Family, marriage markets and inequality : a matching approach.

Summary This thesis deals with the formation of couples in the marriage market, and proposes as a guideline to focus on the issue of inequalities, both inter- and intra-household. The first chapter examines the role of marital preferences in the rise of income inequality between households. Edoardo Ciscato and I use US data to measure the impact of changing marital preferences on inter-household income inequality. Using structural methods, we show that if marital preferences had not changed since 1971, the Gini coefficient today would be 6% lower. In Chapter 2, I introduce the idea of bringing together the literature on matching models and that on collective models. For this purpose, Alfred Galichon, Scott Kominers and I have worked on a matching model with imperfectly transferable utility. We prove the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in this framework. In addition, we construct two algorithms for determining the equilibrium. We show how the model can be estimated by maximum likelihood and propose an illustration. In the last chapter, I focus on resource sharing within couples. The idea is that collective models are inseparable from the marriage market, in the sense that the sharing of bargaining power is endogenous to the determination of an equilibrium in the marriage market. I discuss in depth the connection between collective models and matching models. In particular, I characterize the classes of collective models that can be integrated with the imperfectly transferable utility (ITU) matching model developed earlier. I propose a general method to estimate these models. Finally, I propose to illustrate my results on data extracted from the US PSID, and to estimate a model with private consumption, leisure and domestic work.