Marriage Markets and Marital Choice

Abstract

This article presents a search model of marital choice. We tested the hypothesis that demographic shortages of suitable marital partners not only lower the probability of marriage, but increase the likelihood that never-married women will either: (a) marry men with characteristics dissimilar to their own or (b) marry men with low socioeconomic status. This analysis was accomplished using data from the 1979-1986 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, merged with various local-area sex ratios from the 1980 decennial U.S. Census. We found that a favorable marriage market, measured in terms of the relative number of men to women, increases the odds of marrying a high-status man compared with a low-status man (as measured in terms of education and occupation). It also increases the chance of forgoing marriage rather than marrying low-status men. At the same time, we found little evidence that mate surpluses or deficits in the local marriage market affect patterns of homogamy or assortative mating. The implication is that market conditions— good or bad—have little to do with women's willingness to marry heterogamously. Women are unwilling to “cast a wider net” in the face of market constraints.