Preliminary Marriage Matching, Risk Sharing and Spousal Labor Supplies

The paper integrates marriage matching with a collective model of spousal labor supplies with public goods and full spousal risk sharing. The paper derives testable implications of how changes in marriage market conditions affect spousal labor supplies. The model motivates a sufficient statistic for marriage market tightness that is specific to the marital match and highlights several empirical issues that arise when estimating the effects of marriage market conditions on labor supply. The empirical section of the paper tests for marriage market effects on spousal labor supplies using data from the 2000 US census and on hours in home production from the American Time Use Survey. Changes in marriage market tightness often have large estimated effects on spousal labor supplies and hours in home production in the direction predicted by the theory. Controlling for variation in labor market conditions across marriage markets and for heterogeneity in marital production technologies across different types of matches has substantive implications for the parameter estimates.