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Late age at marriage and rising rates of singlehood increasingly characterize East Asian societies. For Japan, these are major contributors to the very low birth rate. We analyze two unique data sets: dating records covering a two-year period from one of Japan's largest marriage agencies and in-depth interviews with 30 highly-educated Japanese singles. The longitudinal nature of the quantitative data allows us to test hypotheses about how single men's and women's preferences for partners' characteristics adjust over time. The qualitative data provides a more fine-grained look at Japanese singles' partner preferences. We employ fixed-effects regression models to analyze Japanese men's and women's preferences for the relative and absolute education, income, and age of potential marriage partners. Both the quantitative and qualitative data suggest that Japanese women continue to highly value men's income-earning capacity. Men, in contrast, value a partner with moderate income-earning potential. Women's and men's preferences for partner's education are somewhat weaker, and women broaden their educational preference over time. Japanese men's and women's preferences for a potential partner's characteristics are largely consistent with Becker's theory of gender-role specialization. But we also find evidence consistent with Oppenheimer's expectation that men are coming to value women's income-earning capacity more highly than in the past. We use a unique Japanese data set featuring dating records over a two-year period to examine the appropriateness of theories of marital sorting proposed by Becker and Oppenheimer. Our quantitative analysis is complemented by in-depth interviews with Japanese singles.

This paper investigates the effects of early-life exposure to persecution risk on human capital formation and marital sorting, while also analyzing how these effects are influenced by the timing of the exposure during early life. Utilizing the context of China’s “class struggle” period, which targeted various classes including landlords, capitalists, and intellectuals, this study demonstrates that individuals who experienced persecution risk during their childhood exhibit lower formal education attainment, reduced cognitive skills, and lower earnings. They are more likely to form marriages with individuals from classes that were previously favored by the regime but have comparatively lower human capital outcomes. Moreover, the study highlights that the most substantial and enduring impacts occur when the exposure to class struggle persecution risk takes place during early childhood.

The extent to which like-with-like marry is important for inequality as well as for the outcomes of children who result from the union. In this paper, we present evidence on changes in assortative mating and its implications for household inequality in the UK. Our approach contrasts with others in the literature in that it is consistent with an underlying model of the marriage market. We argue that a key advantage of this approach is that it creates a direct connection between changes in assortativeness in marriage and changes in the value of marriage for the various possible matches by education group. Our empirical results do not show a clear direction of change in assortativeness in the UK between the birth cohorts of 1945–54 and 1965–74. We find that changes in assortativeness pushed income inequality up slightly, but that the strong changes in education attainment across the two cohorts contributed to scale down inequality.

Previous work shows that higher male wage inequality decreases the share of ever-married women in their 20 s, consistent with the theoretical prediction that greater male wage dispersion increases the return to marital search. Consequently, male wage inequality should be associated with higher husband quality among those “early-mover” women who choose to forgo these higher returns to search. We confirm using US decennial Census and American Community Survey (ACS) data from 1980 to 2018 that married women ages 22–30 in marriage markets with greater male wage inequality are more likely to marry up in education and in husband’s occupation. We additionally consider whether male wage inequality increases wage uncertainty, leading women to prefer older husbands who can send stronger signals of lifetime earnings. We confirm that higher male wage inequality is also associated with a larger marital age gap.

The consumption literature uses adult equivalence scales to measure individual-level inequality. This practice imposes the assumption that there is no within-household inequality. In this paper, we show that ignoring consumption inequality within households produces misleading estimates of inequality along two dimensions. To illustrate this point, we use a collective model of household behaviour to estimate consumption inequality in the U.K. from 1968 to 2001. First, the use of adult equivalence scales underestimates the initial level of cross-sectional consumption inequality by 50%, as large differences in the earnings of husbands and wives translate into large differences in consumption allocations within households. Second, we estimate the rise in between-household inequality has been accompanied by an offsetting reduction in within-household inequality. Our findings also indicate that increases in marital sorting on wages and hours worked can simultaneously explain two-thirds of the decline in within-household inequality and between a quarter and one-half of the rise in between-household inequality for one and two adult households.

Exchange of racial for educational status has been documented for black/white marriages in the United States. Exchange may be an idiosyncratic feature of U.S. society, resulting from unusually strong racial boundaries historically developed there. We examine status exchange across racial lines in Brazil. In contrast to the United States, Brazil features greater fluidity of racial boundaries and a middle tier of \"brown\" individuals. If exchange is contingent on strong racial boundaries, it should be weak or non-existent in Brazilian society. Contrary to this expectation, we find strong evidence of status exchange. However, this pattern results from a generalized penalty for darkness, which induces a negative association between higher education and marrying darker spouses (\"market exchange\") rather than from a direct trading of resources by partners (\"dyadic exchange\"). The substantive and methodological distinction between market and dyadic exchange helps clarify and integrate prior findings in the status exchange literature.

Who marries whom has important implications for the (re-)production of social inequalities. Whereas previous studies on marital sorting have mainly focused on the husband's and the wife's traits, in this research I assess the importance of parental background in marital sorting in contemporary China in light of the tradition of marriage of matching doors. Drawing on data from the 2006 China General Social Survey, I use log-linear models to explore the extent to which couples sort based on their parents' occupational status and hukou (household registration), and the interaction between the two. The results show a significant association between the occupational status of an individual's father and of his or her spouse, net of the intergenerational mobility between parents and children and the assortative mating between the husband and the wife. Furthermore, there is a significant net association between the occupational status of an individual's father and father-in-law. Parents' hukou status also plays a pivotal role in marital sorting, in that an individual's father and father-in-law tend to have the same rural or urban hukou. Nevertheless, the interaction between the father's occupational status and hukou is not found to play a significant role in shaping the pattern of marital sorting. Given the persistence of the tradition of marriage of matching doors, it is important to conceptualize marriage in contemporary China as a family affair, rather than a de-institutionalized, privatized, or individualized practice.

We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the British Household Panel Survey to estimate the extent of intergenerational economic mobility in a framework that highlights the role played by assortative mating. We find that assortative mating plays an important role. On average about 40-50% of the covariance between parents' and own permanent family income can be attributed to the person to whom one is married. This effect is driven by strong spouse correlations in human capital, which are larger in Germany than Britain.

World War II and its subsequent GI Bill have been widely credited with playing a transformative role in American society, but there have been few quantitative analyses of these historical events' broad social effects. We exploit between-cohort variation in the probability of military service to investigate how WWII and the GI Bill altered the structure of marriage, and find that it had important spillover effects beyond its direct effect on men's educational attainment. Our results suggest that the additional education received by returning veterans caused them to \"sort\" into wives with significantly higher levels of education. This suggests an important mechanism by which socioeconomic status may be passed on to the next generation.

The paper uses information on British women born in 1970, collected at birth and ages 5, 10 and 30, and pregnancy histories at age 30, including miscarriages, to estimate average causal effects of having a first birth before age 20 on 'partnership outcomes' at age 30 for women who had such a birth. Following the methods developed by Hotz et al, the effects can be bounded under relatively weak conditions, and a consistent instrumental variable estimator exists under stronger conditions. The results suggest that a teen-birth causes a women to fare worse in the marriage market, greatly increasing her chances of partnering with poorly educated and unemployment-prone men.