event
Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar
Tuesday
10
May
Bram De Rock

Stable Marriage, Household Consumption and Unobserved Match Quality

Bram De Rock, Full Professor in Mathematical Economics at Université Libre de Bruxelles
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Maison de la paix (Geneva), Petal 1 Room S4 (hybrid)

The Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar is the Economics department's weekly seminar, featuring external speakers in all areas of economics.

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As part of the Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar series, the International Economics Department at the Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Bram De Rock, Full Professor in Mathematical Economics at Université Libre de Bruxelles and at KU Leuven.

He will present his work and paper, joint with Martin Browning, Laurens Cherchye, Thomas Demuynck and Frederic Vermeulen, titled Stable Marriage, Household Consumption and Unobserved Match Quality.

Abstract: We present a methodology for the structural empirical analysis of household consumption and time use behaviour under marital stability. Our approach is of the revealed preference type and non-parametric, meaning that it does not require a prior functional specification of individual utilities. Without making use of the transferable utility assumption, but still allowing for monetary transfers, our method can identify individuals’ unobserved match qualities and quantify them in money metric terms. We can include both preference factors, affecting individuals’ preferences over private and public goods, and match quality factors, driving differences in unobserved match quality. We demonstrate the practical usefulness of our methodology through an application to the Belgian MEqIn data. Our results reveal intuitive patterns of unobserved match quality that allow us to rationalise both the observed matches and the within-household allocations of time and money.

 

About the speaker

Bram De Rock is a Full Professor in Mathematical Economics at both the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the KU Leuven. He holds visiting positions as Honorary senior research associate at the department of economics of the University College London (UCL), as International research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and as visiting professor at the The College of Europe. He is also a regional representatieve of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. His research focuses on developing and empirically applying structural multi-member household consumption models and multi-output production models.