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Abstract
This paper builds and tests a model of marriage as an incomplete contract that arises from asymmetric virginity premiums and examines whether this can lead to social inefficiencies. Contrary to the efficient households hypothesis, women cannot prevent being appropriated by men once they enter marriage if they command lower marriage market opportunities upon divorce. Because men cannot or do not commit to compensating women for their lower ex post marriage market opportunities, marriage is an incomplete contract. Men may seek to lower women's ex ante "market wages" in order to induce entry into joint production. Inefficient or abusive marriages are less likely to separate. Equalizing virginity premiums may reduce domestic and non-domestic violence.
Female circumcision and prices women pay doctors to appear virgin before marriage in many countries suggest asymmetric virginity premiums continue to exist. Evidence from China and the US suggest asymmetric virginity premiums persist over economic development. Asymmetric virginity premiums are strongly positively correlated with female but not male virginity premiums. I use variation in religious upbringing to help estimate the effect of virginity premiums on gender violence in the US. The OLS relationship between virginity premiums and female reports of forced sex may be biased downwards if shame is associated with abuse and this shame is greater for women with higher virginity premiums. But the OLS relationship for males might not be biased downwards. Asymmetric virginity premiums are positively correlated with men forcing sex on women and paying women for sex. The model complements a growing empirical literature on inefficient households and human rights abuses, visible manifestations of female appropriability across time and space.

The alienability of legal claims holds the promise of increasing access to justice and fostering development of law. I develop a principal‐agent framework where litigation funders provide expertise in reducing uncertainty in agents' disutility of production. The model leads to the counterintuitive prediction that litigation funders prefer cases with novel issues, and social surplus is positively correlated with legal uncertainty. Consistent with the model, court backlog, court expenditures, and a slowing in average time to completion are associated with third‐party funding; cases with third‐party funding receive more citations and are reversed less often than comparable cases without such arrangements.