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Project

Search behavior in the marriage market, household formation and economic decisions: a revealed preference analysis.

The aim of this project is to explicitly integrate marriage decisions in the wider context of household decisions when divorce is a possible option. This project wants to better understand the interplay between the search for partners, household formation and economic decisions. The idea is that making an investment in the ability to search for a better partner affects the characteristics of the match, but also the bargaining position in the relationship by determining the quality of the outside options in case of divorce. We will introduce search frictions in the marriage market using two approaches. First, we will propose a matching model where search frictions are captured by a matching function. Secondly, motivated by the empirical observation that most spouses meet through friends, we will study a marriage market where the choice of partners is constrained by one's social networks. We will estimate non-parametrically the models using revealed preferences to provide a structural description of the within-household allocation as a function of the search behavior defining the current and future outside options on marriage markets. Overall, modeling search behavior implies a better description of the intra-household decision process, which in turn yields a more powerful analysis of household choice behavior and its welfare implications on spouses and their children.
Date:1 Jan 2019 →  31 Dec 2022
Keywords:MARRIAGE MARKET, ECONOMICS, SOCIAL NETWORKS
Disciplines:Household behaviour and family organisations
Project type:Collaboration project