Household behavior and the marriage market

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Del Boca, Daniela; Flinn, Christopher J.
• 署名单位: University of Turin; New York University; Collegio Carlo Alberto
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2013.10.001
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 515-550
• 关键词: Bilateral matching; Household time allocation; Efficient outcomes; Likelihood analysis

摘要

There is some controversy in the field of household economics regarding the efficiency of household decisions. We make the point that a flexible specification of spousal preferences and the household production technology precludes the possibility of using revealed preference data on household time allocations to determine the manner in which spouses interact: efficiently or inefficiently. Under strong, but standard, assumptions regarding marriage market equilibria, marital sorting patterns can be used essentially as out of sample information that allows us to assess whether household behavior is efficient or not. We develop a new likelihood-based metric to compare marriage market fits under the two alternative behavioral assumptions. We use a sample of households drawn from a recent wave of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and find strong evidence supporting the view that household behavior is (constrained) efficient. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.