Economics Research Community Seminar – Dr Roberto Bonilla Trejos
Title: Marriage. divorce and reservation wages
Date: 4 October 2023
Time: 13:00-14:00
Location: NUBS.2.03
Speaker: Roberto Bonilla
If you would like to attend, please register using the following link:
Marriage, divorce and reservation wages
Roberto Bonilla is a Costa Rican economist. He did his undergraduate studies in the Universidad de Costa Rica. After working as a practitioner as an advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Trade, he did his MSc and PhD in Economics in the University of Essex.
Details of Roberto’s academic work can be found here: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/business/people/profile/robertobonilla.html
Abstract:
We present an equilibrium model of interlinked frictional labour and marriage markets. In the marital market, men and women are involved in random
sequential search for a partner. Men are seen as breadwinners in the family, and therefore in the labour market unemployed men perform a constrained
sequential search for jobs. We establish that, if divorce is an option, married men have a higher reservation wage than single men when a male marriage
wage premium exists. This result is true with exogenous as well as endogenous wage distributions, where the latter scenario implies firms discriminate by
marital status. We successfully test our results using German data.