Do individuals marry and divorce for economic reasons? Can we measure the economic attractiveness of a person's marriage market? We answer these questions using a structural model of consumer‐producer households that is applied to rich data from Malawi. Using revealed preference conditions for a stable marriage market, we define the economic attractiveness of a potential match as the difference between the potential value of consumption and leisure with the new partner and the value of consumption and leisure in the current marriage. We estimate this marital instability measure for every possible pair in geographically defined marriage markets in 2010. We find that the marital instability measure is predictive of future divorces, particularly for women. We further show that this estimated effect on divorce is mitigated by the woman's age, and by a lack of men, relative to women, in the marriage market, showing that these factors interact with the economic attractiveness of the remarriage market. These findings provide out‐of‐sample validation of our model and evidence that the economic value of the marriage market matters for divorce decisions.

中文翻译：

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哪里出问题了？马拉维的婚姻与离婚

个人出于经济原因结婚和离婚吗？我们可以衡量一个人的婚姻市场的经济吸引力吗？我们使用消费者-生产者家庭的结构模型来回答这些问题，该模型应用于马拉维的丰富数据。通过使用揭示的偏好条件来建立稳定的婚姻市场，我们将潜在匹配的经济吸引力定义为新伴侣的消费和休闲潜在价值与当前婚姻中的消费和休闲价值之间的差额。我们估算了2010年按地理位置划分的婚姻市场中每对可能的婚姻不稳定指标。我们发现，婚姻不稳定指标可以预测未来的离婚，特别是对于女性而言。我们进一步表明，该离婚影响的估计值可以通过该妇女的年龄得到缓解，并且由于在婚姻市场上相对于女性而言，男人的缺乏，表明这些因素与再婚市场的经济吸引力相互影响。这些发现提供了我们模型的样本外验证，并证明了婚姻市场的经济价值对离婚决定至关重要。