Competing Pre-marital Investments

Michael Peters () and Aloysius Siow ()

Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics

Abstract: Pre-marital investments by spouses are largely viewed as public goods within the marriage. So individuals may underinvest. But individuals also use their investments to compete for spouses with higher investments. In a large marriage market, the higher equilibrium match quality obtained by increasing pre-marital investment exactly internalizes the external benefit of the investment so the competitive equilibrium is effcient. This model of competing investments in local public goods is a special case of Rosen's hedonic market model. In small marriage markets, the competition for spouses will raise incentives to invest in pre-marital investments as well as making these investments less predictable.

Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2000-01-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/public/workingPapers/UT-ECIPA-PETERS-00-01.pdf MainText (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Competing Premarital Investments (2002)
Working Paper: Competing Premarital Investment (2001)
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:tor:tecipa:peters-00-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics 150 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePEc Maintainer ().