The Human Capital-Reproductive Capital Trade-Off in Marriage Market Matching

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Low, Corinne
• 署名单位: University of Pennsylvania
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-3808
• DOI: 10.1086/726238
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 552-576
• 关键词: premarital investments; LABOR; education; CHILDREN; career; FAMILY; POWER; pill; gap

摘要

Throughout the twentieth century, the relationship between women's human capital and men's income was nonmonotonic: while college-educated women married richer spouses than high school-educated women, graduate-educated women married poorer spouses than college-educated women. This can be rationalized by a bidimensional matching framework where women's human capital is negatively correlated with another valuable trait: fertility, or reproductive capital. Such a model predicts nonmonotonicity in income matching with a sufficiently high income distribution of men. A simulation of the model using US Census fertility and income data shows that it can also predict the recent transition to more assortative matching as desired family sizes have fallen.