生育指标和婚姻匹配*

本文通过研究中国计划生育政策改革来检验贝克尔（Becker）关于婚姻的经济学理论。中国从20世纪80年代起实行“一胎化”政策,但随后逐渐允许夫妻均为独生子女的家庭生育第二胎,即“双独二胎”政策。由于“双独二胎”实施前不同省份“一胎化”政策的执行力度不同,所以放开“双独二胎”在不同省份间的政策效果也不同。笔者利用政策实施时间前后和省份间政策力度的差异,采用二重差分的实证设计进行分析,发现“双独二胎”政策增加了独生子女之间的匹配,减少了独生子女和非独生子女的“混合匹配”。笔者建立搜寻—匹配模型对“双独二胎”政策如何影响婚姻市场均衡进行分析。二重差分的实证分析得到的证据与模型的推论相一致,实证结果在一系列检验中保持稳健。     

对我国现时夫妻财产制度的探讨

夫妻财产制度，是有关夫妻财产的使用、归属、管理、收益，以及夫妻债务的清偿，夫妻家庭生活等费用的负担，婚姻终止时夫妻财产的清算和分割等的法律制度。夫妻财产制度是夫妻婚姻家庭生活得以正常运转的物质保证，因而它的完善关系到夫妻财产关系平等与否，关系到与夫妻发生交易的第三人的利益安全问题，关系到社会经济的发展问题。     

北京市初婚夫妇的年龄特点、变动趋势及其影响因素

利用北京市2004-2011年的婚姻登记数据对近年来初婚夫妇的年龄及其匹配情况进行分析。近8年北京市初婚男性的平均年龄为27.74岁,女性为25.96岁,夫妇的平均年龄差约1.78岁;尽管"男大女小"仍是主流的婚龄匹配模式,但夫妇年龄差表现出明显的逐年缩小的态势。在男性初婚年龄基本保持稳定情况下的女性初婚年龄的推迟、女性教育程度的提高、城市化进程的不断推进等等,是促进北京市夫妇年龄差缩小的主要影响因素。     

Love,money, and parental goods: Does parental matchmaking matter?

While parental matchmaking has been widespread throughout history and across countries, we know little about the relationship between parental matchmaking and marriage outcomes. Does parental involvement in matchmaking help ensure their needs are better taken care of by married children? This paper finds supportive evidence using a survey of Chinese couples. In particular, parental involvement in matchmaking is associated with having a more submissive wife, a greater number of children, a higher likelihood of having any male children, and a stronger belief of the husband in providing old age support to his parents. These benefits, however, are achieved at the cost of less marital harmony within the couple and lower market income of the wife. The results render support to and extend the findings of (Becker et al., 2015) where parents meddle with children’s preferences to ensure their commitment to providing parental goods such as old age support.     

ON THE EMERGENCE OF TOYBOYS: THE TIMING OF MARRIAGE WITH AGING AND UNCERTAIN CAREERS*

We explore how gender bias in career opportunities affects matching in a marriage market with search frictions and where an individual’s fitness decays with age. We document a “being left on the shelf” effect where young singles, who find the marriage market rapidly thins with age, rush into early partnership. Singles with stronger career opportunities, however, have a greater option value to defer marriage. More equal career opportunities for women (captured by greater schooling and better occupations) potentially explain the recent emergence of toyboy unions, in which the woman is at least 5 years older than her partner.     

An Investigation into the Positive Effect of an Educated Wife on Her Husband’s Earnings: The Case of Japan in the Period between 2000 and 2003

We analyze the effect of a wife??s human capital on her husband??s earnings, using individual-level data for Japan in the period 2000?C2003. We find a positive association between a wife??s education and her husband??s earnings, which can be attributed to the assortative mating effect as well as the positive effect of an educated wife on her husband??s productivity. We divide the sample into those couples with non-working wives and those with working wives, and also employ an estimation strategy proposed by Jepsen (Review of Economics of the Household 3:197?C214, 2005), attempting to control for the assortative mating effect. Our regression analysis provides suggestive evidence that educated wives increase their husbands?? productivity and earnings only when they are non-workers and have sufficient time to support their husbands.     

The value of youth: equalizing age differentials in marriages

"The objective of this paper is to present a model of constrained utility-maximizing behaviour which is able to explain several features of marriage. The model predicts that individuals meet in the marriage market and trade characteristics, in which they are relatively well endowed, to obtain characteristics in which they are less well endowed. The model implies a positive age differential in favour of the husband due to biological differences. This differential is shown to be attentuated by differences in earnings capacity and human capital investments. The model also has implications for dynamic aspects of marriage and provides an explanation for the secular increase in females' age of first marriage and difficulty experienced by females in the post thirty-year age group in finding suitable partners. An examination of unit record data on residents of metropolitan California from the 1980 United States Census reveals systematic patterns in the data are consistent with the theory."     

The value of youth: equalizing age differentials in marriages

The objective of this paper is to present a model of constrained utility-maximizing behaviour which is able to explain serveral features of marriage. The model predicts that individuals meet in the marriage market and trade characteristics, in which they are relatively well endowed, to obtain characteristics in which they are less well endowed. The model implies a positive age differential in favour of the husband due to biological differences. This differential is shown to be attentuated by differences in earnings capacity and human capital investments. The model also has implications for dynamic aspects of marriage and provides an explanation for the secular increase in female' age of first marriage and the difficulty experienced by females in the post thirty-year age group in finding suitable partners. An examination of unit record data on residents of metropolitan California from the 1980 United States Census reveals systematic patterns in the data are consistent with the theory.     

Endogenous gender power,household labor supply and the demographic transition

We present a microeconomic model of the household in which there exists no difference in spousal preferences but childrearing is more time costly for women. Bargaining between the wife and the husband forms the basis of household decisions. Marital bargaining power is determined according to the incomes of the spouses, which in turn help to determine their reservation utility levels outside the marriage. The endogeneity of bargaining power introduces a non-cooperative element to the couples' decision-making problem because both the husbands and the wives take into account how their pre-marital education decisions affect their marital power and the share they extract from household resources in the future. The model predicts that wives invest more than is Pareto efficient in their education in order to increase their bargaining power in marriage. As a consequence, couples have fewer children and consume more when exogenous structural changes lead women to invest more in education. A corollary of the model is that empowering women directly through social reforms such as a lower gender wage gap leads to lower fertility and higher spousal consumption and leisure.     

Do young women trade jobs for marriage? A skeptical view

This paper takes a skeptical view of the theory that the slight decline in young women's labor-force participation from 1985 to 1990 can be explained by the fact that there are fewer women now in their early twenties than there are men in their late twenties so that women currently have more bargaining power in the marriage market than men do.The paper argues that the assumption behind this theory, that for women marriage and employment are substitutes, is outmoded. It also contends that the theory leaves out the importance of full-time schooling as an activity alternative to employment and that in fact the increase in full-time schooling among young women has been much greater than the slight decrease in their labor-force participation.Several questions are raised about the statistical test of the theory and also about the reasons why the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article on the slight decline in young women's labor-force participation and featured the marriage market theory as an explanation for this purported new trend.     

贵州农村不同类型家庭外出务工对家庭收入和生活的影响

分析贵州不同类型家庭外出务工对家庭的影响,发现夫妻共同外出务工家庭多以进工厂的方式外出打工,他们收入要高于户主单独外出务工家庭收入,而夫妻共同外出打工对留守老人与儿童的负面影响要大于户主单独外出务工的家庭。     

Effects of growing wage disparities and changing family composition on the U.S. income distribution

U.S. income inequality soared after 1979. The present paper estimates the contribution of increased earnings inequality to the surge in overall income inequality between 1979 and 1996. The direct contribution of increased earnings inequality is surprisingly modest. Even if male and female earnings inequality had remained unchanged at their 1979 levels, about two thirds of the observed increase in overall U.S. inequality would have occurred. Other factors contributing to higher overall inequality include the growing correlation of husband and wife earned incomes and the increasing percentage of Americans who live in single-adult families, families that typically have much more unequal incomes than husband–wife families.     

The effect of a wife’s retirement on her husband’s mental health

This article examines the effect of wives’ retirement on their husband’s mental health in Australia. By exploiting the exogenous variations in women’s retirement induced by the age pension qualifying ages, we find that spousal retirement status has a positive impact on the mental health of older men. This beneficial impact is found to strengthen with wives’ time spent in retirement. We show that wife’s retirement affects the constituents of her husband’s mental well-being in different ways. We also have identified four channels for the positive linkage between older women’s retirement and the mental health of their spouse.     

家和家人的范围、层级和功能分析

本文基于历史和当代制度及民众实践,提出中国的家实际包括同宗之家、服亲之家、同祖之家、同父之家和夫妇之家五个层级,进而形成家层级结构概念。根据本项研究,近代之前,同宗之家、服亲之家和同祖之家特别是服亲之家、同祖之家成员在官方制度中被赋予较多的责任、义务和权利功能,这些功能以允许、限制和鼓励所为的形式表现出来。民国时期,同宗之家、服亲之家和同祖之家成员间功能关系减弱,当代功能性关系降至同父之家成员范围内,且具有了男女双系特征。在民间社会,婚丧嫁娶等仪式性活动中同祖之家仍是重要关系单位。乡村服亲之家成员在礼仪性活动中多有互动,在村庄公职竞选中仍为人们所重视。     

Class, gender and marriage

This paper estimates the contributions of differential fecundity, social heterogeneity, assortative matching and search frictions to aggregate marriage behavior in 18th century Quebec. The reduced form estimates show that a simple random matching model of the marriage market, in which there are gains to assortative matching and women may leave the marriage market at a higher rate than men, can explain these data. The estimates also show that the marriage market was segmented by social status.     

An empirical analysis of assortative mating in India and the U.S.

This paper uses a conditional logit model to analyze empirically how individuals sort themselves through marriage into households in India and the U.S. The results support positive assortative mating of spouses with respect to age and schooling. We find no evidence in favor of Becker's theory of labor market specialization in couples. Moreover, while similarity in age is the strongest predictor of marital choice in India, education of a prospective spouse plays a more important role in the U.S. Finally, we find that while dowry increases the likelihood of women marrying men with characteristics dissimilar to their own, availability of a mate has a positive effect on the degree of stratification in India.     

MALE AND FEMALE MARRIAGE RETURNS TO SCHOOLING

A collective marriage matching model is estimated and calibrated to quantify the share of returns to schooling that is realized through marriage. The predictions of the model are matched with detailed Danish household data on the relationship between schooling and wage rates, the division of time and goods within the household, and the extent to which men and women sort positively on several traits in marriage. Counterfactual analysis conducted with the model suggests that Danish men and women are earning on the order of half of their returns to schooling through improved marital outcomes.     

A search model of two-sided matching under nontransferable utility

In a decentralized marriage market there are different types of men and women. Agents sequentially search for mating partners and meet bilaterally in a random fashion. Upon meeting, the paired agents complete mating if both agree, and separate and continue searching otherwise. The polarization of interests between men and women appears as in Gale-Shapley marriage problems; as agents of one sex become more selective about their mates, agents of the other sex lose. As search costs disappear, the set of equilibrium outcomes in a search model reduces to the set of stable matchings in a corresponding Gale-Shapley marriage problem.     

The Burden of Unemployment on Family Units: An Overview

This article proposes several measures of the burden of unemployment on family units. It is shown that one in 13 couple families had at least the husband or wife unemployed in 1994. Almost one-quarter of the total unemployment among couple families in 1994 was in families where both husband and wife were unemployed. The analyses presented show that the burden of unemployment on family units differs according to the characteristics of the family. It is particularly intense in couple families with young dependents and among immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. Of particular concern is the finding that there are many families where there are multiple family members unemployed and no member employed. This will have major implications where knowledge of employment opportunities is obtained primarily through family contacts.     

Wants and Working Wives: Household Demand and Saving in Australia*

Household survey data are used to compare the consumption and savings behaviour of families in which both husband and wife work with the behaviour when only the husband is employed. Other household characteristics allowed for are age, socio-economic class and family size. A linear systems model is used and attention is focused on alternative methods of estimating the parameters of the Klein-Rubin utility function. The preferred method involves the use of information from time-series studies in estimating the ‘subsistence’ parameters.