Low sex ratios are often equated with unfavorable marriage prospects for women, but in France after World War 1, the marriage probability of single females rose 50%, despite a massive drop in the male/female ratio. We conjecture that the war-time birth-rate bust induced an abnormal postwar...

According to Pareto (1896), the distribution of income depends on "the nature of the people comprising a society, on the organization of the latter, and, also, in part, on chance." In the model developed here the "nature of the people" is captured by attitudes toward marriage, divorce,...

This paper examines the interactions between household matching, inequality, and per capita income. We develop a model in which agents decide whether to become skilled or unskilled, form households, consume and have children. We show that the equilibrium sorting of spouses by skill type (their...

We argue that one of the key channels linking the labor and marriage markets is the decision of when to become a parent. We develop art equilibrium model of marriage, divorce, and human capital accumulation that allows for differential timing of fertility. We calibrate the model to US panel data...