NBER Publications by Leeat Yariv

This paper uses a new data set on child-adoption matching to document the preferences of potential adoptive parents over U.S.-born and unborn children relinquished for adoption by their birth mothers. We show that adoptive parents exhibit significant preferences in favor of girls and against African- American children. A non-African-American child relinquished for adoption attracts the interest of potential adoptive parents with probability 11.5% if it is a girl and 7.9% if it is a boy. As for race, a non-African-American child has a probability of attracting the interest of an adopting parent at least seven times as high as the corresponding probability for an African-American child. In addition, we show that a child’s desirability in the adoption process depends significantly on time to ...

We study a simple model of a decentralized market game in which firms make directed offers to workers. We focus on markets in which agents have aligned preferences. When agents have complete information or when there are no frictions in the economy, there exists an equilibrium that yields the stable match. In the presence of market frictions and preference uncertainty, harsher assumptions on the richness of the economy have to be made in order for decentralized markets to generate stable outcomes in equilibrium.