Much empirical evidence shows that female and male partners look alike along a variety of attributes. It is, however, unclear how this positive sorting comes about because marriage is an equilibrium outcome arising from a process that entails searching, meeting, and choosing one another. This...

We analyze discrimination against less attractive people on a TV game show with high stakes. The game has a rich structure that allows us to disentangle the relationship between attractiveness and the determinants of a player’s earnings. Unattractive players perform no worse than attractive...

In October 1999, the British government enacted the Working Families' Tax Credit, which aimed at encouraging work among low-income families with children. This paper uses panel data collected between 1991 and 2001 to evaluate the effect of this reform on single mothers. We find that the reform...

This paper presents two optimizing models of educational choice, discusses issues of identification, estimates earnings equations in the context of these models, and presents conditions under which we can test one against the other. The estimates indicate that education is endogenous for young...