Abstract
Despite its popularity, Gary Becker’s model of the marriage market does not fully predict empirical correlations between married women’s labor market participation and aggregate divorce rates. In this article, we show how a simple extension of Becker’s model inspired by sociological theory improves the model’s predictive power. We extend Becker’s model to account for matching agents’ preferences for partner specialization, and as a novelty, we introduce a sociologically inspired coordination mechanism for this trait. We show that these extensions of Becker’s model improve its predictive power in terms of explaining empirical trends in divorce rates.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Journal of Mathematical Sociology |
| Volume | 36 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Pages (from-to) | 97-124 |
| Number of pages | 28 |
| ISSN | 0022-250X |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Apr 2012 |