Assortative Matching at the Top of the Distribution: Evidence from the World's Most Exclusive Marriage Market

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Goni, Marc
• 署名单位: University of Bergen
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-APPLIED ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7782
• DOI: 10.1257/app.20180463
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 445-487
• 关键词: search; institutions; aristocracy; preferences; CHOICE; marry; ratio

摘要

Using novel data on peerage marriages in Britain, I find that low search costs and marriage-market segregation can generate sorting. Peers courted in the London Season, a matching technology introducing aristocratic bachelors to debutantes. When Queen Victoria went into mourning for her husband, the Season was interrupted (1861-1863), raising search costs and reducing market segregation. I exploit exogenous variation in women's probability to marry during the interruption from their age in 1861. The interruption increased peer-commoner intermarriage by 40 percent and reduced sorting along landed wealth by 30 percent. Eventually, this reduced peers' political power and affected public policy in late nineteenth-century England.