Why do some men father children outside of marriage but not provide support? Why are some single women willing to have children outside of marriage when they receive little or no support from unmarried fathers? Why is this behavior especially common among blacks? To shed light on these...

We develop a two-sided directed search model of relationship formation that can be used to disentangle male and female preferences over partner characteris- tics and over relationship terms from only a cross section of observed matches. Individuals direct their search for a partner on the basis...