Pierre André Chiappori (Columbia) "Family Economics" - Cemmap

11. Marriage, Divorce, Children 465
person if there are more singles around. 7
Only if two singles meet, they can form a new household. We denote
by p the proportion of singles (divorcees) that one meets in the second
period of life. Because the expected quality of match, θ, which is revealed
with a lag, equals zero and the material gains from marriage are positive,
every meeting of two divorcees results in a marriage, so that p is also the
probability of remarriage. A new element in this chapter is that, in the
second period, one can meet individuals that differ in their attractiveness
as partners for remarriage, because of the presence of children, lack of
income or commitments to previous spouses. However, the consequences of
having a child may differ for men and women. For women it implies a lower
wage. For men it may imply commitments to the ex-wife. In either case, a
person with a child is a less attractive match.
11.3 Household structure and child care
We begin our analysis with the allocation of resources by couples with one
child. This allocation depends on whether the partners live with their child
or are separated.
11.3.1 Intact family
If both parents live with their child in an intact family, the utility of husband
and wife is the same for all allocations and the two spouses will
agree to maximize their common utility subject to the household budget
constraint
a + c = wmhm + wfhf . (11.4)
Because the mother is assumed to have the comparative advantage in home
production, the father spends all his discretionary time in the market, hf =
1, while the mother will spend all her discretionary time at home. To verify
the optimality of this outcome, note that, due to assumption (11.3), an
increase the father’s work in the market raises the utility of both parents
by wf(1 + α) − β, while an increase in the mother’s work at home raises
their common utility by γ − wm(1 + α).
7 Lauman et al. (1994, Table 6.1 ) report that about half of the marriages arise from
meeting in school, work, and private party and only 12 percent originate in specialized
channels such as social clubs or bars. The establishment of more focused channels, where
singles meet only singles, is costly and they will be created only if the ”size of the
market” is large enough. Also, as noted by Mortensen (1988), the search intensity of
the unattached decrease with the proportion of attached people in the population. The
reason is that attached individuals are less likely to respond to an offer, which lowers
the return for search (see Chapter 7).