The purpose of this project is to develop and test a new framework for modeling family decision-making based on game-theoretic marriage markets. The first part of the project will integrate altruism into marriage market models. The second part of the study will explore the empirical consequences of such models and their interrelations with bargaining models. The goal is to produce structural models of marriage and family demands and to empirically estimate such models. Understanding the economics of family decision-making is crucial to many important policy issues, including the impacts of taxes and subsidies at the macro and micro levels, the implications of varieties of child care and child support programs, the impacts of aid to developing countries, as well as marriage, divorce, fertility, births to unwed mothers and mortality rates by age and sex.
