Search Results for « Marriage matching »

Social norms and stigma are central to many economic outcomes but rarely observed directly. This paper provides a behavioural measure of stigma in a setting where the underlying trait can be biologically verified. Using twelve waves of the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2008-2021), I compare self-reported smoking against biomarkerverified smoking measured by urinary cotinine concentration for 8,768 married couples and 7,940 single adults. I document a 34 percentage point gendered concealment gap where biomarkerpositive women are far more likely than biomarker-positive men to self-report as nonsmokers, with married women showing an additional increment. Within the biomarker-positive sample of wives, concealment is systematically associated with husband education, surviving controls for the wife's own education and age. The choice of measurement affects empirical conclusions about marital sorting. The wife smoking-husband education relationship is 39 percent larger in magnitude under self-report than under biomarker measurement, and structural Choo-Siow surplus estimates differ systematically across measurement schemes. The gendered concealment gap has declined substantially over the study period.

Objective: This article investigates marital sorting by household registration status ( hukou ) and education in contemporary urban China, paying special attention to individuals who have achieved rural‐to‐urban hukou mobility before marriage. Background: Existing theoretical frameworks of assortative mating have highlighted economic resources and cultural matching as two key dimensions. These two frameworks place a different emphasis on individuals' achieved versus ascriptive characteristics and hold different implications for understanding the link between marital sorting patterns and social openness or closure. With a focus on hukou converters, this study examines the relative importance of achieved versus ascriptive traits in China's marriage market and contributes to the evaluation of the two frameworks. Method: This study adopts a mixed‐methods approach. The quantitative analysis uses the harmonic mean marriage function to analyze the nationally representative 2006 China General Social Survey. The qualitative data consist of 115 in‐depth interviews collected in two Chinese metropolitan areas between 2016 and 2017. Results: Quantitative results showed that hukou converters and urban‐born individuals had the highest propensity of marrying a spouse of the same hukou trajectory. Qualitative results further revealed the gap between converters and their urban‐born peers to be hierarchical. Although both groups emphasized the importance of shared values and habitus in evaluating prospective partners, urban‐born individuals regarded hukou converters as a culturally distinct and less desirable option. Conclusion: The findings highlight the power of cultural matching in China's urban marriage market. Hukou converters' rural origin remains visible and acts as a source of lasting symbolic distinction despite adulthood status attainment.

We use a simple structural matching model with unobserved heterogeneity to produce counterfactual marriage patterns, and thus quantify the contribution of changes in marital patterns in rising income inequality. We propose an algorithm that allows us to fix the degree of assortative mating without changing the level of marital gains and hence isolate the intensive and extensive margins (i.e. isolate changes in assortative mating from changes in marriage rates). We apply this approach to US data from 1962 to 2017, and show that marital patterns can explain about a quarter of the rise in income inequality, the intensive margin contributing 7%, the extensive margin the remaining 93%. Our algorithm also allows us to show that the extensive margin is itself driven for three‐fifths by a change in the total number of singles and for two‐fifths by a change in the distribution of types among singles (in particular low‐educated women).

This paper studies how institutional status shapes marital matching under China's hukou system. We exploit a reform allowing children to inherit hukou status from either parent rather than only their mother. Using census data and a triple-difference design, we find that the reform increased rural women's likelihood of marrying an urban-local man by 7.4 percentage points relative to urban women. These effects were stronger in cities with greater availability of urban-local men. To quantify the reform's contribution to marriage distribution, we estimate the Choo and Siow (2006) structural model to conduct counterfactual analyses. Changes in marital gains account for substantial shares of the 1995-2005 changes in marriage rates and hukoubased matching patterns. The reform accounts for 1.79 points (22%) of the decline in rural-local women's marriage rate and 3.51 points (64%) of the rise in rural-nonlocal matching. Overall, the reform reallocated marriage opportunities from locals to nonlocals.