family attitudes. We find that family attitudes are a strong determinant of comparative advantages in home production of men and women, whereas education complementarities induce assortative mating through preferences.

Marriage Market Dynamics, Gender, and the Age Gap

“…Thus, we would infer that an infrequent marriage-pairing, which is long-lasting when it does take place, to be high marital surplus and that the lack of marriage pairings is due to infrequent meetings. This is essentially the argument in Goussé, Jacquemet and Robin (2017).…”

“…While there are many potential applications of such a model, there are also important departures from this model environment that should be considered. As in the dynamic marriage matching model presented in Goussé, Jacquemet and Robin (2017), we posit a model with informational frictions and use this as a framework to understand the dynamics of marital search and matching. An important and unexplored question is the extent to which a frictionless marriage matching model, the leading paragim in the static matching literature, may also be able to generate similar dynamics.…”

“…In contrast, ours is a model where utility is imperfectly transferable, divorce is endogenous, and in which the marriage market is subject to search frictions. As such, it also relates to the two-sided search-andmatching model in Díaz-Giménez and Giolito (2013) which emphasises the role of differential fecundity in explaining marriage age patterns, the stationary marital search model in Goussé, Jacquemet and Robin (2017), 5 and the quantitative macro-economic literature that includes Aiyagari, Greenwood and Guner (2000), Caucutt, Guner and Knowles (2002), Chade and Ventura (2002), Greenwood, Guner and Knowles (2003), Guvenen and Rendall (2015), and Greenwood et al (2016).…”

“…Most related is the recent marital search model developed in parallel work by Ciscato (2019), which presents a tractable extension of the Goussé, Jacquemet and Robin (2017) framework to a life-cycle setting, and examines how changes in the wage structure relate to the decline of marriage in the United States. As in this paper, Ciscato (2019) incorporates across-cohort marriage matching, but in contrast considers an environment with transferable utility and no commitment (rather than limited commitment).…”

Optimal Taxation, Marriage, Home Production, and Family Labor Supply

“… Similar age selections and educational categorizations are common in the marriage market literature. Papers that have used similar categories include Choo and Siow (), Choo and Seitz (), Goussé, Jacquemet, and Robin (), Chiappori, Iyigun, and Weiss (), and Chiappori, Salanié, and Weiss (). We have also estimated our model with four groups (less than high school, high school, some college, college and above) and find both our estimation results and our tax design experiments to be quantitatively robust. …”