The Insurance Role of Marriage

Fang Yang and Mariacristina De Nardi

No 427, 2016 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: Marriage is an institution that also helps insure shocks. Despite this and the prevalence of marriage, very little is known on how effectively marriage insures households against income or health risks and how being married affects labor supply and savings. We develop a framework with both single and married people, in which single people meet partners and everyone experiences labor productivity shocks, medical costs shocks, life span risk, and married people also experience divorce risk. People can self-insure by saving and by choosing their labor supply. We also allow for reversibility of social security and pension payments to the surviving spouse in case of death of one of the spouses and for differential tax treatment of married and single people. In this framework, we study the insurance benefits of marriage, both at the individual and at the aggregate level.

Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge and nep-ias
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2016/paper_427.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:red:sed016:427

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2016 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().