I build an equilibrium investment-and-marriage model to explain stylized facts about education, income, and marriage for Americans born in the twentieth century that had not been explained in a unified way. The most novel finding is a theoretical explanation for why women attend college at a...

Positive assortative matching refers to the tendency of individuals with similar characteristics to form partnerships. Measuring the extent to which assortative matching differs between two economies is challenging when the marginal distributions of the characteristic along which sorting takes...

Young women outnumber young men in cities in many countries during periods of economic growth and urbanization. This gender imbalance among young urbanites is more pronounced in larger cities. We use the gradual rollout of special economic zones across China as a quasi-experiment to establish...

Building on previous literature that examines the influence of intergenerational transmission in cultural evolution, we highlight the importance of the marriage market in the determination of cultural homogeneity (“melting pot”) versus heterogeneity (“diversity”). To do so, we...

We examine preference evolution under different marriage market arrangements, when preferences are influenced by own choices and parents' preferences. The dynamical system exhibits pitchfork bifurcation as the degree of sorting varies: Multiple stable equilibria arise under sufficiently random...

This paper documents relationships between age at marriage and labor-market out- come reflected by personal income as well as relationships between age at marriage and marriage-market outcome reflected by spousal income for Americans born from 1900s to 1970s, and motivated by these documented...