Savings and Economies of Marriage: Intra-Marriage Financial Distributions as Determinants of Savings

Shoshana Grossbard and Alfredo Pereira

No 95, Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary

Abstract: This paper presents an inter-temporal model of individual savings behavior with intra-marriage financial distributions and uncertainty about marriage and divorce. Spouses paying these distributions experience diseconomies of marriage; the spouses who receive them benefit from economies of marriage. We show that higher likelihoods of marriage and divorce are associated with lower (higher) personal savings rates in the presence of diseconomies (economies) of marriage. These results hint at the possibility that structural patterns of social behavior may be at the root of the lack of effectiveness of conventional policy instruments, such as tax incentives, to promote personal savings.

Keywords: savings behavior; marriage; divorce; economies of marriage; gender roles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E21 J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 9 pages
Date: 2013-07-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://economics.wm.edu/wp/cwm_wp95rev1.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cwm:wpaper:95

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Daifeng He ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ) and Alfredo Pereira ().