How does rising political polarization affect who marries whom, and who remains single? This paper uses discrete choice experiments and a transferable-utility matching model to quantify how partisan preferences reshape marriage market sorting and welfare in the United States.

Abstract: Fertility choice is the equilibrium outcome of a multidimensional household problem involving joint decisions over residence, workplace, housing, and investment in children. To study how these margins interact, we develop a dynamic spatial equilibrium model in which wages and housing prices clear in local markets and estimate it using near-universe administrative microdata from South Korea, drawing on census records, credit bureau data linked to mobile phone mobility records, and government administrative sources. Empirically, fertility is negatively correlated with housing prices, commuting costs, and educational achievement, while positively associated with childcare amenities. The estimated model interprets these patterns through a unified mechanism. High-skilled parents sort into Seoul for higher wages, but this concentration intensifies education competition and raises the marginal cost of child quality, while driving up housing prices and commuting costs in general equilibrium. The resulting quantity-quality tradeoff helps explain why fertility remains low even in amenity-rich cities. Our counterfactual experiments show that place-based policies targeting a single margin can backfire at the national level. Reducing commuting costs by an amount equivalent to 20 percent of consumption or doubling housing supply in Seoul attracts households into a low-fertility environment, offsetting local gains through compositional reweighting. A nationwide education cost reduction equivalent to 20 percent of consumption is the most powerful single lever, raising the national fertility rate by 23 percent, because it directly weakens the quantity-quality wedge that spatial sorting amplifies. Combining education reform with subsidies to parents financed by a 20 percent tax on nonparents generates the largest response, raising fertility by 27 percent, as the two policies target largely distinct margins and their effects are approximately additive.

Abstract: South Korea's housing subscription lottery allocates the right to purchase newly built apartments at regulated prices, creating quasi-random variation in homeownership access among otherwise similar applicants. We identify 5,705 verified winner households across 57 oversubscribed capital-region projects in linked administrative records covering credit, consumption, and mobility, and match them to not-yet-treated future winners. In stacked event studies, winning sharply raises homeownership and triggers a large balance-sheet expansion. Mortgage debt rises by roughly 87 million won (approximately $67,000 USD), total debt rises by roughly 94 million won, and loan-to-value and debt-to-income ratios each increase by about 8 percentage points. Yet default risk does not increase. Delinquency rates, counts, and amounts are indistinguishable between winners and controls throughout the event window, and credit scores decline only modestly. The lottery's institutional design provides a natural explanation for this credit risk wedge. Because winners purchase at below-market prices, they finance a smaller share of the apartment's market value, reducing monthly payment burdens. Resale restrictions commit winners to long holding periods, during which ongoing repayment and price appreciation further widen the gap between what the home is worth and what is owed. Together, these features make the lottery a leveraging event that raises debt without raising risk. Beyond the balance sheet, winning raises total consumption after move-in but produces no detectable fertility response within three years, even though policymakers have explicitly promoted the subscription lottery as a pronatalist tool. This null finding, despite a large positive and exogenous housing wealth shock, is consistent with recent evidence that housing affordability is only one of several binding constraints on childbearing in low-fertility settings.

Draft coming soon