TY - JOUR
T1 - Partner choice, investment in children, and the marital college premium
AU - Chiappori, Pierre André
AU - Salanié, Bernard
AU - Weiss, Yoram
N1 - Funding Information:
*Chiappori: Department of Economics, Columbia University, 420 W 118th Street, New York, NY 10027 (email: [email protected]); Salanié: Department of Economics, Columbia University, 420 W 118th Street, New York, NY 10027 (email: [email protected]); Weiss: The Eitan Berglas School of Economics, Ramat-Aviv, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel (email: [email protected]). We thank Simon Lee, Steve Levitt, Corinne Low, Marcelo Moreira, Kevin Murphy, and seminar audiences in Amsterdam, Buffalo, Chicago, Delaware, CEMFI Madrid, LSE, Milan (Bocconi), Paris, Penn State, RAND Santa Monica, San Diego, Toronto, and Vanderbilt for comments, as well as referees. We are also grateful to George-Levi Gayle, Limor Golan, and Andres Hincapie for helping us generate Figure 13, and to Simon Weber for help with our code. Finally, we are deeply indebted to the late Gary Becker for his insightful comments. Financial support from the NSF (grant SES-1124277) is gratefully acknowledged. So Yoon Ahn and Daniel Rappoport provided excellent research assistance. The authors declare that they have no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper.
PY - 2017/8
Y1 - 2017/8
N2 - We construct a model of household decision-making in which agents consume a private and a public good, interpreted as children's welfare. Children's utility depends on their human capital, which depends on the time their parents spend with them and on the parents' human capital. We first show that as returns to human capital increase, couples at the top of the income distribution should spend more time with their children. This in turn should reinforce assortative matching, in a sense that we precisely define. We then embed the model into a transferable utility matching framework with random preferences, à la Choo and Siow (2006), which we estimate using US marriage data for individuals born between 1943 and 1972. We find that the preference for partners of the same education has significantly increased for white individuals, particularly for the highly educated. We find no evidence of such an increase for black individuals. Moreover, in line with theoretical predictions, we find that the "marital college-plus premium" has increased for women but not for men.
AB - We construct a model of household decision-making in which agents consume a private and a public good, interpreted as children's welfare. Children's utility depends on their human capital, which depends on the time their parents spend with them and on the parents' human capital. We first show that as returns to human capital increase, couples at the top of the income distribution should spend more time with their children. This in turn should reinforce assortative matching, in a sense that we precisely define. We then embed the model into a transferable utility matching framework with random preferences, à la Choo and Siow (2006), which we estimate using US marriage data for individuals born between 1943 and 1972. We find that the preference for partners of the same education has significantly increased for white individuals, particularly for the highly educated. We find no evidence of such an increase for black individuals. Moreover, in line with theoretical predictions, we find that the "marital college-plus premium" has increased for women but not for men.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85029389314&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1257/aer.20150154
DO - 10.1257/aer.20150154
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AN - SCOPUS:85029389314
SN - 0002-8282
VL - 107
SP - 2109
EP - 2167
JO - American Economic Review
JF - American Economic Review
IS - 8
ER -
