Marriage Market Outcomes Research Articles

The value of a green card in the U.S. marriage market: A tale of chain migration?

This study examines the impact of having a clear path to lawful permanent resident status, or a “green card,” on marital status and spousal characteristics among Chinese immigrants in the United States. A series of U.S. policy changes in the early 1990s made almost all mainland Chinese immigrants already present in the country eligible for a green card. We examine the effect of those policy changes on Chinese immigrants' marriage market outcomes relative to other East Asian immigrants. Using 1990 and 2000 U.S. Census data, we find that the share of Chinese immigrants who are married increased after they became automatically eligible for a green card. In particular, highly educated Chinese immigrants became relatively more likely to be married with a spouse living with them and relatively less likely to be married with a spouse living elsewhere. This pattern suggests that some Chinese spouses immigrated after their husband or wife received legal status, or spousal chain migration occurred. We also find that highly educated Chinese immigrants benefited in the marriage market in terms of spousal education and earnings, but less-educated Chinese immigrants did not. Meanwhile, less-educated Chinese-born women became relatively more likely to marry a U.S. native.

Sanitation and marriage markets in India: Evidence from the Total Sanitation Campaign

This paper measures the additional value of sanitation within the marriage arrangement. We use data from the Indian human development household survey (IHDS) to model the marital decisions of men and women in rural India and to estimate the marital surplus (the gains from being married). We use the model to demonstrate that the government’s Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) increased marital surplus and changed marriage market outcomes for men and women. Decomposition reveals (i) that sanitation makes it more attractive to be in a marriage for both gender, and (ii) that TSC exposure led to a decrease in the wife’s surplus share, implying a redistribution of gains within the marriage.

A marriage-market perspective on risk-taking and career choices

We document that women are less likely than men to be in “risky” occupations, i.e., those that exhibit large within-occupation wage dispersion. We first demonstrate that a new theoretical channel—the competitive structure of the marriage market—may incentivize both men and women to choose riskier careers with lower wage returns. We then show that a unifying factor—women’s relative inability to reap the benefits of a risky career due to their shorter reproductive span and consequent career-family trade-off—can help rationalize a set of gender differences in labor-market and marriage-market outcomes. Using data from the United States, we provide empirical evidence that supports the model predictions.

Long-Term and Intergenerational Effects of Education: Evidence from School Construction in Indonesia

Abstract We study long-term and intergenerational effects of the 1970s Indonesian school construction program. Exploiting variation across birth cohorts and districts in the number of schools built suggests that 43 years later men are more likely to work formally, outside agriculture, and migrate, and that men and women have better marriage market outcomes. Households with exposed women have higher living standards and pay more taxes. The mother's program exposure leads to increased schooling for her children, with larger effects in secondary and tertiary education. Cost-benefit analyses indicate that school construction leads to higher tax revenues and improved living standards, offsetting construction costs within 18–54 years.

Marriage outcomes of displaced women

To learn more about the long-term consequences of displacement on women, we examine the marriage market outcomes of forcibly displaced women. Using data from 12 representative surveys in 7 countries, we document that women who are adolescents at the time of displacement are more likely to be married. This pattern is robust to choice of comparison group and across countries. We do not find this pattern for displaced adolescent men. We provide additional evidence on this relationship by using unique features of the partition of India in 1947, an event which resulted in large-scale bilateral displacement between India and newly formed Pakistan. Specifically, we use the plausibly exogenous timing and the arbitrary nature of the border drawing to motivate a difference-in-difference design. Using a representative household survey collected in 1973, we find that women who were adolescents when they were displaced by partition were significantly more likely to marry earlier, in line with the descriptive cross country evidence. These women were less likely to continue their education and had more children overall, but do not appear to have married spouses with worse observable characteristics.

Searching on campus? The marriage market effects of changing student sex ratios

This paper studies how secular changes in the student sex ratio affect marriage market outcomes for university graduates. Using data from Germany, I find that a higher own-gender share within the field of study reduces marriage market opportunities for women, while the opposite is true for men. Moreover, an imbalanced student sex ratio changes the composition of couples. For women, a higher female share decreases the probability of having a spouse from the same field, while men are more likely to marry down with respect to educational status when the male share is high. These findings suggest that the secular changes in the sex ratio of university students have important implications beyond the labor market by affecting the household composition among the high-skilled population.

The marital earnings premium: an IV approach

Numerous studies find that married men earn more than single men. However, identifying whether and why marriage affects earnings is complicated by the fact that marriage market outcomes are jointly determined with potential earnings. As such, I exploit exogenous variation in marriage induced by the introduction of no-fault divorce laws in the USA to estimate the effect of marriage on the earnings of men. I find a 38% causal increase of marriage on earnings of husbands. This increase in earnings is explained by a large increase in labor market work after marriage. My findings are robust to the possibility of unobserved heterogeneity in the effect of marriage on earnings across individuals.

Is There a Male-Breadwinner Norm? The Hazards of Inferring Preferences from Marriage Market Outcomes.

This paper argues that distributions of spousal earnings gaps provide no identifying information for the male breadwinner norm, nor such a norm's consequences for gender inequality. First, we show that simple marital matching models-without norm-related assumptions-closely replicate U.S. distributions of wife-husband earnings gaps. Second, we show that the discontinuity in this distribution as wives start to out-earn husbands reflects not breadwinner norms, but rather a point mass of equal-earning couples. We conclude by arguing that the point mass may also threaten other tests of the male breadwinner hypothesis, and proposing several robustness checks that future research should utilize.

Incarceration of African American Men and the Impacts on Women and Children

This paper investigates the causal effects of black male incarceration on black women’s marriage and labor market outcomes, and black children’s family structure and long-run economic outcomes. To establish causality, I construct an instrumental variable for the incarceration rate, which parameterizes plausibly exogenous changes in sentencing policies across states and over years. I find that black male incarceration reduces black women’s marriage but increases employment for more-educated women. It also increases out-of-wedlock births and reduces black children’s educational attainment. Notably, increasing incarceration due to harsher sentencing policies that (i) incarcerate more arrestees or (ii) induce longer sentences has different effects.

Age at Marriage and Women's Labour Market Outcomes in India

AbstractWe examine the relationship between women's age at marriage and their labour market outcomes using nationally representative household data from India. Employing an instrumental variable‐based empirical strategy, we find that a delay in women's age at marriage has no significant causal effect on their labour market outcomes. This is despite marriage delay being associated with higher education, lower fertility and (possibly) higher dowry for Indian women. We argue that this might be because older brides, as compared with younger brides, face more backlash from their partners. This backlash effect could be offsetting the positive labour market effects of marriage delay. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Bride Drain: An unintended consequence of China's urban-rural divide

This paper studies the impact of rural-urban migration on rural marriage market outcomes within China's institutional and cultural context. Using self-collected and commonly used survey data, as well as Population Census, we find that community-level rural female migration produces a bride drain effect in the rural marriage market: it exerts a negative impact on the marriage likelihood of rural men in addition to the traditional channel of sex ratio imbalance. We find no evidence for an equivalent groom drain effect: the increase in men's migration rate at community level has no negative effect on the marriage likelihood of rural women. Instrumental variable estimation is used to address the endogeneity concern. Our results suggest that China's urban-rural divide has an unintended, long-lasting consequence.

Optimal Taxation, Marriage, Home Production, and Family Labor Supply

An empirical approach to optimal income taxation design is developed within an equilibrium collective marriage market model with imperfectly transferable utility. Taxes distort labour supply and time allocation decisions, as well as marriage market outcomes, and the within household decision process. Using data from the American Community Survey and American Time Use Survey, we structurally estimate our model and explore empirical design problems. We consider the optimal design problem when the planner is able to condition taxes on marital status, as in the U.S. tax code, but we allow the schedule for married couples to have an arbitrary form of tax jointness. Our results suggest that the optimal tax system for married couples is characterized by negative jointness, although the welfare gains from this jointness are shown to be quite modest.

A Marriage-Market Perspective of Risk-Taking and Career Choices

We investigate how the marriage market affects risk-taking and career choices in a general equilibrium framework. We show that women's relative inability to reap the benefits of a risky career due to their shorter reproductive span helps explain a set of observed gender differences in the labor market and marriage market outcomes. Our theory predicts that compared with men, women are less likely to choose a risky career when unmarried, have lower within-gender wage dispersion, marry earlier, and if they choose a risky career, are less likely to have children. We provide empirical evidence consistent with theoretical predictions.

Changing Sex-Ratios Among Immigrant Communities in the USA

Marriage patterns of immigrants can serve as an indicator of the degree of immigrant integration into their host countries. Literature on the economics of the household has focused on the role of the sex-ratio as an important determining factor in marriage market outcomes. Therefore, it is important to understand if and how the sex-ratio has changed over time and the mechanisms that may drive that change. In this paper, we explore recent changes in the sex-ratio among immigrants to the USA, focusing on the 24 highest sending countries of immigrants. First, building upon previous research, we document the non-gender-neutral nature of declining immigration to the USA. We approach this study from two different dimensions to document some of the forces driving this change in the sex-ratio. The first approach, focusing on changes between birth cohorts, demonstrates that immigration is declining more quickly for men than it is for women, leading to a decrease in the sex-ratio from above 100 and thus bringing about more gender-balanced migration. Second, we present results from an analysis of data on recently granted green cards, which suggests that the sex-ratio among this population is increasing from below 100, also bringing about more gender balance among immigrants. The period of study allows us to capture changes taking place pre- and post-Great Recession. We find declines in migration for both men and women during the Great Recession, but sharper recovery for women. Additionally, while migration has declined for both men and women in traditional receiving states, the stock of women has increased in non-traditional immigrant-receiving states.

Population dynamics and marriage payments: an analysis of the long run equilibrium in India

Abstract Why do scarce Indian women pay dowry to secure grooms even as the sex-ratio of offspring is manipulated by parents? We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model of demographic and marriage market outcomes with endogenous gender preference. We find, that under a calibration of parameters suggested by Indian marriage market indicators, any long run steady state equilibrium must have both dowry and a masculine sex ratio. The key assumption that generates this result is the asymmetric marital preferences of men and women regarding own and spouse’s ideal age at marriage.

Is There a Male Breadwinner Norm? The Hazards of Inferring Preferences from Marriage Market Outcomes

Spousal characteristics such as age, height, and earnings are often used in social science research to infer social preferences. For example, a male norm has been inferred from the fact that fewer wives are taller than their husbands than would occur with random matching. The large proportion of husbands out-earning their wives has similarly been cited as evidence for a male breadwinner norm. This paper argues that it is difficult and potentially misleading to infer social preferences about an attribute from observed marital sorting on that attribute. We show that positive assortative matching on an attribute is consistent with a wide variety of underlying preferences, including female or female breadwinner norms. Given prevailing gender gaps in height and earnings, positive sorting implies it will be rare for women to be taller than, or earn more than, their husbands – even if there is no underlying preference for shorter or lower-earning wives. In an empirical application, we show that simulations which sort couples positively on permanent earnings can largely replicate the observed distribution of spousal earnings differences in US Census data. Further, we show that an apparent sharp drop in the distribution function at the point where the wife begins to out-earn the husband results from a mass of couples earning identical incomes, a mass which we argue is not evidence of a norm for higher-earning husbands.

Education is a Remedy for Domestic Violence: Evidence from a Schooling Law Change

This paper explores the relationship between female education and domestic violence by utilizing a change in compulsory schooling. We replicate the study of Erten and Keskin (2018) using a more recent dataset. Contrary to their findings, we show that the reform induced increase in schooling for women reduces physical and sexual violence while social and financial control behaviors remain unchanged. Improvements in marriage market outcomes seem to be the dominant channel through which education affects domestic violence. Better education has improved partner quality, whereas women’s gender attitudes and labor market outcomes have not changed.

Changing Sex-Ratios Among Immigrant Communities in the U.S

Marriage patterns of immigrants are an important indicator of the degree of immigrant integration into their host countries. Literature on the economics of the household has focused on the role of the sex-ratio as an important determining factor in marriage market outcomes. Therefore, it is important to understand if and how the sex-ratio has changed over time and the mechanisms that may drive that change. In this paper, we explore recent changes in the sex-ratio among immigrants to the United States. First, building upon previous research, we document the nongender neutral nature of declining immigration to the United States. We approach this study from two different dimensions to document some of the forces driving this change in the sex-ratio. The first approach, focusing on changes between birth cohorts, demonstrates that immigration is declining more quickly for men than it is for women, leading to a decrease in the sex-ratio from above 100 and thus bringing about more gender balanced migration. Second, we present results from an analysis of data on recently granted green cards, suggests that the sex-ratio among this population is increasing from below 100, also bringing about more gender-balance among immigrants.

Education, Marriage, and Fertility: Long-Term Evidence from a Female Stipend Program in Bangladesh

In 1994, Bangladesh introduced the Female Secondary School Stipend Program that made secondary education free for rural girls. This paper examines the long-term effects of the stipend program on education, marriage, fertility, and labor market outcomes of women. We find that the stipend increased years of education for eligible girls by 14%–25%. These girls were more likely to get married later and have fewer children. They also had more autonomy in making decisions about household purchases, health care, and visiting relatives. They were more likely to work in the formal sector than the agricultural or informal sector. Eligible women were likely to marry more educated husbands who had better occupations and were closer in age to their own. Their children’s health outcomes also improved. These results imply that school-based stipend programs can increase female empowerment through positive effects on schooling and marriage market outcomes over the long term.

The long-term effect of childhood poverty

This paper uses variation among siblings to identify the consequences of childhood poverty on both labour and marriage market outcomes. In the labour market, individuals who experienced childhood poverty are found to have lower earnings and lower labour market attachment and to have worse jobs both vertically in terms of low-paying industries and horizontally in terms of job positions. In the marriage market, childhood poverty is found to have negative consequences for the probability of marriage, cohabitation, and having children around the age of 30. The effect sizes are found to exhibit an inverse u-shape in the age of the child, peaking during adolescence. Results on educational choices suggest that the mechanisms behind these results can be that childhood poverty affects the skill formation, networks, and decision making of the child.