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Title: Do Husbands Want to Be Shorter Than Their Wives? The Hazards of Inferring Preferences from Marriage Market Outcomes

Citation Type: Conference Paper

Publication Year: 2017

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Abstract: Spousal characteristics such as age, height, and income are often used in social science research to infer social preferences. For example, a male taller norm has been inferred from the fact that fewer wives are taller than their husbands than would occur with random matching. The fact that more husbands out-earn their wives than vice versa has been used as evidence that husbands prefer that their wives earn less or wives prefer that their husbands earn more. This paper argues that it is difficult and potentially misleading to infer social preferences from marriage market outcomes. We first show how standard economic theory predicts that positive assortative matching on a characteristic in equilibrium is consistent with a wide variety of preferences. This theoretical result is applied to an empirical investigation of income differences between spouses, where a persistent gender gap also exists. Simulations which sort couples positively on permanent income can largely replicate the observed distribution of spousal income differences in US Census dataincluding the sharp drop-off in mass as the wife begins to out-earn her husbandwithout assuming a norm against the wife out-earning her husband.

Url: http://conference.iza.org/conference_files/Gender_2017/lam_d5998.pdf

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Authors: Bailey, Martha; Binder, Ariel; Lam, David

Conference Name: 1st IZA Workshop: Gender and Family Economics

Publisher Location: Bonn, Germany

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Family and Marriage, Gender

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