Marriage market and intra-household allocation : essays in economics of family and education[Formation des couples et allocation des ressources au sein des ménages : essais en économie de la famille et de l’éducation]

This dissertation deals with family formation, family organization and education systems. The first two chapters study how people choose their partners and how they share their income. First, I focus on couple formation and I model how people meet and decide to match or not. People can choose their partner according to their education level, their wage and their physical attractiveness. Using American data, I observe who matches with whom and who stays single and for how long to recover the preferences of individuals in terms of mating. The second chapter attempts to understand how the efficiency and the sorting of the marriage market could impact economic outcomes such as income inequalities or labor supplies. In this chapter, when people marry, they share their income and decide how much each of them will work on the market and at home to raise children or do the housework. Using British data, I recover the amount of monetary transfers which exist between household members and show that these transfers make married women work less on the market and married men work more. The last two chapters of this dissertation focus on the French education system and on the impact of grade retention policies. In the third chapter I use decomposition methods to assess to which extent the decrease in French student's score at PISA tests can be attributed to the changes in student's characteristics or to the changes in school returns. Finally, in the last chapter, I use an estimation strategy to get rid of this selection effect and we use a panel data on French High School students to evaluate the impact of grade retention on their scores.