This paper studies premarital parental investments in children's wealth, where spousal wealth is a public good in marriage. By investing in their children's wealth, parents increase the wealth of their children and the quality of the spouses that their children can marry. In large marriage...

This paper estimates the contributions of differential fecundity, social heterogeneity, assortative matching and search frictions to aggregate marriage behavior in 18th century Quebec. The reduced form estimates show that a simple random matching model of the marriage market, in which there are...

This paper investigates how rural families in China use marital and post-marital transfers to compensate their sons for unequal schooling expenditures. Using a common behavioral framework, we derive two alternative methods for estimating the relationship between parental transfers and schooling...

This paper presents a tractable framework for studying frictionless matching in school, work, and marriage when individuals have heterogeneous social and cognitive skills. In the model, there are gains to specialization and team production, but specialization requires communication and...