The Collective Marriage Matching Model: Identification, Estimation and Testing∗

We develop and estimate an empirical collective model with endogenous marriage formation, participation, and family labor supply. Intrahousehold transfers arise endogenously as the transfers that clear the marriage market. The intra-household allocation can be recovered from observations on marriage decisions. Introducing the marriage market in the collective model allows us to independently estimate transfers from labor supplies and from marriage decisions. We estimate a semi-parametric version of our model using 2000 US Census data. Estimates of the model using marriage data are much more consistent with the theoretical predictions than estimates derived from labor supply. ∗We would like to thank Karim Chalak, Don Cox, Anyck Dauphin, Ryan Davies, Peter Gottschalk, Arthur Lewbel, and seminar participants at many seminars and conferences for helpful comments. Seitz gratefully acknowledges the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.