Research

Across many advanced economies, the second demographic transition has reshaped household formation: marriage has declined, cohabitation has expanded, and both divorce and separation hazards have fallen. Using four decades of monthly U.S. demographic data, I first document three new facts: (i) marriage has declined while cohabitation has risen, (ii) both unions have become more stable over time, and (iii) there are two inflection points—the mid-1990s, when substitution from marriage to cohabitation accelerated, and after the 2008 financial crisis, when remaining single became more common. Existing static or dynamic-stationary models cannot explain why fewer matches are formed even as those that do persist are more stable. To address this gap, I develop and estimate a dynamic, non-stationary marriage matching model with endogenous dissolution which allows for both marriage and cohabitation. The estimates show that rising match-formation costs outpaced surplus gains, reducing partnership formation, while marriage stability is driven by rising surplus and cohabitation stability by higher dissolution costs. Policy reforms in the 1990s coincide with the marriage–cohabitation substitution, and counterfactuals indicate that, coming out of the 2008 crisis, had house prices not risen so sharply, marriage formation would have been higher while cohabitation would have changed little.

We study distribution of labor with a model relying on one-to-one matchings of workers on which occupational choice is a constraint. We show this formulation of the model to be consistent with empirical observations of skill-based wage inequalities observed in the american market. We study theoretical properties, like existence and uniqueness of optimal solutions and stability results which indicate the behaviour of the labor market when either the original population or the production function changes. The techniques used to investigate such a model rely in optimal transport methods which allow us to provide quantitative tools to analyze and predict these changes. This model provides new understanding of wage inequalities across and within firms relating them to relative skill contributions to productions (through matched couples). 

Fertility rates in the United States have declined to historic lows, with recent cohorts marrying later, cohabiting more, and having fewer children. Standard economic explanations—such as housing costs, wages, or student debt—account for little of this trend, suggesting that shifting preferences play a central role. This paper utilizes a dynamic model of coresidential matching and fertility that incorporates marriage, cohabitation, dissolution, and fertility choices. The framework allows me to estimate match surplus, formation and dissolution costs, and fertility payoffs, and to disentangle whether declining fertility reflects postponement or an outright reduction in desired family size. Preliminary estimates suggest that while the value of childbearing within marriage remains stable across cohorts, rising frictions in union formation have reduced net returns to marriage and delayed fertility. These results imply that effective pronatalist policy must target both household formation and fertility incentives, rather than fertility alone.