Research

Complementarities between partners' characteristics are often held responsible for the patterns of assortative mating observed in marriage markets along different dimensions, such as race and education. However, when the marriage market is segmented into racially and educationally homogeneous clusters, people naturally have more match opportunities with their likes. In this paper, we build an empirically tractable dynamic matching model with endogenous separation and remarriage. In every period, agents participate in a competitive assignment game in the vein of Choo and Siow (2006), where mating strategies depend on both the expected match gains and search frictions in the form of meeting costs. We leverage panel data on the duration of both non-cohabiting and cohabiting relationships to jointly estimate both determinants of assortative mating with a nationally representative sample of the U.S. population. We show that, in the absence of search frictions, the share of matches between people of the same race (education) would decrease from 88.2% (49.2%) to 55.5% (40.8%), as opposed to 53.3% (33.5%) if singles were randomly matched. As a result, search frictions explain nearly all the racial homogamy observed in the data, but only approximately half of the observed educational homogamy, with the other half attributed to match complementarities. In a counterfactual exercise, we show that minority groups experiencing an unfavorable gender ratio when marriage markets are segmented, such as Hispanic men and black women, would benefit from access to a broader and more diverse pool of partners.

Social scientists have long been interested in marital homogamy and its relationship with inequality. However, measuring homogamy is not straight-forward, particularly when one is interested in assessing marital sorting based on multiple traits. In this paper, we argue that Separate Extreme Value (SEV) models not only generate a matching function with several desirable theoretical properties, but they are also suited for the study of multidimensional sorting. Specifically, we show (i) how a small number of factors can be identified that capture most of the explained variance in matching patterns, and (ii) how these factors relate to various "outcomes" of the post-matching relationship, such as children's human capital and well-being. We then use rich small-scale survey data to examine sorting among parents of children attending schools in Naples. Our findings show that homogamy is pervasive; not only do men and women sort by age, education, height, and physical characteristics, but they also look for partners that share similar health-related behavioral traits and risk attitude. We also show that marital patterns are well explained by a low number of dimensions, the most important being age and human capital. Moreover, children of parents with a high human capital endowment perform better at school, although they report lower levels of subjective well-being and of perceived quality of relationship with their mothers.

In this paper, we extend Gary Becker's empirical analysis of the marriage market to same-sex couples. Beckers's theory rationalizes the well-known phenomenon of homogamy among heterosexual couples: individuals mate with their likes because many characteristics, such as education, consumption behaviour, desire to nurture children, religion, etc., exhibit strong complementarities in the household production function. However, because of asymmetries in the distributions of male and female characteristics, men and women may need to marry "up" or "down" according to the relative shortage of their characteristics among the populations of men and women. Yet, among homosexual couples, this limit does not exist as partners are drawn from the same population, and thus the theory of assortative mating would boldly predict that individuals will choose a partner with nearly identical characteristics. Empirical evidence suggests a very different picture: a robust stylized fact is that the correlation of characteristics is in fact weaker among the homosexual couples. In this paper, we build an equilibrium model of the same-sex marriage market which allows for straightforward identification of the gains to marriage. We estimate the model with 2008-2012 ACS data on California and show that positive assortative mating is weaker for homosexuals than for heterosexuals with respect to age and race. Yet, contrarily to previous empirical findings, our results suggest that postitive assortative mating with respect to education is stronger on the same-sex marriage market. As regards labor market outcomes, such as hourly wages and working hours, we find that the process of specialization within the household mainly applies to heterosexual couples.

In this paper, we describe mating patterns in the United States from 1964 to 2017 and measure the impact of changes in marital preferences on between-household income inequality. We rely on the recent literature on the econometrics of matching models to estimate complementarity parameters of the household production function. Our structural approach allows to measure sorting on multiple dimensions and to effectively disentangle changes in marital preferences and in demographics, addressing concerns that affect results from existing literature. We answer the following questions: has assortativeness increased over time? Along which dimensions? To which extent the shifts in marital preferences can explain inequality trends?  We find that, after controlling for other observables, assortative mating on education has become stronger. Moreover, if mating patterns had not changed since 1971, the 2017 Gini coefficient between married households would be lower by 6%. We conclude that about 20% of the increase in between-household inequality is due to changes in marital preferences. Increased assortativeness on education positively contributes to the inequality rise, but only modestly.

In spite of the increasing share of individuals who identify as bisexuals or report sexual attraction to both men and women, 89% of partnered bisexuals in the U.S. are in a different-sex relationship. Moreover, 14% of partnered gay men and lesbians have a partner of the opposite gender. In order to better understand these mating patterns, we estimate a multidimensional matching model of the marriage market where individuals differ by gender, sexual orientation, age, education, and race. The novelty is that the partner's gender is endogenously chosen conditional on the agent's sexual orientation, and is subject to trade-offs that depend on both the agents' preferences and the pool of potential partners. We show that same-sex couples experience lower gains from live-in relationships, a difference we refer to as the "same-sex penalty". We find a relatively large penalty for male same-sex couples, in both Germany and the U.S., although it has decreased in recent years. Moreover, we identify a smaller penalty for female same-sex couples in some regions of the U.S., but not in the Northeast, in the West, nor in Germany. Through a counterfactual experiment, we show that, absent this penalty, the share of same-sex couples in the U.S. would increase by about 50%, from 1.35% to 2.06% of all couples. Finally, we also show that a 10% increase in the men-to-women gender ratio would lead to a modest, but positive increase in the odds that a man is in a same-sex relationship (+1.8%), and to an almost symmetric decrease in the odds that a woman is in a same-sex relationship (-1.9%).

Previous genetic studies of human assortative mating have primarily focused on searching for its genomic footprint but have revealed limited insights into its biological and social mechanisms. Combining insights from the economics of the marriage market with advanced tools in statistical genetics, we perform the first genome-wide association study (GWAS) on a latent index for partner choice. Using 206,617 individuals from four global cohorts, we uncover phenotypic characteristics and social processes underlying assortative mating. We identify a broadly robust genetic component of the partner choice index between sexes and several countries and identify its genetic correlates. We also provide solutions to reduce assortative mating-driven biases in genetic studies of complex traits by conditioning GWAS summary statistics on the genetic associations with the latent partner choice index.

This paper demonstrates the prevalence, pervasiveness, persistence, and resilience of a system of non-Big God religious beliefs, in absence of religious organizations and moralizing prescriptions, thanks to a self-fulfilling mechanism based on social insurance. We focus on the Vietnamese’s beliefs in marriage fortune predictions by the Taoist astrological system Tử Vi. First, we estimate a structural model of assortative marriage matching and show that such beliefs’ importance in marriage formation amounts to 6.5% of that of the entire age and education profile. Second, we estimate the effect of auspiciousness on couples’ outcomes while controlling for selection into marriage using the structural model’s predictions. Auspicious couples receive 11% more social transfers from their extended family, and up to 28% under hardship, because they are believed to be more harmonious and lucky. They further enjoy more consumption, income, and other welfare measures. We link the system’s long-term persistence and resilience to its potential role as a commitment device between families.

In this paper, we introduce a search-and-matching framework to study educational choices, and household formation and dissolution over the life-cycle. In this model, sorting patterns on the marriage market are driven by both economies of scale in household production and consumption, and search frictions. We discuss the identification of both objects with panel data on marriages and divorces. We estimate the model with PSID data and document how the gains from marriage, marriage market segmentation, and returns to college have changed in the U.S. over the last 50 years. Through our structural model, we show that changes in the wage distribution alone would lead to an increase of college education equally for both genders, could explain almost 20% of the total decline of marriage, but would also reduce women's marriage market returns to college. On the other hand, we show that changes in household production, gender norms, and search frictions have given female college graduates an edge on marriage markets. The positive interaction between the increasing college wage premium and the changes in marriage market fundamentals explains the fast rise of female college education.

Previous technical report dating June 2018 available in the HCEO Working Paper Series (2018-046)