modeling marriage

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue Jan 4 18:29:56 PST 2000


[Is bourgeois economics a form of psychopathology?]

"A Good Man is Hard to Find: Marriage as an Institution"

BY: RUSSELL D. MURPHY, JR.

Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

Department of Economics

Document: Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:

http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=172189

Paper ID: Virginia Tech Working Paper No. E98-02

Date: July 19, 1999

Contact: RUSSELL D. MURPHY, JR.

Email: Mailto:rdmurphy at vt.edu

Postal: Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

Department of Economics

Blacksburg, VA 24061

Phone: 540-231-4537

ABSTRACT:

This paper develops a model of marriage as an institution that

changes the incentives of a mating game between men and women.

Unlike other models of the family, decisions to invest in

children are not contractible ex-ante, but must be sub-game

perfect given that intimacy and pregnancy are sequential.

Marriage and divorce, which are publicly observable, create

costs for exiting a match; informal relationships do not.

Providing an institution which makes a match

observable--marriage--improves incentives for men to invest

costly unobservable effort in their children.

The model accounts for several stylized facts about marriage,

including better outcomes, on average, for children within

marriage, and women's preferences for marriage over informal

relationships. It also suggests why societies may impose costs

for divorce and out-of-wedlock child bearing; the penalties can

increase the average welfare of children. The model highlights

the tensions surrounding these policies. Exogenous penalties are

not Pareto-improving, even among the young; some children are

strictly worse off with higher penalties even if the aggregate

welfare of children increases.

JEL Classification: J12, J13



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