On the empirical content of the Beckerian marriage model

Jianfei Cao, Xiaoxia Shi and Matthew Shum ()

Economic Theory, 2019, vol. 67, issue 2, No 2, 349-362

Abstract: Abstract This note studies the empirical content of a simple marriage matching model with transferable utility, based on Becker (J Polit Econ 81:813–846, 1973). Under Becker’s conditions, the equilibrium matching is unique and assortative. However, this note shows that when the researcher only observes a subset of relevant characteristics, the unique assortative matching does not uniquely determine a distribution of observed characteristics. This precludes standard approaches to point estimation of the underlying model parameters. We propose a solution to this problem, based on the idea of “random matching.”

Keywords: Beckerian marriage model; Assortative matching; Indeterminacy; Random matching (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C51 C78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1007/s00199-018-1106-z

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