The rise and fall of divorce: a sociological extension of becker's model of the marriage market

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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 languageEnglish
JournalJournal of Mathematical Sociology
Volume36
Issue number2
Pages (from-to)97-124
Number of pages28
ISSN0022-250X
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012

ID: 37951814