This is proposal to continue our work on theory and measurement in the economics of marriage and the family. We have developed application of the theory of public goods to households and families. We plan to extend these theoretical results and to apply them to empirical analysis of marriage markets and household living arrangements. A major portion of our research will be to fit an empirical model of a marriage market to American and Swedish data on the age of marriage of males and females extending from the present back into the 19th century. This model can be used to explain the response of marriage patterns to the economic the demographic background, including the effects of changing cohort size. Our theoretical results have also allowed us to develop an empirically estimate model of the effect of total resources and the dispersion of resources among potential joint household members on the probability of forming joint households. This model extends our results on assortative mating in marriage markets to a wide class of joint household formation decisions. We will apply the model to data sets from Guatemala, Brazil, and the United States.
