A Behavioral Two-Sex Marriage Model

In this paper we discuss a particular marriage model, i.e., a model for the number of marriages for each age combination as a function of the vectors of the number of single men and women in each age group. The model is based on Dagsvik (1998) where it is demonstrated that a specific matching game played at the individual level imply, under specific assumptions about the distribution of the preferences, a convenient expression for the corresponding structural marriage model. Data from the Norwegian Population Register for nine years are applied to estimate the model. We subsequently test the hypothesis that, apart from a random “noise” component, the age-specific parameters change over time according to a common trend. We find that the hypothesis is not rejected by our data.