Schooling Down to Marry Up: Marriage Norms and Educational Investments

In this paper, I explore the effect of older males’ and females’ education on younger cohorts’ education in the United States. I use US Census and ACS data from 1940-2016 and exploit the differences in schooling levels among different ethnicities as a source of variation in the pool of skills among potential partners. I find that older men’s education correlates more strongly compared to older women’s with females in younger cohorts. I develop a model of pre-marital investments in education to explain the above results. Agents derive utility from labor market returns and marriage market returns to education. Due to society’s preference that women marry up, the model proposes that women experience lower utility from getting ‘too much’ education because of a lower probability of finding a preferred partner. When there are more high-education men around, women respond by increasing their education because of a loosening of their constraint. The model also predicts that high-skill women will be less affected by the change in men’s education than low-skill women.