This article was published 25 years ago and written mostly while I was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, in 1980-81. I used my middle name Amyra, my last name was hyphenated, I had just completed my dissertation under the supervision of Gary Becker and was not yet naturalized as a citizen of the USA. My English writing skills were lacking. I was impatient, packed too many ideas into one article, and was not careful enough in stating all my model's assumptions. Had this article been more readable, the differences between my marriage model and Becker's would have been more obvious, and so would be parallels with more recent models of marriage. These notes are aimed at filling the gaps that I left open in the early 1980s. This article was reproduced in my 1993 book with very few changes (GS93). INSTRUCTIONS TO READERS: These notes need to be used in juxtaposition to the original article, for most equations and all graphs are omitted here. In the text below the original GS84 article is reproduced in Times Roman, while explanations, qualifications and notes are in Courier. They address the shadowed statements in the previous paragraph reproduced from GS84. Text in squared brackets has been added to original article. The original article [henceforth, the article] follows British spelling, whereas the additions use US spelling. Most footnotes found in the original article are ignored here. p. 863 Economists have long recognised that the nature of the household plays a role in determining the supply of factors of production and the demand for goods and services. However, it was not until the 'new home economics' developed by Mincer (1962)) Becker (1965) and Lancaster (1966) that household structure was given a significant role in economic theory. Today labour economists regularly write about the value of married women's time, and marital status enters economic analyses of consumption. However, no allowance has been made for potential changes in the character of the household: single persons don't marry and married couples do not divorce. In each case the contact of the couple or the individual with the outside world is limited to exchange in goods, factor or asset markets. We have no theory analysing the interdependence between labour and marriage markets. This universally accepted assumption of a predetermined marital status is puzzling in the light of more than a decade of contributions to the economics of marriage, e.g.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract