Marriage as an Exclusive Asset-Pooling Club: Marital-Rape Criminalization and the Elite Reorganization of American Marriage Markets, 1970-1990

Between 1976 and 1993, every U.S. state dismantled the marital rape exemption, repricing the legal liability structure of the marital contract in a staggered, plausibly exogenous sequence. We assemble a 107-million-record microdata infrastructure from IPUMS USA (1970-1990 decennial censuses; 2000-2024 American Community Surveys) and a hand-constructed 51-state family legislation matrix to estimate the causal effect of these reforms on marriage market participation. Our primary design is a micro-level linear probability model estimated on 19,775,597 complete-case observations, absorbing state fixed effects, year fixed effects, and state-specific linear trends, with CR1 state-clustered inference (51 clusters, test df = 50). We document a +10.4 percentage point increase in long-run marital stock capitalization following reform adoption (p < 0.001), alongside a +4.2 percentage point short-run effect (p < 0.001). A general-equilibrium framework rationalizes this Elite Sorting Paradox: statutory rights codification converts marriage into a protected asset-pooling vehicle whose scarcity value accrues disproportionately to high-income, high-education cohorts (+11.1 pp education gradient), while unobserved exit costs filter lower-income households out of the entry margin. Placebo and pre-trend diagnostics support the identifying assumptions. Volume I of The New Human Race project.