arXiv 13 Jul 2026 · Econometrics
arXiv:2607.11268 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
Durable marriages are presumed to foster the household specialisation that marriage enables. We exploit a recent Dutch reform that temporarily lowered the cost of divorce while leaving consent requirements unchanged. We embed divorce hazards obtained from population-level administrative data into a dynamic structural matching model in which individuals repeatedly match and choose marital roles. We identify the structural parameters by fitting the model to the equilibrium matching distribution over time, using a novel computational approach. Compared to the high-cost counterfactual, we find that more couples choose marriage when divorce costs are lower, as higher rates of marriage entry outweigh the rise in divorce. Because specialisation is preserved, aggregate welfare rises.
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The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Stevenson, Betsey and Wolfers, Justin (2007) Marriage and Divorce: Changes and Their Driving Forces | 0.843 | 3 | 3 | 100% |
| 2 | Corblet, Pauline and Fox, Jeremy T and Galichon, Alfred (2023) Repeated Matching Games An Empirical Framework | 0.737 | 4 | 3 | 50% |
| 3 | Galichon, Alfred and Salanié, Bernard (2022) Estimating Separable Matching Models | 0.737 | 3 | 3 | 67% |
| 4 | Lilia Maliar and Serguei Maliar and Pablo Winant (2021) Deep learning for solving dynamic economic models. | 0.737 | 3 | 3 | 67% |
| 5 | Richard Sinkhorn (1964) A Relationship Between Arbitrary Positive Matrices and Doubly Stochastic Matrices | 0.737 | 3 | 3 | 67% |
| 6 | Becker, Gary S (1973) A Theory of Marriage: Part I | 0.644 | 3 | 2 | 67% |
| 7 | Andrew J. Cherlin (2004) The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 8 | Aÿgun, Murat (2015) Het Wetvoorstel Wet Scheiden Zonder Rechter | 0.511 | 2 | 2 | 50% |
| 9 | Choo, Eugene and Siow, Aloysius (2006) Who marries whom and why | 0.511 | 2 | 2 | 50% |
| 10 | Shapley, Lloyd Stowell and Shubik, Martin (1971) The assignment game I: The core | 0.511 | 2 | 2 | 50% |
Showing the top 10 of 31 scored citations.