Marriage Decision
Biological reasons: Genes?
Mating decision:
Do genes play a role?
An odor experiment shows that women prefer the odor
of men who are genetically similar to them, in the sense
whose genes match each woman’s paternal genes.
Like genes or unlike genes? Inbreed or outbreed?
Extremes of both inbreeding and out-breeding should be
avoided:
Extreme inbreeding causes high risk of having a
child who inherits bad versions of the same gene. A
good example may be some European royal families.
Also Darwin, who developed the theory of evolution,
experienced the suffering of inbreeding.
Out-breeding is thought to result in healthy children,
but extreme out-breeding is also disruptive.
Problem: It seems genes only explains the marriage
decision mildly and ambiguously. Wealth, education
and income play more important roles.
Why people get married: an Economic perspective
Gary Becker, who was the Nobel prize winner in
Economic Science in 1992, gives the skeleton of a theory
on marriage, by making the following two assumptions:
Each individual wants to maximize his or her utility and
the ''marriage market" is in equilibrium.
Everyone gets married ''voluntarily", either out of their
own preferences, or out of their parents’. We know that
in economics we represent the preference by utility
function.
We will assume that those who want to get married are
expecting their utility to increase compare to their
original marital status, or they will stay single.
The gains from marriage:
Assume all the commodities can be combined into a
single aggregate “z,” the underlying utility maximization
problem is equivalent to maximization of “z”.
Each household has a production function for “z”
depending on the different inputs: x (market goods and
services) and t (time).
We have the following problem:
z f ( x1 , x2 ,...xm ; t1 , t 2 ,...t k ; E )
s.t.
m k
p x w l
i 1
i i
j 1
j j v
lj tj T
Where x is market goods and services, t is the time
proportion spent on household, E are the environmental
conditions, p i is the price for market good, w j is wage
rate, l j is the time spent on the labor market, v is non-
labor income and T is the time endowment.
If we compare the above household production function
with the individual production function, we must have
the following relation if the individuals are married:
mm f z m 0
fmf z f 0
mm f f m f z m f z m 0 z f 0 ,
where mm f and f m f are the optimal production after
they get married, and z m 0 and z f 0 are the optimal
production for each one before the marriage.
How marriage influences the individual's labor supply?
Changes in labor supply:
Before marriage:
For each individual, if we assume the following
production function, and individuals choose their time
allocation:
Maxzi xi ti
s.t
xi wi li
ti li 1
by solving it we get the optimal production level and
labor supply:
w
zi i
*
4
1
li
*
2
1
ti
*
2
After marriage:
The maximization problem becomes:
MaxZ ( xa xb )(ta tb )
s.t.
xa xb wala wblb
t a la 1
tb lb 1
by solving it, we can get the optimal level of “z” and “t”:
if wa wb w , then household production z w ,
*
w
for each individual z * , and there is indifference for
2
the time allocation.
if wa wb , then household production
z* max( wa , wb ) and if wa wb , then t a 0, t b 1 ; if
wa wb , then ta 1, tb 0 .
In the real world, usually females’ wages are lower than
males’, such that we may observe that female’s labor
supply decrease after marriage, some of them even drop
out of the labor force. The opposite is true for males.
Changes in wage rate:
The most common case is that, after marriage, females’
wages go down, while males’ go up.
The reasons may be:
For females:
Their time allocation may be influenced by
marriage, namely they become less attached to the
labor force. Household responsibilities including
child-care, etc. are another issue.
For males:
They become more concentrated on their work and
less mobile (less likely to change job).