Marriage as a Rat Race: Noisy Premarital Investments with Assortative Matching
研究了在无摩擦婚姻市场中，父母为子女婚姻前景进行的婚前投资是否过度，发现除非性别完全对称，否则投资通常超过帕累托最优水平，且女孩投资更多当她们的质量波动较小或人数较多时。
We study the efficiency of premarital investments when parents care about their child’s marriage prospects, in a large frictionless marriage market with nontransferable utility. Stochastic returns to investment ensure that equilibrium is unique. We find that, generically, investments exceed the Pareto-efficient level, unless the sexes are symmetric in all respects. Girls will invest more than boys if their quality shocks are less variable than shocks for boys or if they are the abundant sex. The unique equilibrium in our continuum agent model is the limit of the equilibria of finite models, as the number of agents tends to infinity.