Marriage market dynamics, gender, and the age gap

Andrew Shephard

PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: We present a general discrete choice framework for analyzing household formation and dissolution decisions in an equilibrium limited-commitment collective framework that allows for marriage both within and across birth cohorts. Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics and American Community Survey data, we apply our framework to empirically implement a time allocation model with labor market earnings risk, human capital accumulation, home production activities, fertility, and both within- and across-cohort marital matching. Our model replicates the bivariate marriage distribution by age, and explains some of the most salient life-cycle patterns of marriage, divorce, remarriage, and time allocation behavior. We use our estimated model to quantify the impact of the significant reduction in the gender wage gap since the 1980s on marriage outcomes.

Keywords: Marriage; divorce; collective household models; life-cycle; search and matching; intrahousehold allocation; structural estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D13 D15 D83 J12 J16 J22 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 72 pages
Date: 2019-03-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-dge, nep-gen, nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pen:papers:19-003

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