The Marriage Market, Labor Supply and Education Choice

Chiappori, Pierré-Andre; Dias, Mónica Costa; Meghir, Costas

doi:10.3386/w21004

Cited by 49 publications

(53 citation statements)

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“…We interpret the economic mechanism behind the heterogeneity in the e↵ect of school construction by ethnic group as evidence of the role of the marriage market in driving educational choices and hence how households respond to education reforms. While marriage outcomes are generally considered an important component of the returns to education, especially for women (Goldin, 2006;Chiappori et al, 2017), it is typically di cult to empirically observe them and to identify their actual impact. In this paper, we study the marriage market returns to education as reflected in the value of the bride price and show that they have sizable e↵ects on parents' decisions to educate daughters, particularly in response to policies that reduce the cost of schooling.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bride Price and Female Education

Ashraf¹,

Bau²,

Nunn³

et al. 2016

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Udry, Glen Weyl and participants at various seminars and conferences for helpful comments. Eva Ng, Parina Lalchandani, and Poulod Borojerdi provided excellent research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bride Price and Female Education

Ashraf¹,

Bau²,

Nunn³

et al. 2016

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“…53 This is both because the number of college men was lower, and due to changing tastes for partners.54 Ge(2011)predicted female college graduation would drop 8% without the marriage market return to education Chiappori, Iyigun, and. Weiss (2009), Chiappori, Costa-Dias, andMeghir (2018),Fernández andWong (2011) andLow (2014) also studied the interaction of the marriage market and education.…”

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confidence: 99%

Career and Family Decisions: Cohorts Born 1935-1975

Eckstein

Keane²,

Lifshitz

2019

Econometrica

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Comparing the 1935 and 1975 U.S. birth cohorts, wages of married women grew twice as fast as for married men, and the wage gap between married and single women turned from negative to positive. The employment rate of married women also increased sharply, while that of other groups remained quite stable. To better understand these diverse patterns, we develop a life-cycle model incorporating individual and household decisions about education, employment, marriage/divorce, and fertility. The model provides an excellent fit to wage and employment patterns, along with changes in education, marriage/divorce rates, and fertility. We assume fixed preferences, but allow for four exogenously changing factors: (i) mother's education, health, and taxes/transfers; (ii) marriage market opportunities and divorce costs; (iii) the wage structure and job offers; (iv) contraception technology. We quantify how each factor contributed to changes across cohorts. We find that factor (iii) was the most important force driving the increase in relative wages of married women, but that all four factors are important for explaining the many socio-economic changes that occurred in the past 50 years. Finally, we use the model to simulate a shift from joint to individual taxation. In a revenue-neutral simulation, we predict this would increase employment of married women by 9% and the marriage rate by 8.1%.Broadly speaking, employment rates of single men and women, as well as married men, were all fairly stable over the whole 1962 to 2015 period. 2 In contrast, the employment rate of married women doubled from 30% in 1962 to about 60% in 1995, almost approaching that of single men/women. Since 1995, the employment rate of married women has stabilized.The increase in relative wages and employment of married women coincided with an increase in their education relative to singles. But we find education alone cannot explain the increase in married women's relative wages. Selection of women into marriage based on unobserved labor market skills has also gone from strongly negative to positive.The focus of this paper is to unravel the causes of these puzzling differences in trends of wages and employment of married women relative to other demographic groups over the 1962-2015 period by analyzing behavior of cohorts born from the 1930s to the 1970s. Potential explanations include: changing selection into marriage, changing incentives to invest in human capital, increased demand for female labor, changing divorce laws, changes in availability of oral contraception, and home production technology. Thus, to understand the changes in wages and employment that occurred over this period, one needs a model that includes marriage market sorting along with individual and household decisions about education, marriage/divorce, employment, and fertility.Of course, prior literature contains many papers that address some aspects of these phenomena. For example, explanations of why wages/employment of married women have increased include: reduced gender wage discri...

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“…The key insight of the SEV approach is that only the sharing rule over the economic part of the surplus matters for assortativeness in marriage (see Choo and Siow (2006), Chiappori et al (2017) and Chiappori et al (2018)). Specifically, it can be shown that there exists a collection of values U IJ and V IJ that add up to the economic surplus Z IJ for all possible matching combinations, and such that the individual utilities of man i and woman j married to each other in the stable equilibrium are, respectively,…”

Section: The Separable Extreme Value Index Of Assortativenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changes in Assortative Matching and Inequality in Income: Evidence for the UK

et al. 2020

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The extent to which like-with like marry is important for inequality as well as for the outcomes of children that result from the union. In this paper we present evidence on changes in assortative mating and its implications for household inequality in the UK. Our approach contrasts with others in the literature in that it is consistent with an underlying model of the marriage market. We argue that a key advantage of this approach is that it creates a direct connection between changes in assortativeness in marriage and changes in the value of marriage for the various possible matches by education group. Our empirical results do not show a clear direction in the change in assortativeness in the UK, between the birth cohorts of 1945-54 and 1965-74. We find that changes in assortativeness pushed income inequality up slightly, but that the strong changes in education attainment across the two cohorts contributed to scale down inequality.

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The Marriage Market, Labor Supply and Education Choice

Cited by 49 publications

References 0 publications

Bride Price and Female Education

Bride Price and Female Education

Career and Family Decisions: Cohorts Born 1935-1975

Changes in Assortative Matching and Inequality in Income: Evidence for the UK

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