Marriage matching, risk sharing and spousal labor supplies

This paper develops the collective marriage matching model, a behavioral and empirically flexible framework that incorporates both marriage matching and intrahousehold allocations. The model shows how marriage market equilibrium and bargaining power within the family are simultaneously determined. The framework provides a solution to the problem of incorporating substitute sex ratios in empirical models of spousal labor supplies. Using data from the US 2000 census, the empirical results show that changes in marriage market tightness, the ratio of unmarried men to unmarried women, have large estimated effects on spousal labor force participation rates, and smaller effects on hours of work and hours in home production. Controlling for variation in labor market conditions across marriage markets has substantive implications for the parameter estimates.