We present a methodology for the structural empirical analysis of marital matching patterns that allows us to evaluate individuals’ trade-offs between material benefits (i.e., real consumption) and immaterial benefits (i.e., unobserved match quality) from marriage. We focus on a setting in which agents can be divided into observable types, with common preferences within a type. Our general methodology includes both general utilities and quasi-linear (i.e., transferable) utilities of the individual household members, and assumes stability of marriage as the equilibrium condition that characterizes the observed partner choices. The basic ingredients of our methodology are testable revealed preference conditions for marital stability that are intrinsically nonparametric, which enables an empirical investigation that is robust to functional specification error. We also demonstrate the practical usefulness of our methodology through an application to the Belgian MEqIn data.
Professor Bram de Rock is a full professor at the European Centre for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics (ECARES) at the Université libre de Bruxelles and the Department of Economics at KU Leuven. He is also an international research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (London) and a honorary senior research associate of the Department of Economics of University College London (UCL). His research interests lie within family economics, with a focus on consumption, labor supply, the distribution of time and money within families and matching on the marriage market. Bram De Rock has published extensively in international journals including Econometrica, American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies and the Journal of Political Economy.