The Collective Marriage Matching Model: Identification, Estimation, and Testing

We develop and estimate an empirical collective model with endogenous marriage formation, participation, and family labor supply. Intra-household transfers arise endogenously as the transfers that clear the marriage market. The intra-household allocation can be recovered from observations on marriage decisions. Introducing the marriage market in the collective model allows us to independently estimate transfers from labor supplies and from marriage decisions. We estimate a semiparametric version of our model using 1980, 1990, and 2000 US Census data. Estimates of the model using marriage data are much more consistent with the theoretical predictions than estimates derived from labor supply.