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Title: Making Yourself Attractive: Pre-Marital Investments and the Returns to Education on the Marriage Market
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2007
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Abstract: While several studies examine the eect of marriage market conditions on post-maritallabor supply, few account for the eect that these conditions may have on pre-marital in-vestment decisions and mate selection. This paper investigates theoretically and empiricallyhow changes in marriage market conditions aect pre-marital investments. I ?rst show howa change in the sex ratio ?that is, the ratio of males to females ?can alter incentives forinvestments both in the context of a unitary model of the household and in a non-unitarysetting with post-match bargaining. I show that a rise in the sex ratio will lead men toincrease pre-matching investments and women to decrease them if agents are su ciently riskaverse. I test this prediction using exogenous variation in the marriage market sex ratio gen-erated by the preference of second generation Americans for endogamy and shocks broughtabout by immigration. I ?nd that a worsening of marriage market conditions spurs higherpre-marital investments, measured by years of education, literacy and occupational choice.Speci?cally, a change of the sex ratio from one to two leads men to increase their educationalinvestment by 0.5 years on average and women to decrease it by 0.05 years. In addition,the eect of the sex ratio on pre-marital investments appear to, in itself, signi?cantly alterpost-marital labor supply behavior suggesting that accounting for these eects when usingmarriage market conditions as proxies for ex-post bargaining power is important. Overall,these results suggest that there are substantial returns to education on the marriage mar-ket, and that both men and women take these returns into account when making educationdecisions.
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Authors: Lafortune, Jeanne
Publisher: NORC
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Education, Family and Marriage
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