 Till taxes do us part: Tax penalties or bonuses and the marriage decisionFrancesca Barigozzi, Helmuth Cremer and Kerstin Roeder European Economic Review, 2019, vol. 118, issue C, 37-50 Abstract: The tax regimes applied to couples in many countries including the US, France, and Germany imply either a marriage penalty or a marriage bonus. We study how they affect the decision to get married by considering two potential spouses who play a marriage proposal game. At the end of the game they may get married, live together without formal marriage, or split up. Proposing (or getting married) implies a cost that can indicate strong love. The striking property we obtain is that a marriage bonus may actually reduce the probability that a couple gets married. If the bonus is sufficiently large, signaling is no longer informative, and a pooling equilibrium in which no couples get married remains. Similarly, a marriage penalty may increase marriages. The penalty may lead to a separating equilibrium with efficiency enhancing information transmission, which was otherwise not possible. Keywords: Marriage penalty; Marriage bonus; Proposal game; Signaling (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:118:y:2019:i:c:p:37-50 DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2019.05.001 Access Statistics for this article European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier |
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