Matching in the Marriage Market and Non-Marital Childbearing

Abstract

The paper presents a search and matching model with heterogeneity in person-types and non-transferable utility. It allows women an additional option to have a child outside marriage with a man whom they reject or who rejects them as a marriage partner. But having a child slows down their marital search. The paper derives conditions for an equilibrium with non-marital childbearing in which some women spend some time as a single mother, but eventually marry. Such an equilibrium depends on their being sufficient frictions in marital sorting.