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Bequest as a Public Good within Marriage: A Note

Junsen Zhang

Journal of Political Economy 1994

Bequest to and marriage of children can lead to a Pareto-inefficient allocation. The inefficiency (or market failure) arises because one family, making a bequest to its own child, ignores the contribution to the utility of the other family whose child enters the marriage. This note shows that an assortative mating rule based on bequests can improve or even restore Pareto efficiency when parents take account of the rule in deciding the amount of bequests to their own children.

DOI
10.1086/261926
Volume
102 (1)
Pages
187-193
Language
en
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