IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jpolec/doi10.1086-726238.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Human Capital–Reproductive Capital Trade-Off in Marriage Market Matching

Author

Listed:
  • Corinne Low

Abstract

Throughout the twentieth century, the relationship between women’s human capital and men’s income was nonmonotonic: while college-educated women married richer spouses than high school–educated women, graduate-educated women married poorer spouses than college-educated women. This can be rationalized by a bidimensional matching framework where women’s human capital is negatively correlated with another valuable trait: fertility, or reproductive capital. Such a model predicts nonmonotonicity in income matching with a sufficiently high income distribution of men. A simulation of the model using US Census fertility and income data shows that it can also predict the recent transition to more assortative matching as desired family sizes have fallen.

Suggested Citation

  • Corinne Low, 2024. "The Human Capital–Reproductive Capital Trade-Off in Marriage Market Matching," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 132(2), pages 552-576.
    • Handle: RePEc:ucp:jpolec:doi:10.1086/726238
    DOI: 10.1086/726238
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/726238
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/726238
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1086/726238?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hanna Virtanen & Mikko Silliman & Tiina Kuuppelomäki & Kristiina Huttunen, "undated". "Education, Gender, and Family Formation," Working Papers 340, Työn ja talouden tutkimus LABORE, The Labour Institute for Economic Research LABORE.
    2. Martin Browning & Laurens Cherchye & Thomas Demuynck & Bram De Rock & Frederic Vermeulen, 2024. "Spouses with Benefits: on Match Quality and Consumption inside Households," Working Papers ECARES 2024-11, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    3. Elin Colmsjoe, 2024. "A Flying Start: The Long-Run Effects of Inter Vivos Transfers," CEBI working paper series 24-02, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. The Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ucp:jpolec:doi:10.1086/726238. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Journals Division (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JPE .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.