@article{1bdcb579b7bf4c78852953bf99325679,
title = "Household behavior and the marriage market",
abstract = "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.",
keywords = "Bilateral matching, Efficient outcomes, Household time allocation, Likelihood analysis",
author = "{Del Boca}, Daniela and Flinn, {Christopher J.}",
note = "Funding Information: This paper was previously circulated under the title “Household Time Allocation and Modes of Behavior: A Theory of Sorts.” This research was partially supported by the C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics at New York University and Collegio Carlo Alberto . Flinn thanks the National Science Foundation for additional support. The editor, an anonymous referee, and an anonymous associate editor provided constructive comments and suggestions that led to a substantially improved paper. We are grateful to Olivier Bargain, Cristian Bartolucci, Xiaohong Chen, Olivier Donni, Bryan Graham, James Mabli, Tom MaCurdy, Al Roth, and Yoram Weiss for helpful discussions and suggestions, as well as to participants in the August 2005 SITE workshop on “The Nexus Between Household Economics and the Macroeconomy,” the conference “Interactions within the Family” held at the Universita di Torino in 2005, the conference “The Labour Market Behaviour of Couples” held in Nice in 2008, and workshop participants at ASU, Yale, and UCL. We remain responsible for all errors and omissions. Copyright: Copyright 2014 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.",
year = "2014",
doi = "10.1016/j.jet.2013.10.001",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "150",
pages = "515--550",
journal = "Journal of Economic Theory",
issn = "0022-0531",
publisher = "Academic Press Inc.",
number = "1",
}